Modern historians emphasize that Indians in colonial Mexico were victims of Spanish oppression, but not merely victims. The native peoples turned the institutions and culture of the conquerors to their own needs, and in so doing they mitigated the burdens of colonialism. Economic historians have been slow to take up the challenge of understanding these adaptations, in part because the history is alien and its sources difficult, and in part because the assumptions of neoclassical economics ill-describe a world that was scarcely modern, if modern at all. But if any work has risen to the challenge, it is this one.