This article studies the connection between globalisation and economic growth in eighteenth-century Mexico. This was a period of globalisation in Mexico, characterised by market integration and growth in international trade. I estimate economic growth at that time and explore its relationship with the dominant export of the epoch, silver. The results show that Mexico experienced rapid economic growth in the eighteenth century and, furthermore, that exports caused that growth. During the period of Bourbon reforms economic growth improved, but not dramatically. Mining ceased to be the engine of growth by the end of the century.

This article looks at the response to government anticlericalism in the diocese of Huajuapam de León, Oaxaca. In particular it examines how the dynamic relationship between bishop, priests and parishioners established during the early twentieth century produced a religious culture, which wove itself into the cultural, ethnic, political and economic identities of the indigenous Mixtecs. This religious culture proved key to resistance to post-revolutionary anticlericalism and socialist education in the 1930s and led to the failure of the state project.

Conscription and resistance to it can tell us much about state–society relations in Mexico in the 1940s. The state's implementation of conscription was obstructed by limited bureaucratic and coercive capacity, and by the continued political autonomy of the regions. Popular protests and the hundreds of petitions sent to the central government provide a glimpse of popular views of the army, state, nation, notions of respectability, and the family. The extent of both violent and more ‘loyal’ resistance to the draft shows the continued vigorous contestation of state policies by Mexican society at different levels, and it illustrates the limits to the popular legitimacy of the central state.

Medical developments in Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century have received little attention. This study examines the Mexican responses to the success and failures of an important international health campaign of the 1950s: malaria eradication. During the 1950s malaria became the disease of central concern for international and US agencies working in developing countries (as yellow fever and hookworm were for tropical health during the early twentieth century). This article outlines the motivations, design and techniques of the campaign. It concentrates on two local responses: first, the enthusiastic support displayed by personnel working in the field; and, secondly, the reactions against the campaign of a local doctor – who revealed some of the inadequacies of malaria eradication – and of two medical anthropologists, who emphasised the scant attention paid to the cultural and social aspects of the campaign.

This article analyses the forgery and discovery of the purported tomb of Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica emperor. An eclectic collection of contemporary sources outlines a subtle interplay between elites, cultural managers and peasants, who alternately collaborated and competed in manipulating the would-be invention. Groups traditionally undervalued in studies of nationalism, namely villagers and petty bureaucrats, went far beyond the mimesis of elites to significantly reshape parts of the national narrative. Their entrepreneurial success in manipulating nationalist symbols demonstrates that the instrumentalist use of the past is a cross-class activity.

In this article I attempt to explain the differentiated development of the politics of recognition – that is the process of formal recognition of cultural diversity and indigenous peoples' rights – in Mexico, particularly in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas. I follow an explanatory framework that proposes that the recognition agenda emerges in the context of armed conflict and/or legitimacy and governability crises, and evolves successfully when indigenous actors get access to the decision-making process and form alliances with key political actors. I find that government legitimacy has eroded in both states, and that governability has been severely threatened in Oaxaca and disturbed by armed conflict in Chiapas. However, only in the former have indigenous actors influenced the decision-making process and made alliances with the key decision-makers. This latter finding – fundamental within the explanatory framework followed – begs a further question – why was an alliance between the indigenous and the government elite possible in Oaxaca but not in Chiapas? I go beyond the original explanatory framework and identify a series of structural, contextual and agent-related factors that account for the uneven development of the politics of recognition in each state.