British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics, and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico, 1889-1919, by Paul Garner

Abstract

British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics, and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico, 1889-1919, by Paul Garner. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2011. xiv, 319 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). The spectacular rise of Weetman Pearson from head of a small British construction firm to leader of a multinational oil corporation was in no small measure due to his business activities in late nineteenth century Mexico. It was--and remains--the type of evidence used to criticize the economic model pursued by Mexico's leader at the time, Porfirio Diaz, a dictator whose long regime lasted from 1876 to 1910. In the literature this dictatorship is often not only portrayed as authoritarian and corrupt, but also as one which partly gained international support through its preferential treatment of foreigners and all things non-Mexican. A popular saying of the times captures these political and economic tensions by speaking of a Mexican mother who is kind to foreigners but acts like a stepmother to Mexicans. The contribution of British Lions and Mexican Eagles to the historiography on Porfirian Mexico and to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century global economic thinking and Latin American history, more generally, is to evaluate Pearson's business activities in Mexico in historical context. Usually these topics are viewed through nationalist or dependency theory analyses (as summarized above), which create distortions that Garner finds unhelpful. With the goal of obtaining a more nuanced historical vista of his subject, Garner highlights the interplay between historical continuities and junctures. He does this, on the one hand, by looking at the business and political cultural practices of fin-de-siecle Britain and Mexico that enabled Pearson to become an important spokesperson for Mexican interests in British financial and government circles. On the other hand, the increasing disentanglement of politics and finance in early twentieth-century, public political discourse created a number of stresses for the global economy which need not have resulted in Pearson's divestment of his by then mostly Mexican oil holdings. Now, the reassessment of the the intrinsic value of the Porfirian modernizing project--rather than its later, post-revolutionary reaction to it--provides us with an expanding picture in which Mexican developmentalist thinking is independent of the figure of Diaz. International developments tested the developmental model in unexpected ways. Here the emergence of an American hegemon around the turn of the twentieth century and a still-powerful British Empire to some degree divided the world into spheres of influence. Furthermore, during the global conflict spawned by World War I, London became increasingly deferential to American foreign policy objectives in the New World, lest America jeopardize British--and later Allied--access to Mexican oil (p. 206). British imperial goals, for their part, readily identified other investment alternatives for British capital, for example, the oil deposits in the Persian Gulf. In the process of discussing the globalization of Pearson's business ventures, Garner also allowed specialist and non-specialist alike the opportunity to grasp the historiographical debates surrounding the figures not just of Weetman Pearson but also Porfirio Diaz. …