Institutions and Investment: The Political Basis of Industrialization in Mexico Before 1911. By Edward Beatty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Abstract

After a long decay, in the last decades of the nineteenth century the Mexican economy experienced a process of accelerated growth mainly associated with the export sector. As the latter developed and diversified, new opportunities for investment opened in agriculture, livestock rising, and mining. Starting in the 1890s, this process was also accompanied by an early phenomenon of import-substitution industrialization, which would continue to unfold until the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910. Although industrial growth was “limited in scope and fraught with inefficiencies” (p. 187), it appears as an uncommon experience in an era dominated by export-led growth in Latin America and as one that has attracted less attention than it deserves in the historiography on Mexico. This is the subject of Edward Beatty's work.