Christy Thornton's crucial book is part of a deep reassessment over the last 15 years of the history of economic development. Until the beginning of the new century, this history was mainly described as a set of ideas and practices diffusing from North to South during the Cold War era. Thanks to the work of scholars like Frederick Cooper, a new cohort of historians has begun addressing how the so-called Third World substantially contributed to development theories and practices. Focusing on Mexico as a case study, Thornton's book shows how, at least since the Mexican Revolution's triumph, that country's diplomats and economists tried to shape international debates over the world's economic institutions in favor of their nation's development plans. In doing so, Thornton adds to important new works on Mexico's contemporary history that are slowly moving from a focus on familiar milestones and toward lesser-known topics like the dirty war or Mexico's Cold War interactions with the Third World.The book's eight chapters retrace Mexico's contribution to the shaping of international economic institutions between the Mexican Revolution and the 1970s. The first six chapters are the most accomplished. They draw on prodigious research in Mexican archives, which, as any scholar working on Mexico's contemporary history knows, are a particularly hard nut to crack. Thornton convincingly shows how the experience of the 1910 revolution gave Mexican officers and diplomats an extremely original perspective on economic development that largely anticipated the Economic Commission for Latin America's developmentalism and Third World countries' proposals for economic reform during and after decolonization. As Thornton shows, Mexicans were introducing to the international economic debates of the 1920s and the 1930s the advanced principles contained in the 1917 constitution, which sought to strongly regulate capitalist forces. Mexican delegates at inter-American conferences during this time fought for international recognition of weak countries' economic sovereignty as essential to political independence. They proposed the Inter-American Development Bank as part of a new international economic architecture designed to harness international finance and make it more responsive toward weak countries' development needs. Also taking advantage of the enhanced bilateral cooperation with Washington during the Good Neighbor era, Mexican officers substantially molded the new international organizations founded at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference. These officers argued that these institutions should help less developed countries become more resilient to commodity price cycles and make funds for industrialization available to those countries unable to fetch them on the international market. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that is, should work as international development institutions. As Thornton shows, Mexico partly succeeded in influencing the new institutions' mission according to its vision of economic development.The last two chapters of the book focus on the period between the end of World War II and the 1970s. One chapter deals with Mexico's alleged retrenchment from its engagement with the first line of debate over global economic governance during the 1950s and the 1960s. The last chapter offers what is probably the best reconstruction to date of the process leading to the approval of President Luis Echeverría's Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. However, Thornton's interpretation of this period leaves some room for debate. According to Thornton, Mexico's moderation during the 1950s and 1960s was mainly due to the country's success in obtaining crucial resources for industrialization. The money coming to Mexico from bilateral and multilateral Washington-based financial institutions and from the financial markets was indeed conspicuous and could explain, along with growing Cold War geopolitical pressures, Mexico's diminished international activism during the 1950s. However, during the 1960s Mexico sought to recover a more dynamic international position. Still, as Thornton argues, its policy toward the Third World was marked by strong ambiguities. Rather than streaming from a position of strength, as Thornton suggests, what probably motivated such an ambiguous interaction was Mexico's economic weakness. The Mexican economy, unable to generate adequate levels of domestic investments and export revenues to support its state-led industrialization, became by the end of the 1950s increasingly dependent on US bilateral and US-based multilateral funding sources, which made the country more vulnerable to Washington's pressures, which could be incomparably harsher than during the Good Neighbor era. This might explain Mexico's ambiguous relations with the Third World, even when President Adolfo López Mateos attempted to resume a policy of rapprochement with the emerging global South. Paradoxically, Mexico's economic weakness—which during the early 1970s became a full-fledged crisis aggravated by Richard Nixon's economic nationalism—might also help to explain Echeverría's Third Worldist radicalization, the president having much less to lose than in the 1950s—when the Mexican miracle was taking off—and in the 1960s—when the country could still count on a friendlier partnership with its Northern neighbor. My different interpretation of the 1960s and 1970s aside, Thornton's book represents an illuminating account that, drawing on absolutely outstanding research, helps us to better think about Mexico's postrevolutionary history and improves our understanding of center-periphery relations during the twentieth century.
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Nov 1, 2023
Rémi Bachand 
Open Access