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Paul Gillingham, "Mexico: A 500-Year History" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025)

March 7, 2026·1 hr 16 min·7 clips

How did an epileptic fit and a burned back lead a young historian to Mexico to forge the grave of the last Aztec emperor?

The conversation starts with contingency. The host asks how much independence depended on events in Europe, then moves into the difficult decades after Mexico became a new nation. Gillingham does not flatten it into one collapse story. He accepts the familiar picture of instability, bankruptcy, and weakened post-colonial state power, but he keeps another story in view too. Local democracy matters. Villages and small towns used openings in the 1810s and 1820s to create municipios, autonomous units with elected governments and tough, competitive procedures. The comparison keeps widening. Gillingham asks listeners to set aside twentieth-century assumptions for a minute and compare Mexican political life with what was happening elsewhere at the time. The United States becomes one reference point, and the host brings in the war with the United States in the 1840s. Gillingham keeps the tension intact. Mexico's economy had been among the world's great ones before 1810, and in his telling it never really recovered after independence. Presidents and constitutions came and went quickly. Still, the same period produced a rush of local political formation, with ordinary communities claiming real institutional space through elected municipal governments. That is the book's habit: disorder is not the whole story. The closing swerves lighter, with Gillingham naming money laundering as a subject that could educate, entertain, and be great fun to write.

As heard by us

Mexico's post-independence turmoil is paired with a sharper story of local democratic invention.

Paul Gillingham treats Mexico's years after independence as something more than a simple tale of collapse. He moves through bankruptcy, rapid constitutional turnover, and the usual picture of a weak state, then lands on the quieter fact that villages and small towns were…

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Why you'd press play

You want Mexico's independence story as a complex, mixed story, not a clean simplification.

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