One of The Chronicle of Higher Education's Best Scholarly Books of 2021
Revolution in Development uncovers the surprising influence of postrevolutionary Mexico on the twentieth century's most important international economic institutions. Drawing on extensive archival research in Mexico, the United States, and Great Britain, Christy Thornton meticulously traces how Mexican officials repeatedly rallied Third World leaders to campaign for representation in global organizations and redistribution through multilateral institutions. By decentering the United States and Europe in the history of global economic governance, Revolution in Development shows how Mexican economists, diplomats, and politicians fought for more than five decades to reform the rules and institutions of the global capitalist economy. In so doing, the book demonstrates, Mexican officials shaped not only their own domestic economic prospects but also the contours of the project of international development itself.
Christy Thornton is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
"Christy Thornton has made a landmark contribution. Focusing on the pivotal case of Mexico and penetrating the condescending discourse of Northern policymakers and diplomats, she compellingly reads the construction of the twentieth century's great international governing institutions—the League of Nations, the IMF and the World Bank, the United Nations—from the outside in, through the optic of the Global South. Her clear-eyed, painstakingly researched analysis of Mexico's 'revolution in development' establishes the nation's critical constitutive role in the making of US global hegemony, while reconfiguring our understanding of Mexican foreign policy and the ideology and practice of the postrevolutionary state."––Gil Joseph, Farnam Professor of History and International Studies, Yale University
"In this book, Christy Thornton guides us through the era when Mexico was assuming an active role in struggles to change the institutional and economic world order per se as a way to advance its nationalist development agenda. She masterfully brings alive the actors and pains and gains of Mexico's quest to transform key multilateral institutions for a more just system and to remove constraints on its own development process. Academics, students, and policy makers, especially in Mexico, will benefit enormously from this splendidly written, extremely well-documented contribution to the knowledge of Mexican economic history, with an international political economy and institutional building perspective." ––Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid, coauthor of Development and Growth in the Mexican Economy: A Historical Perspective
"Many scholars have asked what difference the Mexican Revolution made, but those who have addressed this question typically have framed it in strictly domestic terms. Yet, as Christy Thornton brilliantly demonstrates in this pathbreaking study, Mexican revolutionary nationalism manifested itself at the international level, from World War I on, in startling and significant ways. Revolution in Development promises to radically revise our understanding of the formation of the international economic order and to enable us to appreciate the role that Mexico and its Latin American allies played in the global debates about economic development."––Barbara Weinstein, author of The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil
"This brilliant study posits Mexico as a subject rather than an object of global economic policy. Most history of capitalism is written through the lens of the Global North, and this book offers a crucial corrective, showing the Mexican postrevolutionary government as a critical advocate for the Global South."––Jürgen Buchenau, Professor of History and Latin American Studies, UNC Charlotte
310 pp.6 x 9
9780520297166$29.95|£25.00Paper
Jan 2021