CapitalCommunityMex/N.America

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

Capitalism made the modern world as empires and nations rose and fell. Together they shaped diverse communities while men and women pressed to gain viable lives. From the 16th century, New Spain made silver to become an engine of commercial capitalism—sustained by Mesoamerican, Catholic, maize-making communities. Later, Boston became a periphery of early capitalism, building ships, trading slaves, making rum—sustained by Puritan wheat-growing families. After 1810, revolution in New Spain broke the silver flows that fueled Asian trades, opening the world to British cottons made of fiber raised by enslaved hands in the US South. A new industrial capitalism began in the Anglo-American world, sustained by slaves who forged lives and religious cultures to resist as they could. In Mexico, silver revived, stimulating new industries fed by free families entrenched on the land. Then in 1873, the US joined England on a global gold standard, breaking the power of silver as capital. The US rose to global hegemony, Mexico faced dependence, and both saw social transformations that privileged the powerful while growing numbers searched for viable lives and sustaining religious cultures—pursuits that continue as globalizing capital again remakes North America and the world.