Hispanic American Historical Review 93:2 Copyright 2013 by Duke University Press Book Reviews Feature Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America. By john tutino. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. x, 697 pp. Paper, $29.95. John Tutino has written a highly ambitious and provocative book to which it is impos- sible to do justice, either in praise or critical encounter, in a short review. The book has much to tell us about Mexican colonial and world history, even if it does not manage entirely to convince in all of its vast claims (“vast” being one of the author’s favorite words, along with “soaring,” “complex,” and “diverse,” so that descriptors and superla- tives sometimes stand in for analysis and evidence). The main thesis is that the Bajío, a late-settled region in Mexico’s near north anchored by the commercial city of Querétaro and the great mining center of Guanajuato, became the motor of world capitalism by the mid-eighteenth century or so. The region’s influence extended to what Tutino calls “Spanish North America,” stretching from the Bajío into the distant reaches of what is now the American Southwest. The steady demand for the silver pouring out of Guana- juato and other nearby mining centers drove this development, linking New Spain not only with the Atlantic economy but also with East Asia, specifically China. Tutino does an impressive job of describing the commercial and entrepreneurial dynamism of this huge area in mining, commercial agriculture, trade, and, eventually, textile manufacture. But the mining and commercial dynamism, not surprisingly, produced a highly skewed distribution of income and wealth and an increasing social polarization, especially after 1750 or so. These were some of the preconditions for the explosion of the 1810 insur- gency, whose history the author will explore in a subsequent volume. Among the book’s many virtues are Tutino’s acuity in tracking much of the vitality of this central node of the global economy to China and his compelling integration of indigenous people into the history of the Bajío, where they are often neglected. He shows how the Otomí Indian population supplied the labor to build Spanish towns and to cul- tivate haciendas. They formed much of the demographic base of the area from the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries onward, even while Indian populations further south were shrinking quickly under the lash of epidemic disease. There are fascinating, skill- fully integrated, and quite extended biographies of individuals key to these processes or