From acclaimed and prizewinning historian Paul Gillingham, the rich and fascinating history of one of the world’s most diverse, politically groundbreaking, and influential of countries

From its outset, “Mexico was more profoundly, globally hybrid than anywhere else in the prior history of the world,” writes Paul Gillingham at the beginning of this masterful work of scholarship and narration. Over the ensuing five centuries, Mexicans have prefigured and shaped the course of human lives across the globe.

Gillingham begins in 1511 with the dramatic shipwreck of two Spanish sailors near the Yucatán Peninsula. Ten years later Hernán Cortés led an army of European adventurers and indigenous rebels to seize the legendary island city of Tenochtitlán, the largest in the Americas and the center of Montezuma’s empire. The capture of the future Mexico City was, more than an extraordinary military event, the collision of two long-separated worlds, radically different in everything from biota to urban planning. Spaniards discovered tomatoes, chocolate, and a city larger and more sophisticated than anything they had ever seen. Mexicans discovered horses, wheels, and new lethal germs, sparking a cataclysmic century of disease that wiped out a majority of the preexisting population and led to a unique recombination of European and indigenous cultures. Mexico’s independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821 led to a calamitous mid-century war with the United States and then one of the first great social revolutions that brought peace for Mexicans throughout many of the global horrors of the twentieth century, before the country itself slipped into the violence of the cartels and a refugee crisis in the 2000s.

Through it all, Mexico set new standards for inclusivity, for progressive social policies, for artistic expression, for adroitly balancing dictatorship and democracy. While racial divides endured, so too did indigenous peoples, who enjoyed rights unthinkable in the United States. Mexico was among the first countries to abolish slavery in 1829, and since then Mexicans have elected North America’s first Black president, Vicente Guerrero; the region’s only indigenous president, Benito Juárez; and its only woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum.

As elegantly written as it is powerful in scope, rich in character and anecdote, Mexico uses the latest research to dazzling effect, showing how often the country has been a dynamic and vital shaper of world affairs.