Introduction

DURING THE 1970s and 1980s, "dependency" provided a common paradigm for Latin America's condition, and "dependency theory" dominated much of the scholarship on the region. The dependency approach argued that Latin America's development was adversely conditioned by the economic and political power of the industrialized world. Deeply entrenched unequal relations between the Latin American periphery and a European and US core constrained local development paths, producing poverty, inequality, authoritarian politics, and underdevelopment.

By the late 1980s and 1990s, however, new scholarship marked the sharp decline of dependency's influence as an explanatory paradigm. Empirical studies failed to support some of dependency's central claims, and a new generation of scholars moved in other directions: many historians turned to cultural and local studies, while many social scientists took up the study of national institutions and actors in search of local explanations for political and economic outcomes in Latin America. Since then, both historians and social scientists have explicitly or implicitly dismissed the notion that Latin America "depended" on the industrialized core, centered in the North Atlantic, and have often emphasized local agency within the region. Dependency has become a word that most Latin American historians have assiduously avoided for nearly two decades. Nevertheless, the story of technological change in nineteenth-century Mexico is fundamentally one of dependence. Through Mexico's nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, nearly every local effort to innovate, to adopt new ways of doing things in mining, agriculture, and manufacturing, critically depended on access to imported hardware (tools, machines, and parts) and imported technical knowledge and expertise (know-how) from the countries of northern Europe and the United States. Examples of Mexican expertise, ingenuity, and technological capabilities were not altogether absent from the nineteenth-century experience: they were most famously centered in Monterrey but were also present in individuals and firms throughout the country. However, these were isolated and exceptional across a broader landscape in which growing interest and investment in new technologies focused overwhelmingly on the well-publicized availability of global goods: new machines, processes, and expertise developed in and exported from England, France, Germany, Belgium, and the United States—what I will refer to as the "North Atlantic." In this, Mexico's experience differed little from that of many other countries around the globe.

This book argues that dependence on imported machines and know-how was the defining trait of Mexico's history of technology in the nineteenth century and that dependence would remain an important legacy into the twentieth. Built on a broad survey of innovation across the Mexican economy and several detailed case studies, the book examines the nineteenth-century origins of that dependence. In contrast to the assumptions implicit in the more iron-clad nature of the older dependency approach, however, this dependence was not structurally determined by an unequal relationship of exchange between Mexico and the United States and Europe. Nor was it uniformly prescriptive: individuals, firms, industries, and even regions could and did develop independently, with substantial local capacities for technological creativity. Dependence was not hegemonic or inevitable but rather contingent on conditions within Mexico. The particular course of technological development in nineteenth-century Mexico made persistent dependence a likely but not inevitable outcome in the twentieth.

Mexico's technological dependence arose in the gap between adopting new technologies and assimilating new knowledge and expertise. On one hand, importing, adopting, and using new technologies from the countries of the North Atlantic proved relatively easy, at least after 1870. Over the previous half century (ca. 1820-70), persistent economic malaise and low consumer demand in Mexico had consistently discouraged investment in new machines and expertise, with some important exceptions. After about 1870, however, more propitious social and economic conditions in Mexico combined with a dramatic increase in the availability of new machines and knowledge in the North Atlantic as the country reintegrated into an expanding Atlantic economy. Together with gradual social and cultural changes in Mexico, these conditions increased incentives to invest in innovation by adopting machines, tools, and production systems as well as new technical knowledge and expertise embodied in print materials and in people themselves. The result was a massive wave of technology imports between roughly 1870 and the outbreak of revolution in 1910. New technologies, in turn, pushed further social change, increased productivity, and underlay economic growth.

However, it proved far more difficult for individuals and firms working in Mexico to assimilate the knowledge and expertise embedded within new technology imports. Most Mexicans were effectively excluded from opportunities to engage with new technologies in ways that might yield learning. Even for the relatively few with access to technical education and economic opportunity, the obstacles to learning and mastering new knowledge proved substantial. Because individuals and firms had only rarely adopted the technologies of the first industrial revolution before 1870, Mexico possessed an accumulated deficit of local experience and capabilities when faced with a flood of technology imports thereafter, ranging from iron, steam, and mechanized production techniques to the new advances in chemical, metallurgical, and electrical science and technologies of the second industrial revolution. By late century, then, the gap between Mexican capabilities and the North Atlantic technological frontier had widened considerably. Few in Mexico had the particular kinds of human capital necessary to assimilate the knowledge and expertise embodied in technology imports. As a result, both entrepreneurs and policy makers found it cheaper and quicker to import hardware and expertise from abroad than to develop it at home. Dependence on imported technology meant that there would be little demand for domestic sources of technology, and little stimulus to local technological capacities. There would be, in other words, relatively little pressure to invest in the local development of human capital, high-wage skills, and the local production of machines, tools, and their parts. This would...