Thread by @arctotherium42

Thread with excerpts from the 'Porfiriato' section of TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1973). This was the first era of stability and economic growth in post-independence Mexico, summed up with the slogan "Order and Progress."

Independent Mexico's problem was that Mexicans were incapable of setting aside personalisms for truly national institutions; congress, for example, was a joke.

Benito Juarez greatly expanded secular education; but this turned out to be more of a curse than a boon, because the vast majority of people with schooling insisted on government or legal jobs; very few became doctors or engineers or technicians.

Porfirio Diaz gained power through the standard procedure (a coup), but turned out to be much more effective than his predecessors. He created a personalist, but flexible and not especially bloody 'national cacique' regime through patronage.

He invited in foreign investors and sold mining rights; this required changing Hispanic law to allow for the sale of subsoil resources.

Diaz managed to eliminate Mexico's perennial rural banditry by deputizing some of the bandits to kill the others, recruiting the promising ones. This garnered him American respect. He stayed in power by carefully reducing (usually not killing) potential rivals.

The Porfiriato was not in any way totalitarian and not particularly oppressive; Diaz observed constitutional norms. He monopolized politics, but not other arenas; anti-Diaz elites were free to do other things and he left few martyrs.

In this era, the last nomads around the world were finally behind defeated by civilization; the Russians in Central Asia, the Argentines in the Pampas, the US in the West, and Mexico with the Apaches in the North, finally securing the Mexican frontier.

The peace and economic opportunity of the Porfiriato was able to attract some European immigrants, who brought desperately needed skills and entrepreneurialism; the Catholic ones tended to assimilate into the criollo elite, the Anglos remained separate.

The liberal, laissez-faire structure of the Porfiriato, which allowed for the alienation of land, led to land concentration in the countryside; by 1900 only 3% of rural families owned farmland and at least half of the republic belonged to a few thousand families.

The newer latifundios on the fringes of Mexico (east, north, south), tended to be foreign owned and managed and quite efficient, while the older ones in the Mexican core were no better than 200 years prior. In 1900, Mexico probably produced less food than under Montezuma.

The Porfiriato was, for the first time, able to pay Mexico's debts, and enormous capital flowed in from abroad.

European and North American capitalists transformed the Mexican economy (outside of agriculture), bringing in modern techniques and technology (electricity, mining, waterworks, banking, etc) that could not have been generated locally with massive investments.

Exports increased by a factor of 7 between the 1870s and 1910, and for the first time a native group of businessmen came into being, mostly assimilated Europeans or Levantines. No small farmer immigrants arrived, unlike the US, Argentina, or Brazil.

The Porfiriato succeeded in stabilizing, modernizing, and developing Mexico for the first time, and managed to preserve Mexican sovereignty.

Diaz was popular in the US because he crushed bandits and facilitated trade and investment; Americans only felt the need to intervene in Mexico when Mexico failed to uphold the responsibilities of a civilized nation.

Ultimately, the Porfiriato, despite its massive gains and successfully building a modern economy, failed because it was unable to uplift the rural Mexican masses, who were incredibly poor by world standards, as the population doubled in 30 years.

To retain power, Diaz had systematically corrupted other potential power bases (notably the army and state-level governors) as well as any potential mechanisms of succession. This meant that when his time was up, there was no orderly or even swift transfer of power.