Rajeshwari Dutt. Maya Caciques in Early National Yucatán

In recent times, a number of works have shed new light on the manifold transitions that indigenous communities underwent between late Bourbon times and the early national period in Spanish America. Following the path of earlier publications on these topics by Peter Guardino and Michael Thomas Ducey regarding early republican Mexico, a group of important monographs have highlighted newly available documents and made important contributions to nineteenth-century social history. Among them, one may list works on political transformations by Karen D. Caplan and Paul K. Eiss, on social and economic changes by Luis Alberto Arrioja, and on the careers of indigenous scribes by Miriam Melton-Villanueva. Rajeshwari Dutt’s elegantly written and compact volume Maya Caciques in Early National Yucatán lays out a useful outline of political transformations in nineteenth-century Yucatán, and engages fruitfully in preexisting debates about two important regional developments: the Caste War (1847–1901), and the economic transformation that led to labor-intensive agricultural production in haciendas in the late nineteenth century

Archaeology · Caste · Economic history · Ethnology · Indigenous · Maya · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies