Stephen B. Neufeld. The Blood Contingent

It is remarkable that the regular Mexican army in the long nineteenth century (1810–1910) has attracted, comparatively, so little attention in the historiography considering how important an institution it was, in sociocultural, political, and, evidently, military terms. Throughout the nineteenth century it affected people’s lives through its methods of forced recruitment, at times providing a space for social mobility like no other institution offered. Its generals rose to power more often than civilians did, and it used its military might to intervene in politics repeatedly through pronunciamiento pressure and barracks revolts. Not always successful, it also saw action in both domestic and international wars, such as the 1829 Spanish attempt at reconquest, the Texas Revolution (1835–1836), the Pastry War (1838), the Mexico-U.S. War (1846–1848), the War of the Reform (1857–1861), and the French Intervention (1862–1867). For the restored liberal republic and Porfirian Mexico, the only complete and noteworthy study until now was Daniel Gutiérrez Santos’s Historia militar de México (1955). It is for this reason alone that Stephen B. Neufeld’s The Blood Contingent: The Military and the Making of Modern Mexico, 1876–1911, is such a welcome contribution to the historiography

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