New Spain produced rising flows of silver to become a dynamic center of global trades in the eighteenth century, socially stable as polarities deepened. Napoleon’s 1808 Spanish invasion cracked imperial sovereignty; in 1810 political and popular insurgencies exploded in the Bajío, the leading region of silver, manufacturing, and commercial cultivation. They endured for a decade, collapsed silver capitalism, and led to the end of Spanish rule when counterinsurgent armies proclaimed a Mexican monarchy in 1821. Mexican’s searched to become a nation while facing a broken commercial economy, legacies of Cádiz liberalism, and armies expecting to rule. Debates about economic possibilities and conflicts over central rule and provincial rights generated decades of instability, marked by the secession of Texas to protect cotton and slavery, then the war in which the United States took Mexico’s North from Texas to California. Mexico’s fall from the heights of silver capitalism enabled the U.S. rise within industrial capitalism.