This is not a history of Mexico’s Second Empire (1864 – 67) but a history of its historiography. It summarizes almost 150 years of historiographical production about Maximilian of Habsburg’s Mexican Empire and explains why and how the period came to be represented as an exotic and parenthetical interlude in national history. El Segundo Imperio nicely complements Pani’s first book, Para mexicanizar el Segundo Imperio (Colegio de México, 2001), a significant reconsideration of the Mexican sources of the imperial project.
The author divides her account into four stages. The first (1862 – 1917) reviews the works produced by contemporaries of the Second Empire. It is an unusually cosmopolitan body of literature, both because of the exceptional number of foreigners whose attention was caught by the imperial experiment and because of the Mexican authors’ awareness, “within what has tended to be a rather parochial historiography” (p. 30), of the international influences...
