As the author comments in his preface, Mexicans have paid too little attention to the economic and social history of their country before 1867. A few historians such as Luis Chávez Orozco, Jesús Silva Herzog, and Agustín Cue Cánovas have published surveys, interpretations, or documents; but nothing comparable to the massive scholarship of Daniel Cosío Villegas’ Historia moderna de México has yet appeared. The dismal spectacle of national disintegration naturally does not attract Mexican researchers. Nevertheless, as López Cámara puts it, these unhappy decades were “the sickbed from which we Mexicans of today have arisen,” and they furnish a starting point from which to study “the magnitude and the results of the two greater events which have shaped . . . the national reality in which we live—the Reform and the Mexican Revolution” (p. 9).

Outsiders may help, but it is really up to Mexican historians to fill this gap. López Cámara has done only part of the job. His book ought to be titled The Economic and Social Structure of Early National Mexico as Viewed by French Observers, for he has confined his sources almost entirely to economic and social materials in the reports of French diplomats in Mexico and published French travel descriptions. According to his acknowledgments he has worked in London as well, but no one would guess this from his text or footnotes. He does not appear to have used the accounts of Henry George Ward, William P. Robertson, or other British visitors. Also, there would seem no good reason for ruling out American diplomatic correspondence or travel books, especially the recent revealing edition of Madame Calderón de la Barca’s classic. But above all López Cámara’s book lacks the solid basis of source materials from his own country—the government documents, pamphlets, newspapers, and unpublished materials which give detailed, often passionate evidence about the frustrating Mexican economy and the turbulent society of the early national period.

The author’s concentration on French descriptions and statistics makes for a curious detachment and also some distortion. The French diplomats wrote with special reference to French economic interests and diplomatic controversies, most of which he omits. There is almost no mention of individual Mexicans. While the treatment of commercial and financial problems is fairly comprehensive and well balanced, the section on mining is unsatisfying, probably because the French had few mining interests after the 1820s. If the author had consulted the close-packed pages of the British Quarterly Mining Review, he would easily have gathered more details about operations, technology, labor, and security troubles than he could possibly have used.

López Cámara has made at least one important contribution in demonstrating the rich variety of material on internal Mexican conditions to be found in European diplomatic and consular reports. (The British archives, although little used here, are at least as voluminous as the French.) A proper admixture of Mexican sources would have given the foreign comments more relevance and involvement with the Mexican environment.