Material Life, Continuities, and Periodization: A Comment

Professor Carmagnani's essay consists of two parts. In the first three-quarters of the essay, he rapidly reviews historical writing on colonial Mexico from about 1970 until 1981, identifying major topics, tendencies, and prospects for the future. In the second part of the essay, Carmagnani turns to some of what he believes to be the shortcomings of this decade or more of writing, especially what he views as its failure to establish a new periodization for the Mexican colonial centuries. In discussing this “inertia” in the new generation of social historians, he proposes a periodization that he believes more accurately “fits” the general findings of this recent historical corpus.