The 1910 uprising against Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz marked the first sweeping social revolution of the twentieth century, foreshadowing the Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions that followed. Yet despite coming first, the Mexican Revolution has attracted far less attention from scholars about its global reverberations. How did awareness of Mexico’s social upheaval inspire other radicals around the world? This is the question that lies at the heart of Heatherton’s ambitious and provocative yet sometimes frustrating new book.
The Mexican Revolution, Heatherton argues, was born in the global crucible of what she calls “the New Imperialism,” the late-nineteenth century push by U.S. and European states and corporations to open new markets, subjugate distant peoples, and extract the natural wealth of their lands. Mexico, despite remaining nominally sovereign in these years, bore the burdens of this global crusade, as vast swaths of its land and wealth fell into foreign hands under the...