Schroeder Mexico, Basin of Like a giant bowl gouged out of the Earth, ringed by mountains and active volcanoes, the Basin of Mexico, the site of contemporary Mexico City, is one of the w
Trang 1merchants and the Dutch state succeeded in amassing
vast quantities of capital during the colonial period
Principally because their domestic economies had
undergone the most extensive transition to capitalism,
by the end of the colonial period the English and French
states had become the most successful in employing
mercantilist theory and practice to augment their own
economic, political, and military power, and, by
exten-sion, the power and prestige of their respective
nation-states
Further reading Hansen, E Damsgaard
European Econom-ic History: From Mercantilism to Maastricht and Beyond
Herndon, VA: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2001;
Vaggi, Gianni, and Peter Groenewegen A Concise History
of Economic Thought: From Mercantilism to Monetarism
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003
Michael J Schroeder
Mexico, Basin of
Like a giant bowl gouged out of the Earth, ringed by
mountains and active volcanoes, the Basin of Mexico,
the site of contemporary Mexico City, is one of the
world’s most ancient and important cradles of human
civilization Conventionally called the Valley of Mexico,
this singular geographic feature has no outlet to the sea,
and thus technically is a basin, not a valley Tectonically
unstable, ranging in elevation from 2,000 to 2,400
me-ters above sea level, and extending roughly 110
kilome-ters north to south and 80 kilomekilome-ters east to west, the
Basin of Mexico covers an area of approximately 7,000
square kilometers Prior to the conquest of Mexico, the
basin’s diverse ecological zones saw the rise and fall of
diverse city-states and kingdoms Because it formed a
closed hydrological system, and because it has ample
volcanic and alluvial soils, the basin evolved a complex
network of lakes, streams, and springs that also made it
one of the richest and most productive ecological zones
in all of Mesoamerica
The basin’s first human inhabitants, arriving some
15,000 years ago, found an environment teeming with
life—not only birds, fish, plants, and insects but a
stag-gering diversity of mammals like rabbit, fox, pigs, deer,
wolves, as well as camelids, horses, mammoths,
masta-dons, giant sloths, bears, and other large prey Initially
a hunter’s paradise, the basin had by 9,000 years ago
seen its largest fauna become extinct, probably due to a
combination of climate change and anthropogenic
pres-sures The beginnings of maize cultivation, which later provided the economic underpinnings for the develop-ment of complex societies and civilizations across Meso-america and beyond, began in or near the basin around 5,000 b.c.e It is hypothesized that the absence of large draft animals suitable for domestication delayed for several thousand years the emergence of fully sedentary societies As late as 1,000 b.c.e., the entire basin was home to an estimated 10,000 inhabitants—a tiny frac-tion of its carrying capacity, and of what it would be two millennia later
Beginning around 1100 b.c.e., in the basin’s wetter southern zones, conscious manipulation of the basin’s abundant water resources marked the beginnings of an agricultural revolution, and along with it of complex societies that relatively quickly developed into large-scale state systems Around 500 b.c.e., to the northeast the construction of irrigation ditches and other water-control mechanisms permitted the emergence of the basin’s first true city and state, Teotihuacán Around the same time,
a host of other polities emerged around the five intercon-nected shallow lakes that dominated the basin’s center— from south to north Lakes Chalco, Xochililco, Texcoco, Xaltocán, and Zupango
From around 100 b.c.e., and continuing for the next 16 centuries, there emerged an exceedingly intricate array of polities, kingdoms, and city-states across the basin, most with their capital cities located near the lakes
at the basin’s center, the exact sequence and relationships
of which scholars are still endeavoring to understand The Aztecs built their capital city Tenochtitlán atop what began as a small island on the western edge of Lake Tex-coco, the basin’s central and largest lake
By the time of the Spanish arrival in 1519, the Basin of Mexico was home to an estimated 2 million
to 3 million people, making it one of the most densely packed areas in the world, with an average population density of from 300 to 500 persons per square kilome-ter After the conquest, the Spanish devoted enormous resources to draining the giant lakes In the early 21st century, the Basin of Mexico was home to the world’s second-largest megalopolis and an estimated 25 mil-lion to 30 milmil-lion people
Further reading Gibson, Charles The Aztecs under
Span-ish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964; Kandell, Jonathan La Capital: The Biography of Mexico City New York: Random House, 1988.
Michael J Schroeder
44 Mexico, Basin of