Projecting Prosperity

Striving for a State in Nineteenth Century Mexico

My ongoing monograph, Projecting Prosperity: Striving for a State in Nineteenth Century Mexico, is a history of Mexico’s national administrative formation from independence through the Mexican Revolution. In it, I illuminate how those who worked beyond the realm of electoral politics understood and imagined the state and to what ends. The project looks past the political tumult that generally defines our understanding of nineteenth century Mexico to present a story of desired and increasingly real institutional stability. Building on rich historiographies on “everyday forms of state formation” and popular political liberalism in Mexico, I trace how the basic institutions of a durable and functional state grew out of popular and elite economic aspirations and needs.

The following publications all form part of this ongoing project:

• Lurtz, Casey Marina. “A Confounded Statistic: Turn-of-the-Century Mexican Agriculture in Incommensurable Terms.” The Americas 80, no. 2 (April 2023): 291–329.

• Lurtz, Casey Marina. “Codifying Credit: Everyday Contracting and the Spread of the Civil Code in Nineteenth-Century Mexico.” Law and History Review 39, no. 1 (2021): 97–133.

• Lurtz, Casey Marina. “Making Eden Prosperous in Nineteenth Century Mexico/A un Edén próspero en el México decimonónico,” ISTOR, invited for special issue on Latin American environmental history, Summer 2017.

• Lurtz, Casey Marina. “Developing the Mexican Countryside: The Department of Fomento’s Social Project of Modernization,” Business History Review, 90, No. 3 (Autumn 2016): 431-455.