Publications

Book

From the Grounds Up Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico (Stanford University Press, 2019)

Published in Spanish as Desde las raíces. Actores locales y la creación de una economía de exportación en el sur de México (UNAM-CIMSUR, 2022)

In the late nineteenth century, Latin American exports boomed. From Chihuahua to Patagonia, producers sent industrial fibers, tropical fruits, and staple goods across oceans to satisfy the ever-increasing demand from foreign markets. In southern Mexico's Soconusco district, the coffee trade would transform rural life. A regional history of the Soconusco as well as a study in commodity capitalism, From the Grounds Up places indigenous and mestizo villagers, migrant workers, and local politicians at the center of our understanding of the export boom.

Peer Reviewed Journals

• Lurtz, Casey Marina. “Challenging Abstraction: Unruly Statistics and the State in Progress,” The American Historical Review, 130, no.1 (2025): 80-111.

• 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.

  • Winner of the 2022 Anne Fleming Article Prize from the American Society for Legal History and the Business History Conference.

• 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. “Insecure Labor, Insecure Debt: The Struggle over Debt Peonage in the Soconusco, Chiapas,” Hispanic American Historical Review 96, No. 2 (Spring 2016): 291-318.

• 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.

Book Reviews

• Review of The Three Deaths of Cerro de San Pedro: Four Centuries of Extractivism in a Small Mexican Mining Town,Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert. H-Environment, 2025.

• Review of The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal, Joan Flores-Villalobos. American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 799–800.

• Review of Technocratic Visions: Engineers, Technology, and Society in Mexico, J. Justin Castro; James A. Garza (Editors). Isis 114, no. 4 (2023): 881-2.

• Review of Fueling Mexico: Energy and Environment, 1850-1950, Germán Vergara. Journal of Interdisciplinary History. (2022) 53(1): 175-6.

• Review of Matters of Justice: Pueblos, the Judiciary, and Agrarian Reform in Revolutionary Mexico, Helga Baitenmann. Hispanic American Historical Review. (2021) 101(3): 529-31.

• Review of A Revolution Unfinished: The Chegomista Rebellion and the Limits of Revolutionary Democracy in Juchitán, Oaxaca, Colby Ristow. Hispanic American Historical Review (2019) 99 (4): 782-784.

• Review of Routes of Compromise: Building Roads and Shaping the Nation in Mexico, 1917-1952, Michael K. Bess. Journal of Social History (Fall 2019): 304-06.

• Review of Globalized Fruit, Local Entrepreneurs: How One Banana-Exporting Country Achieved Worldwide Reach, Douglas Southgate and Lois Roberts. Business History Review 91, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 439-441.

• Review of Pesos and Politics: Business, Elites, Foreigners, and Government in Mexico, 1854-1940, Mark Wasserman. Business History Review 90, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 177-79.

• Review of The Civilizing Machine: A Cultural History of Mexican Railroads, Michael Matthews. Hispanic American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 172-73.

• Review of Las estadísticas de salud en México: Ideas, actores e instituciones, 1810–2010, Claudia Agostoni and Andrés Ríos Molina. Enterprise & Society 14, no. 3 (Sept 2013): 664-66. 

Pieces in Preparation

• “Debt Peonage in Postcolonial Mexico,” book chapter for From Colony to Republic: The Social History of Law in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, edited by Timo Schaefer, Oxford University Press.

• “Indigenous Villagers and Laborers in the Mexico-Guatemala Borderlands, 1867-1900," in Dangerous Liaisons: A Century of Plantations, Coerced Labor, and Ethnic Relations in Modern Chiapas, edited by Jan Rus and Stephen Lewis. Duke University Press.

•  “Genealogies of Development: Views from Latin America,” convener and editor of joint special issues in preparation for invited proposal to Humanity and History of Science. Articles submitted fall 2024. Author of Humanity introduction.

• "An Agricultural Atlas of Mexico in 1899," digital humanities project that uses GIS to map municipal-level agricultural data collected for the 1900 Paris World's Fair. See preview of this project here.