In the Laboratory of Politics. The Confederate States of America and Mexico's Second Empire, 1848-1867.

Erika Pani (Colegio de México) will be presenting a talk analysing experiments in nation building: The Confederate States of America and Mexico's Second Empire. 

This seminar will be held on Microsoft Teams and can be accessed via this link from 16:00 on 10 February 2021. 

In the twenty years that followed the end of the Mexican American War profoundly reshaped the politics and geopolitics of North America, as its two republics were riven by civil war and radical political experiments. 

The war in which Mexico lost half of its territory and tuned the United States into a continental power set both victor and vanquished on a path of increasing polarization and confrontation. Ordinary politics were unable to resolve the conflict over slavery's expansion into the conquered territories in the United States, while in Mexico Liberals and Conservatives saw their rivals' projects for the nation not only as wrongheaded but as dangerous. To cut the Gordian knot they believed was strangling the Republic, some politicians resorted to revolutionary politics: Secession in the Union's southern slave States, foreign intervention and monarchy in Mexico.

This talk is presented by Erika Pani (Colegio de México).