The unconstitutional and morally corrupt war also made it impossible to avoid the later civil war, while also plunging Mexico into even greater turmoil. The work concludes with the disastrous-for-Mexico North American invasion, when the US decided AGAINST being a good neighbor. The privilege of whiteness was cemented early in the raucous borderlands: neither Native Americans nor the original Tejanos fared much better when facing the encroaching hordes of racist cracker cotton dreamers. Slavery made it possible for these haystack sleepers to chase the dream of unimagined wealth from the sweat of the brow of chattel slaves. Some Americans cultivated cotton without enslaved labor, though they did not become rich. Such shining heroes of 'Texas independence' as Austin, Lamar, Houston, and even Seguin, come off poorly: not much better than racist sharecroppers. One of the most interesting arguments is that the FAILED Republic of Texas modeled the later EPIC FAIL of the Confederacy. He is also rare for being the non-Mexicanist who actually carefully delves into the historical record in Mexico, from Spanish colony to republic, and at both the national and state levels. Torget's approach is transnational and also places the Texas borderlands within the Atlantic world of empires, slavery-based capitalism, and the cotton commodity revolution. This award-winning book has so much to offer, and is deserving of its multiple awards. It is hard to believe that it has been more than one-half of a century since the last serious, scholarly history of Texas. Seeds of Empire tells the remarkable story of how the cotton revolution of the early nineteenth century transformed northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the United States, and how the rise and spectacular collapse of the Republic of Texas as a nation built on cotton and slavery proved to be a blueprint for the Confederacy of the 1860s. In the aftermath, Anglo-Americans rebuilt the Texas borderlands into the most unlikely creation: the first fully committed slaveholders' republic in North America. An extraordinary alliance of Anglos and Mexicans in Texas came together to defend slavery against abolitionists in the Mexican government, beginning a series of fights that culminated in the Texas Revolution. Thousands of Anglo-Americans poured into Texas, but their insistence that slavery accompany them sparked pitched battles across Mexico. In response, Mexico threw open its northern territories to American farmers in hopes that cotton could bring prosperity to the region. By the late 1810s, a global revolution in cotton had remade the U.S.-Mexico border, bringing wealth and waves of Americans to the Gulf Coast while also devastating the lives and villages of Mexicans in Texas.

Seeds of empire torget