CEDLA Lecture: The Rise and Fall of the Mexican Developmental State

The Rise and Fall of the Mexican Developmental State (1920-80) by Alan Knight

This paper applies the notion of the ‘developmental state’ to Mexico during the period c. 1920-c.1980, that is, the two decades of state-building and social reform which followed the armed revolution and the four decades which witnessed the hegemony of the PRI. It considers how to conceptualise the ‘developmental state’, first, in narrow terms, drawing on the literature devoted to East Asia, then, more broadly, in order to help the model ‘travel’ – safely and usefully – to twentieth-century Latin America, especially Mexico. The application of the model(s) involves a schematic chronology, emboding four periods, each evaluated according to ‘developmental’ criteria (economic growth, the role of the state, social – including agrarian – reform, and welfare). It concludes that, as a good model should, that of the developmental state offers a valid, useful and, in some measure, original way of looking at and understanding the distinctive trajectory of Mexico’s political economy in the decades following the armed Revolution and culminating in the hegemony of the PRI. 

Alan Knight is Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford, where he previously held the Chair of Latin American History and was Director of the Latin American Centre. He previously taught at the Universities of Essex (UK) and Texas, Austin. He is the author of ten books, most dealing with Mexican/Latin American history, in particular the Mexican Revolution. He has also co-edited volumes dealing with the Mexican oil industry, Mexican caciquismo (boss politics), the Great Depresion of the 1930s, and superstition in history.