Louise E. Walker

Class of Fall 2014

Associate Professor of History

Northeastern University

Massachusetts

Economic Woes: Debt and the Ethics of Capitalism in Modern Mexico

Conflicts over bankruptcy and usury are a fundamental yet little understood part of the history of capitalism in modern Mexico. In her Academy project, “Economic Woes: Debt and the Ethics of Capitalism in Modern Mexico,” Walker describes how bankruptcy litigation–from colonial courts like the Inquisition, to the chambers of nineteenth century judges, to today’s Credit Bureau–demonstrates the recurrence of concerns about the ethics and practices of the debt economy throughout modern Mexican history. Pharmacists, merchants, and teachers, among many others, have navigated a changing moral and legal framework for borrowing and lending money through major economic changes—from a traditional Catholic moral economy in the eighteenth century to the emergence of liberal economics in the nineteenth century, and to the development of state-led capitalism in the decades following the 1910-1920 revolution. Walker looks into what happens when loans go bad in each of these economies in order to chart the history of capitalism over the long term. This approach allows her to examine the continuities, changes, and recurrences in the history of private property rights, moral economies, liberal economics, and the economic lives of middle-class people.

Associate Professor of History at Northeastern University Louise E. Walker focuses on colonial and modern Mexican and Latin American history, social movements, natural disasters, and the history of capitalism. She completed her BA in history at McGill University (2000) and PhD at Yale University (2008) and subsequently taught at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, and at the New School for Social Research, in New York City. Her first book, Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Classes after 1968 (Stanford, 2013), tells the story of neoliberalism and democracy in Mexico and won the 2014 Award for the Best Book in the Social Sciences from the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association and the honorable mention in the 2014 Thomas McGann Book Prize from the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies. Walker is co-editor of Latin America’s Middle Class: Unsettled Debates and New Histories (Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, 2013) and of a special journal dossier on Mexico’s recently declassified secret police archives, “Spy Reports: Content, Methodology, and Historiography in Mexico’s Secret Police Archive” (Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 2013). Her work has been supported most recently by the American Council of Learned Societies.