Without realizing it, my interest in corn swept me up with uncontrollable passion. I gathered a significant amount of material on the history of corn worldwide. My access to the extraordinary libraries at Cambridge, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago, libraries that take patrons seriously as researchers and not as petty criminals, was a surfeit, a banquet for a starving man. It also was a disappointment. Very few authors shared my unbridled passion. The search for materials began to slow down and I entered the phase of diminishing returns. Nevertheless, the material raised the possibility of a project I had not anticipated: a series of case studies on corn’s role in the formation of the world system, nothing less than a world history of corn. The possibility both irresistibly tempted and terrified me. Temptation carried the day and my work led me to write a book in which Mexico scarcely figured. Two preexisting conditions came to bear on this project. Like all Mexican social scientists, I am a Mexicanist by virtue of training, vocation, and manifest destiny. I know and study Mexico. The problems of that country define the horizons of my intellectual concerns. That is all well and good—it is one of the strengths of the Mexican social sciences— but it has its drawbacks as well.
Preface xi
At its most extreme, Mexicanism results in a lack of interest in what is happening elsewhere in the world, in spite of being conscious of the fact that the nature of our connection to the rest of the world defines and conditions our own circumstances to an important degree. More often, we simply take it for granted that knowledge about the world at large is a specialized field of knowledge that only the wealthy can aspire to, a luxury that we cannot a√ord. We end up resorting to Western scholars to enlighten us about those things that take place beyond our own borders. On the one hand, we become dependent on the acquisition and analysis of an essential portion of information in order to better appreciate our own circumstances. On the other, knowledge about the larger world remains characterized by the intellectual perspectives of developed nations. Those perspectives vary and the legacy of colonialism does not taint all of them, but colonialism does provide a context, does bring a certain reality to bear on all these perspectives. We do not enjoy global analysis that is at once a Mexican perspective and an international worldview. This abeyance leads to a distortion of knowledge about the world, and such intellectual unilateralism leads to scientific dependence.