Deportation of the Yaqui

The deportation of the Yaqui is named as a topic in the book’s discussion of scholarship on Mexico, but the available passage does not recount when, where, or how the deportations occurred. Its significance here is therefore contextual: the book places research on the Yaqui alongside a broader analysis of political instability, economic institutions, and the unequal development of the Americas.

The Yaqui in the Book’s Account

The book’s reference to the Yaqui appears in a guide to further reading, which points readers to a study by Hu-DeHart for a discussion of the deportation. It supplies no particulars about the people deported, the authorities responsible, the conditions of removal, or the episode’s immediate consequences. Those details cannot be reconstructed from the passage itself.

Comparative Context: Institutions and Expansion

Elsewhere, the book argues that European commercial and colonial expansion helped produce sharply different institutional outcomes. Atlantic trade created a wealthy group of traders in England who were comparatively independent of the Crown and pressed for political change; in Spain and France, royal control over trade remained stronger. The account presents these different responses to expanding commerce as consequences of small initial institutional differences that grew more consequential over time.

The book also describes the coercive side of overseas expansion. In the Moluccas, the Dutch East India Company pursued control of the spice trade through military force, removal of competing traders, and restrictions on clove cultivation. In Ambon, Dutch rule intensified existing tribute and forced-labor arrangements, tying households to the soil and obliging them to cultivate clove trees and provide labor. This account illustrates the book’s wider claim that European expansion could impose or reinforce extractive institutions rather than simply open new avenues of trade.

Reversal and the Limits of the Evidence

The book characterizes colonial expansion as a force that, in many places, destroyed or obstructed local commercial and industrial activity. It argues that the destruction of independent polities and indigenous economies, alongside the creation of extractive institutions, helped prevent some societies from benefiting from industrialization. The Yaqui deportation is cited within the bibliography for the Mexico discussion, but the supplied evidence does not explicitly connect that episode to a specific policy, cause, or consequence. The comparison provides historical context, not a substitute for an account of the deportations themselves.