This sweeping new history of Mexico spans 500 dramatic years of conquest, innovation and revolution. It begins in 1511 with the shipwreck of two Spanish sailors in Yucat?n. Paul Gillingham’s superb history chronicles how this convulsion led to a startling recombination of cultures. He shows how the industrial mining of Mexico’s silver transformed the wealth and trade of the world, making it the centre of the first truly global economy. We then see how independence from Spain went on to bring calamitous wars with the United States and France. One of the world’s great social revolutions then remade Mexico and ushered in a one-party state that, whatever its shortcomings, brought peace throughout many of the global horrors of the 20th century – before the country collapsed into violence in the drug wars of the 2000s.