Mexico: Colonial Period

Spanish forces under Hernan Cortes conquered the Aztec Empire between 1519 and 1521, bringing the territory that is now Mexico under Spanish rule and forming the core of the viceroyalty of New Spain. Mexico City, built on the ruins of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, became the viceroyalty's capital in 1535 and the seat of a colonial government that eventually stretched from the present-day southwestern United States through Central America and into parts of the Caribbean and the Philippines.

Colonial society in New Spain was organized around a rigid caste system, with a small population of Spanish-born peninsulares and American-born criollos holding political and economic power over a majority Indigenous and mixed-race population. Silver mining drove the colonial economy, supplemented by the hacienda system of large agricultural estates, and New Spain became one of the wealthiest and most populous territories in the Spanish empire, exceeding six million people by the early nineteenth century.

In the eighteenth century, Spain's Bourbon Reforms sought to tighten royal control, reorganize administration into intendancies, and increase revenue extraction from the colony. These changes, combined with growing resentment among criollos over their exclusion from top offices, contributed to unrest that culminated in the Mexican War of Independence, which began in 1810 and ended Spanish colonial rule in 1821.