The Mexican Revolution was like no other: it was fueled by no vanguard party, no coherent ideology, no international ambitions; and ultimately it served to reinforce rather than to subvert many of the features of the old regime it overthrew. Alan Knight argues that a populist uprising brought about the fall of longtime dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1910. It was one of those "relatively rare episodes in history when the mass of the people profoundly influenced events." In this first of two volumes Knight shows how urban liberals joined in uneasy alliance with agrarian interests to install Francisco Madero as president and how his attempts to bring constitutional democracy to Mexico were doomed by counter-revolutionary forces. The Mexican Revolution illuminates on all levels, local and national, the complex history of an era. Rejecting fashionable Marxist and revisionist interpretations, it comes as close as any work can to being definitive.

Alan Knight is Professor of Latin American History, Oxford University, and Director of the Latin American Centre, St. Antony's College, Oxford.

"Masterly. . . . One of the best books in the entire literature on the sociology of revolution."—W. G. Runciman, London Review of Books

"Shows great originality and is the closest thing to date to a definitive history written by a single author. . . . The empiricist quality of this book may turn him into the next authority, the standard for a new generation of historians."—Jean Meyer, Hispanic American Historical Review

"This study undoubtedly will be considered one of the best written and most thoroughly researched synthese of the revolution for years to come."—Heather Fowler Salamini, Peasant Studies

"Alan Knight's remarkable Mexican Revolution must rank among the finest pieces of historical scholarship to have appeared in this country over the past decade, and deserves a much wider audience than Mexicanists alone."—Alistair Hennessy, Times Literary Supplement