David Anthony Brading FRHistS, FBA[1][2][3][4][5][6] (26 August 1936 – 19 April 2024), was a British historian and Professor Emeritus[7] [8]of Mexican History at the University of Cambridge, where was an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College. His work has been recognized with multiple awards including the Bolton Prize in 1972,[9] the Order of the Aztec Eagle, and the Medalla 1808—both of which were awarded by the Mexican government[2][10][11][12]—and the Medal of Congress from the Peruvian government in 2011.[2][13]
He is regarded as one of the foremost historians of Latin America in the United Kingdom,[14][15][16] and was the most widely cited British Latin Americanist.[17][18]
David Brading was born in London, England, and educated at St Ignatius' College and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read history and obtained a BA (Hons) double first-class honours in 1960. He was an Exhibitioner and Foundation Scholar at Cambridge University where he attended the lectures of David Knowles, Geoffrey Elton, and Michael Postan. In 1961 he was awarded a Henry Fellowship to Yale University. But it was later that year, whilst in Mexico, that Brading's fascination with the country began:
I have now found my field of study: sixteenth-century Spain and Latin America...The more I think of it, the more Latin America seems attractive. Sixteenth–century Spain, looking back to the Reconquista and forward to the Counter Reformation and the decadence. The nature of its Catholicism, its mysticism, the history of its expansion, the Jesuits, its art, architecture and poetry. Latin America with its archaeology and anthropology, the nature of its liberalism and its revolutions.[14]
After working for several months in the Civil Service as Assistant Principal at the Board of Trade, he received his M.A. from Cambridge University[19] and enrolled for a PhD at University College London, under the supervision of John Lynch.
Deciding to investigate silver mining in New Spain, Brading spent 15 months engaged in archival research, starting in the Archive of the Indies, Biblioteca Nacional de España, and the Archivo Histórico Nacional before continuing in Mexico in the National Library of Mexico, General Archive of the Nation and finally the archive of Guanajuato.[14] The fruition of this research was the completion in 1965 of his doctoral thesis,[2] entitled "Society and Administration in Late Eighteenth Century Guanajuato with especial reference to the Silver Mining Industry"[20] which was examined by Charles Boxer and John Parry.
Returning to the United States as an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Brading delivered three sets of lectures dealing with Mexico, Peru, and Argentina, before moving to Yale University as Associate Professor in 1971.
Brading's first book, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico 1765–1810 was published in 1971. It dealt with the general history of the silver industry in Mexico with a comprehensive study of Guanajuato and its mines, population and leading families. A review in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science called it a "landmark of dissertation research and organization"[21] while Fernand Braudel who is considered one of the greatest of the modern historians found it a "fascinating book".[22] It won the Bolton Prize in 1972.[9]
In 1973, Brading returned to Cambridge University as a University Lecturer in Latin American History and become Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies at Cambridge University from 1975 – 1990. He was a fellow of St Edmund's College from 1975 to 1988. In 1991 a LittD was awarded to Brading and he was made Reader in Latin American History at Cambridge University. The following year he was the Leverhulme Research Fellow in Mexico, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lima in Peru.[2] and was elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts of which he is one of only ten British members in the humanities, the others being Roger Scruton, Richard Overy, Norman Davies and Timothy Garton Ash among others.[23]In 1999, Brading was made Professor in Latin American History at Cambridge University.
In 1992, Brading's book The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 was published. Its central thesis was that Spaniards born in the New World (creoles) had an American cultural identity, a creole consciousness, distinct from those born and raised in Spain (peninsulares). A review in the journal History declared it to be a book of major importance on the topic,[24] as did a review in the Journal of Latin American Studies.[25] The Mexican literary magazine Letras Libres "said it occupies a place of honor in the library of neophytes and scholars".[26]
In 2001, Brading published Mexican Phoenix, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries, a detailed history of the most important religious icon in Latin America – the Virgin of Guadalupe. Foreign Affairs magazine commented in a review saying that it was "brilliant"... and had "remarkable insight".[26][27]
In 2007, Brading was honoured by a Festschrift, with essays by former students and colleagues, as a "celebration of his outstanding contribution to the field of Mexican history". The result was Mexican Soundings: Essays in Honour of David A. Brading.[28][29][30][31][32]Its genesis lay in a September 1999 three-day conference, "Visions and Revisions in Mexican History held at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.[29]
Mexican Soundings is organised into two distinct halves, the opening three essays focus on Brading's work and life, and the six following highlight the themes that have marked his career and range from the late seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, focused on religion, political culture and Mexican national identity.
Enrique Florescano's essay pays tribute to Brading's "thorough research for mining, agricultural production, land tenure and historical textual analysis of chronicles, political treatises and myths piece encapsulates the principal contributions of each of David Brading's major works".[28]
While Eric Van Young's "historiographical essay, in particular, underlines the impact that each of Brading's publications has made. . . Brading is the "chief architect" of the Age of Revolution periodization (1750-1850), which he calls "Brading's century;" that he led the way in "the socialization of elite studies in Mexican historiography…and that he is the leading scholar of intellectual history and the Catholic Church for colonial Mexico".[31]
The next two essays explore Colonial society and culture with Susan Deans-Smith's essay focusing on the work of painters and guild politics in colonial Mexico City. It is a "study finely tuned to questions of guild and community, Spanish presumptions of superiority, and the assertions of men of indigenous, mestizo, and mulatto ancestry."[28] Ellen Gunnarsdóttir's article is centred around Francisca de Los Ángeles, a Querétaro Beata who lived in the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth. "A fascinating portrayal of how women might break out of traditional gender restraints in colonial society". A trio of essays explores the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the liberal reform era's conflicts with Brian Hamnett's portrait of Tomas Mejia, a figure who linked local and national politics and illustrated the dense network of clientelistic relationships behind the familiar categories of 'liberal' and 'conservative' blurring the crucial period of 1840-1855.[28]
María Eugenia García Ugarte's recounting of the life of the Bishop of Puebla, Pelagio Antonio de Labastida y Dávalos "offers a narrative of how one influential member of the Catholic establishment sought to navigate a way through the more draconian measures of liberal reform designed to restrict Church privileges".
Guy Thomson's "Memoirs and Memories of the European Intervention in the Sierra de Puebla, 1868- 1991" offers an illuminating examination of the interactions among nineteenth-century historical narratives, modern historical memories, and scholarly historians.[31]
Alan Knight's discussion is on whether there is such a thing as "Mexican national identity…as it" is shifting and disputatious in nature, is a conceptual black hole, and that while the 1910 Revolution and its aftermath advanced some fundamentals of a common national identity in Mexico, "the objective national identity remained notoriously fragmented by region, locality, religion, ideology, age, gender, and ethnicity". Knight argues for an integrated economic, social, political, and cultural history, "as exemplified in the work of David Brading".[31]
Brading's autobiographical essay, "A Recusant Abroad" was an amplification of a piece published in Spanish in 1993. It was received enthusiastically by reviewers, Keith Brewster in the Bulletin of Latin American Research commented "We are afforded a rare glimpse of an eminent scholar's development from a hesitant graduate searching a true vocation into an accomplished master of his craft, while Cynthia Radding in the Journal of Latin American Studies called it "beautifully reflective".[14][29] Timothy Anna in The Americas found Brading's essay to be fascinating "Declaring that his first love was Baroque art and architecture and Catholic political thought and mysticism, Brading provides his assessment of the origins, meanings, and purposes of his various publications."[31] Professor John Tutino of Georgetown University commenting in The Hispanic American Historical Review that "Brading's contributions to Mexican history are equalled by few and exceeded by none… No one can understand the silver economy, social processes, and government reforms of the late colonial era without knowing Miners and Merchants, the book that introduced David Brading to a generation. The First America took on even larger challenges, brilliantly tracing imperial power and ideology along with Spanish American cultural and intellectual responses and innovations over more than three centuries, reaching past independence to mid-nineteenth-century liberal reforms."[31]
Brading has received honorary degrees from four universities, including Universidad del Pacifico, Universidad de Guanajuato,[12] Universidad de Lima,[2][12] and the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo.[33][12]