ONE LAND · 8 ATLASES
History of Mexico in maps
Mexico as it appears in 8 interactive history atlases, from 1750 to 2015: Mexico, New Spain, New Spain / Mexico. Each era below lists who ruled the land and when control changed, linked to the dated map that shows it.
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What was Mexico before it was Mexico? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History atlases — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.
Mexico — beyond the empire · Norse and Aztecs
Beyond the empire lay many peoples the Triple Alliance never ruled: the hunting and farming peoples of the north whom the Mexica called Chichimecs, the Huastec lordships of the northern Gulf coast and the states of the isthmus. The empire’s reach was uneven, and its frontiers were zones of trade, raiding and diplomacy.
| Other peoples and states — the opening position |
NORSE AND AZTECS: EVERY CHAPTER AND MAP →
Mexico (New Spain to 1821) · Industrial Revolution
| Colony or dependency — the opening position | |
| Agrarian economy |
INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: EVERY CHAPTER AND MAP →
New Spain (mod. Mexico) · Age of Revolutions
New Spain’s independence came in two revolutions: Hidalgo’s and Morelos’s popular risings (1810–15), made by villagers and crushed by creole officers — and then those officers’ own conservative exit (Iturbide, 1821) when Spanish liberalism threatened their privileges. Empire, then republic (1824), then decades of coups and the loss of its far north — with the age’s social question, Indigenous and agrarian, still open.
| Colonial possessions — the opening position | |
| Republics & revolutionary states |
AGE OF REVOLUTIONS: EVERY CHAPTER AND MAP →
New Spain / Mexico · Haiti and Kenya independence
| Under colonial rule — the opening position | |
| Other states and societies |
HAITI AND KENYA INDEPENDENCE: EVERY CHAPTER AND MAP →
Mexico · American Civil War
Mexico fought its own war inside the decade: France invaded in 1862 (while the US was too busy to enforce the Monroe Doctrine — the timing was Napoleon III’s explicit calculation) and installed Maximilian of Habsburg as emperor against Juárez’s republic. Confederate Texas traded cotton through Matamoros around the blockade all war. After Appomattox, Sheridan moved 50,000 veterans to the Rio Grande and Washington armed the Juaristas; the French left in 1867 and Maximilian faced a firing squad. Two republics, invaded in the same decade, both survived — the parallel was not lost on either.
| Mexico, 1840–54 — the opening position | |
| Neighbors & the outside world | |
| Neighbors & the outside world |
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR: EVERY CHAPTER AND MAP →
Mexico · WWI
Mexico · Cold War
| US-aligned states — the opening position |
COLD WAR: EVERY CHAPTER AND MAP →
Mexico · Feminism and the Tunisian Revolution
Mexico granted women the national vote in 1953, and they first used it in 1955. In 1975 Mexico City hosted the first UN World Conference on Women, where Bolivian, Mexican and American activists argued over whether poverty or patriarchy came first. Mexico ratified CEDAW in March 1981, among the first countries to do so.
| Refused: women excluded; ERA never ratified — the opening position | |
| Right won in law | |
| No reform yet / outside this story | |
| Right won in law |
FEMINISM AND THE TUNISIAN REVOLUTION: EVERY CHAPTER AND MAP →
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