Making a New WorldMaking a New World is a major rethinking of the role of the Americas in early world trade, the rise of capitalism, and the conflicts that reconfigured global power around 1800. At its center is the Bajo, a fertile basin extending across the modern day Mexican states of Guanajuato and Quertaro, northwest of Mexico City. The Bajo became part of a new world in the 1530s, when Mesoamerican Otoms and Franciscan friars built Quertaro, a town that quickly