William B. Taylor is a historian of colonial Mexico, who held the Sonne Chair of History at University of California, Berkeley until his retirement. He made major contributions to the study of colonial land tenure, peasant rebellions, and many aspects of colonial religion in Mexico. In 2007 he received the Distinguished Service Award of the Conference on Latin American History, the highest honor of the professional organization of Latin American historians.
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Academic career
Taylor attended Occidental College and earned a B.A. in Latin American Studies in 1965. He attended Universidad de las Américas 1964-65, earning an M.A. in History. He studied at University of Michigan for his doctorate under the direction of distinguished Latin American historian Charles Gibson. Taylor co-edited a festschrift for his mentor.
His 1969 doctoral dissertation was revised and published as Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Mexico, which challenged a number of important aspects of research on colonial Mexican haciendas. Taylor showed that there were considerable regional variations in colonial Mexican land tenure patterns. Using the case study of Oaxaca, he demonstrated that indigenous communities continued to control land and the Catholic Church was not dominant in the agrarian sector. Taylor’s work was one many regional hacienda studies that followed, and one that Eric Van Young singles out in a review article. “Not all regions experienced the same degree of land concentration, of course, as Taylor’s 1972 work on Oaxaca has notably shown.”
His second major monograph was Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages, which showed that reports of indigenous drinking were likely exaggerated by colonial officials, homicides were usually within communities, and rebellion at the local level followed discernible patterns. Taylor identified local trial records as a new source of Mexican Indian history, which are important since they record Indians’ testimony on topics not generally found in other colonial sources. One reviewer of this book says that it stands “as evidence of the continued independence of thought of an historian who now ranks among the foremost in his specialty.”
His magisterial study of the secular clergy, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico won the Conference on Latin American History Bolton/Johnson Award for the best book in English on Latin American history in 1997. The work is complicates the understanding of the colonial Catholic Church, and makes "a major contribution to the ongoing debate over the significance of the Bourbon reforms...Taylor's monumental work is essential reading for every colonialist and an indispensable foundation for future studies of the church in colonial Latin America." Historian Nancy Farriss says of it, "Taylor's book will stand for a long time as the work that everyone in the field must consult, refer to, and reckon with."