Ted Beatty
Associate Professor of History
Director, Latin American Studies Program
Fellow, Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Field
Latin America
Profile
Professor Beatty's interests include the economic and political history of nineteenth and early twentieth century Mexico, technological change in Mexico, and comparative studies of institutions, technology transfer, and economic development. His Stanford dissertation (1996) and first book received financial support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the U.S-Mexico Center at the University of California San Diego, and the Economic History Association. That project examined the institutional context for economic change and industrialization in Mexico between 1890 and 1910. Professor Beatty examined three federal policies designed to attract investment to domestic industry: tariff schedules, patent law, and tax exemptions. Based on a quantitative and case study analysis of their administration, allocation, and adjudication, he argued that institutional reform reshaped incentives and consequently redirected new investment. Yet the three policies-forming together an incipient import substituting industrialization regime-had divergent results: import tariffs provided crucial protection; tax exemptions were largely ineffectual; and reformed patent law yielded unexpected costs. That work was published as Institutions and Investment: The Political Basis of Industrialization in Mexico before 1911 (Stanford University Press, 2001).
Current Project
Professor Beatty's current research broadly examines technological change in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Mexico. New technologies flooded Mexico (and the rest of the world) from the North Atlantic. This project examines what happened to those technologies once they were unloaded from ships or rail cars on Mexican soil. It traces the life story of three cases studies and then systematically examines the factors that facilitated or constrained the adoption, innovation, adaptation, and diffusion of new, foreign techniques and know-how in the Mexican context. Professor Beatty is interested in examining the balance of economic, political, social, and cultural factors that underlay the relationship between imported knowledge (embodied in new machines and processes) and the technological capabilities in Mexican society. He received two years of support for this research from the National Science Foundation.
Teaching Interests
Professor Beatty teaches courses in modern Latin American History, the history of Mexico, and select topics in comparative economic history. As Director of the College of Arts & Letters' Latin American Studies Program he coordinates the college-level planning for this undergraduate minor degree program as well. The inauguration of a new Ph.D. field in Latin American history in 2005 has brought the opportunity to teach graduate seminars and to mentor our first cohorts of new graduate students.
Recent Publications
Institutions and Investment: The Political Basis of Industrialization in Mexico
before 1911, Stanford University Press, 2001.
“Patents and Technological Change in Late Industrialization: Nineteenth Century Mexico in Comparative Perspective,” History of Technology vol. 24, 2002, pp. 121-150.
“Approaches to Technology Transfer in History and the Case of Nineteenth Century Mexico,” Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 1:2, 2003, pp. 167-200 (invited submission).
“Visiones del futuro: la reorientación de la política económica en México (1867-1893),” Signos Históricos (Mexico), vol. 10, julio-diciembre 2003, pp. 39-56.
“Propiedad industrial, patentes e inversión en tecnología en España y México (1820-1914),” co-authored with Patricio Sáiz González, in Rafael Dobado, Aurora Gómez Galvarriato, and Graciela Márquez, eds., España y México: Historias Económicas Paralelas? Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006.
Contact
Office: 203 Hesburgh Center
Phone: (574) 631-7038
Email: Edward.Beatty.5@nd.edu
Office Hours: by appointment