William B. Taylor (historian)
William B. Taylor is a historian who studied colonial Mexico. He held the Sonne Chair of History at the University of California, Berkeley, until his retirement. His work focused on land tenure, peasant rebellions, and religion in colonial Mexico. In 2007 he received the Distinguished Service Award from the Conference on Latin American History, the top honor in the field.
Taylor earned his BA at Occidental College in Latin American Studies (1965) and an MA in History at Universidad de las Américas (1964–65). He did his PhD at the University of Michigan under Charles Gibson and co-edited a festschrift for his mentor.
His 1969 doctoral dissertation was revised and published as Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Mexico, challenging ideas about haciendas and showing regional differences in land patterns. In Oaxaca, he argued, Indigenous communities kept land control and the Catholic Church was not dominant in the countryside.
His second major book, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages, suggested that reports of indigenous drinking were often exaggerated by officials, most homicides happened within communities, and local rebellions followed recognizable patterns. He identified local trial records as a valuable new source for Indigenous history.
Taylor’s magisterial study Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico won the Bolton/Johnson Award in 1997 for the best English-language book on Latin American history. It deepened the understanding of the colonial Catholic Church and contributed to debates about the Bourbon reforms. Nancy Farriss said it will stand as a foundational work that everyone in the field will consult.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 17:13 (CET).