Introduction Dossier Region and City: approaches from economic and social history

Abstract

At the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century, discordant voices emerged with regional history that was experiencing notable growth within historiographic production. Criticism revolved around the ambiguities and the interchangeable use of certain terms such as local, microhistory and regional, as well as the confusion of taking the regions as if they were federative entities (Miño Grijalva, 2002, pp. 867-868). These objections to regional history generated different reactions, which, although they did not agree with Miño Grijalva, did not throw his observations on deaf ears and from that moment on efforts were made to enrich the definition of the concepts of region and city through intense interdisciplinary exchanges (Antonio Ibarra, 2002, pp. 241-243).