Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs.

Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy, customizable themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there.

Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time. From startups to scaleups, online, in person and on the go.

Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you.

Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup.

From the chaos of the Spanish conquest and the humiliation of military defeat to the United States

to the disruption of the revolution, Mexican history is often viewed through the lens of trauma

and violence. Yet, as Paul Gillingham explains in this episode of the History Extra podcast,

this was also one of the earliest democracies in the world,

one in which indigenous people enjoyed rights unthinkable in the United States.

In conversation with Spencer Misen, Paul discusses One Nation's extraordinary history.

Paul, at the very beginning of your new book, you introduce us to what you describe as the first Mexicans.

Just to start, who were these people? And what was it that defined them as the first Mexicans?

That's a controversial story, of course, because as soon you say that Mexicans actually don't

exist until first contact with Europeans, people at the back of the classroom can put their

hands up and say, excuse me, that's unbelievably racist. The first Mexicans, if you say,

Mexicans are people who inhabit this vast territory in North America, obviously go back more or less to

Bering Strait, so talking 10,000 years. But Mexico as a label for a place doesn't really come

into existence until late in the 16th century. And Mexico, more than anything else, is defined by this extraordinary coexistence and

fusion of peoples from across the world.

And Mexico is the first place why that happens.

And until first contact with Europeans, that's just not there.

...