Juan Coddou Wilson is a social and legal historian whose research explores the intersection of economic development, agrarian change, and authoritarianism. His current project analyzes the first social revolution of the twentieth century, the Mexican Revolution, to explain how policies to redistribute land, protect workers, and promote industrialization replicated the authoritarian practices of the regime that the revolution had toppled. Rooted in Veracruz sugar fields (on the Mexican Gulf), a pioneer area in implementing revolutionary policies, the project shows how local peasant and labor leaders interpreted the social rights created by the revolution as mandates to increase agrarian and industrial productivity and satisfy social needs. Positive material results created popular support for these policies, despite their negative political consequences: the subordination of local self-governance institutions to administrative direction, the deindustrialization of the area’s hybrid economy, and the creation of clientelist networks that destroyed budding political alliances that offered alternative development paths. His research has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Law and Political Economy, Latin American Legal Studies, Nexos, and Tocqueville 21.