He was an Exhibitioner and Foundation Scholar at the University of Cambridge where he attended the lectures of David Knowles, Geoffrey Elton and Michael Postan.

[14] The fruition of this research was the completion in 1965 of his doctoral thesis,[2] entitled "Society and Administration in Late Eighteenth Century Guanajuato with especial reference to the Silver Mining Industry",[20] which was examined by Charles Boxer and John Parry.

It dealt with the general history of the silver industry in Mexico with a comprehensive study of Guanajuato and its mines, population and leading families.

A review in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science called it a "landmark of dissertation research and organization"[21] while Fernand Braudel, who is considered one of the greatest of the modern historians, found it a "fascinating book".

The following year, he was the Leverhulme Research Fellow in Mexico, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lima in Peru,[2] and was elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, of which he was one of only ten British members in the humanities, the others including Roger Scruton, Richard Overy, Norman Davies and Timothy Garton Ash.

[29][30][31][32][33] Its genesis lay in a September 1999 three-day conference, "Visions and Revisions in Mexican History", held at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

It is a "study finely tuned to questions of guild and community, Spanish presumptions of superiority, and the assertions of men of indigenous, mestizo, and mulatto ancestry".

[29] Ellen Gunnarsdóttir's article is centred around Francisca de Los Ángeles, a Querétaro Beata who lived in the late seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth.

A trio of essays explores the middle decades of the nineteenth century and the liberal reform era's conflicts with Brian Hamnett's portrait of Tomas Mejia, a figure who linked local and national politics and illustrated the dense network of clientelistic relationships behind the familiar categories of "liberal" and "conservative" blurring the crucial period of 1840–1855.

[29] María Eugenia García Ugarte's recounting of the life of the Bishop of Puebla Pelagio Antonio de Labastida y Dávalos "offers a narrative of how one influential member of the Catholic establishment sought to navigate a way through the more draconian measures of liberal reform designed to restrict Church privileges".

It was received enthusiastically by reviewers; Keith Brewster, in the Bulletin of Latin American Research, commented: "We are afforded a rare glimpse of an eminent scholar's development from a hesitant graduate searching a true vocation into an accomplished master of his craft."

"[32] Professor John Tutino, of Georgetown University, commented in The Hispanic American Historical Review that "Brading's contributions to Mexican history are equalled by few and exceeded by none… No one can understand the silver economy, social processes, and government reforms of the late colonial era without knowing Miners and Merchants, the book that introduced David Brading to a generation.

The First America took on even larger challenges, brilliantly tracing imperial power and ideology along with Spanish American cultural and intellectual responses and innovations over more than three centuries, reaching past independence to mid-nineteenth-century liberal reforms.