William B. Taylor is a historian of colonial Mexico who held the Sonne Chair of History at University of California, Berkeley until his retirement.
Using the case study of Oaxaca, he demonstrated that indigenous communities continued to control land and the Catholic Church was not dominant in the agrarian sector.
“Not all regions experienced the same degree of land concentration, of course, as Taylor’s 1972 work on Oaxaca has notably shown.”[5] His second major monograph was Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages, which showed that reports of indigenous drinking were likely exaggerated by colonial officials, homicides were usually within communities, and rebellion at the local level followed discernible patterns.
One reviewer of this book says that it stands “as evidence of the continued independence of thought of an historian who now ranks among the foremost in his specialty.”[6] His magisterial study of the secular clergy, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico won the Conference on Latin American History Bolton/Johnson Award for the best book in English on Latin American history in 1997.
"[9] Historian Nancy Farriss says of it, "Taylor's book will stand for a long time as the work that everyone in the field must consult, refer to, and reckon with.