“Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States.” The famous words attributed to eight-term Mexican President Porfirio Díaz have often been repeated to describe the country he ruled as a de facto dictator for 30 years. They are also a fair summary of the story told in Paul Gillingham’s sprawling new work, Mexico: A 500-Year History.

To the average American reader, our southern neighbor is something of a mystery. In yellow-tinted film scenes and wistful country music lyrics, Mexico is a place apart, something distinctly different from the U.S. Except when some crisis bubbles up into the international news, or when Mexico’s problems leak across our all-too-porous 2,000-mile border, Americans tend to forget about it, just as we forget about Canada and the rest of the world.

But for those curious about Mexico, Gillingham’s 700-plus-page book provides a quick-paced and readable introduction to the nation’s history, beginning with the first contact between Spaniards and natives in the early 16th century.

Gillingham tells the story of a nation that developed from the start as a hybrid culture. Unlike the more sparsely populated parts of the New World to the north and the far south, the land that became Mexico was home to a dense, partly urbanized population of natives. Moreover, unlike the........

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