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Despite Marx minuting that, ‘the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world,’ there is a heavily Eurocentric perspective in much historical sociology debate on state formation and the rise of the modern capitalist states-system. This impinges on attempts to understand the origins of capitalism in terms of feudal crisis, agrarian class structures, and economic development in Europe resting on changes in social property relations. In contrast, a contribution is made in this paper to the focus on transformations in social property relations by understanding the social origins of the transition to capitalism in Mexico. There are two principal steps to the argument. First, there is a focus on processes of primitive accumulation that created the conditions of development for capitalist production and national consolidation of the internal market in Mexico. This is understood as a ‘passive revolution’ based on state intervention to guide political modernisation. Second, this account of ‘passive revolution’ in Mexico is related to the subsequent unfolding of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and specifically its so-called ‘institutional phase’ between 1920-1940. Overall, the argument promotes an understanding of state formation and processes of primitive accumulation by tracing the class strategy, or ‘passive revolution’, of the state in Mexico, which gave capitalism there a particular form consistent with authoritarian and hegemonic influence. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]