This chapter explores the political significance of experience. Imperial authorities and political writers deemed experience as one of the major attributes of a good ruler, and imperial officials acquired it thanks to their mobility and by serving in different places across the world. By integrating the study of the political theory with the actual practices of the officials, the chapter reveals how officials’ expertise was gained, valued, and transferred across the different imperial locations – not only from Europe to America but also the other way around. Officials’ experience, which was logged in their informaciones de méritos y servicios, spawned a new epistemological milieu that privileged direct knowledge and sensorial experimentation.

This chapter evinces that the engagement of Spanish imperial officials with distant societies utterly foreign to them was only possible thanks to the clever use of their networks of patronage. Patrons, clients, and brokers played a vital role in shaping the officials’ activities. By looking at some of these networks from an imperial perspective, new light is shed on how the culture of bounty and clientelism, which was based on personal and local linkages, adapted to the global dynamics and new geographies, thus facilitating the government of the empire, even in regions thousands of miles away from the core of those networks. Furthermore, the chapter shows that royal service was a familial endeavor, including, of course, the wives. Although often contradictory, the networks, goals, and means of the officials’ kin and those of the monarchy were interwoven and became almost indistinguishable.

The concluding chapter summarizes the book’s main arguments and findings and argues for a global and synchronic study of the Spanish Empire to shed light on the nature and limits of imperial power and colonialism and their specific implementation, particularly in the case of Latin America.

This chapter studies the shaky effects of mobility and the resistance to it. The chapter looks at some cases in which Spanish officials and subjects moved way beyond the accepted boundaries and their mobility turned into trespassing, even going native. This radical movement, notably when physical mobility resulted in cultural mobility, generated many tensions and anxieties within each local society, and, in turn, prompted intense debate on the definition of the empire’s limits and nature. Many feared the excesses of mobility and argued for stringent policies and controls that would supposedly fixate Spanish identity and keep it pure.

The introduction presents the main arguments and topics discussed throughout the book. It also sketches some critical characteristics of early modern Spanish officials and the global Spanish Empire. Furthermore, it discusses the book’s methodological and theoretical approaches, particularly the challenges of writing a global history from the margins.

This chapter deals with the physical and tangible aspects of the worldwide circulation of royal officials and exposes how the Spanish Empire developed an unheard of system of global mobility. After evaluating the dramatic changes in how people thought of distance, it sketches some of the major patterns of Spanish mobility and the new technologies that enabled such movement. This allows for discussing some novel material representations of the globe and the original worldly imaginings.

Building upon the previous themes, the book’s last chapter highlights the development of Spanish imperial cosmopolitanism, which enabled officials and subjects to make sense of and subsume the heterogeneous societies and regions they encountered and think of the world as one coherent unity. This cosmopolitanism was demarcated by imperial rivalries and officials’ self-perception as Catholic soldiers. Their actions and interactions with other people were read through the lenses of their Catholic identity, which also fostered a sense of Spanish exceptionalism. Moreover, most global interactions and imaginings occurred in areas usually deemed "peripheral," expressing the unity and coherence of the polity despite its dispersion and diversity.

The chapter focuses on five disparate exercises of power spanning the global empire: the rebellions of the Araucanians, the Sangleys of Manila in the Philippines, the peasants of Córdoba in Andalusia, the Indians of Oaxaca in New Spain, and the expulsion of the moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula. Different scenarios of opposition to royal authority and their concomitant repression are analyzed to contrast how officials acted and thought, incorporating and rejecting subjects, and to study how the same official could perform in two very distinct circumstances and locales. More importantly, close attention is paid to the circulation of political ideas. Practices of government were transmitted worldwide, as well as the tropes and stereotypes on which royal officials relied for assessing imperial subjects and imposing royal authority on them.