This chapter describes the market for high-level colonial offices in eighteenth-century Spanish America. It starts by providing an overview of the territorial and institutional organization of the Spanish Empire at the time as well as the positions that constituted the “supply”: their number, rank, and institutional attributes. The rest of the chapter then focuses on the determinants of demand through the analysis of office prices, buyer characteristics, and the profitability of certain positions versus others. Estimates show how, all else equal, positions with greater rank and power as well as those more profitable, drew higher prices on average. It also finds that individuals of higher social status or more connected to the Crown – of military, nobility, or Spanish origin – were heavily “subsidized” to occupy office vis-à-vis those lacking those traits. Altogether, this is consistent with office prices revealing important information about the expected returns of certain positions versus others.

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.

Chapter 2 explores the early history of colonial rule in the New Kingdom of Granada, and of the priests and officials first tasked with introducing Christianity to its Indigenous peoples. This involves unravelling a series of powerful assumptions entrenched in the historiography that insist on the efficacy of colonial power. Instead, the chapter shows that the ability of colonial officials, missionaries, and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic to effect change on the ground remained fleeting, contingent, and inconstant. To do so, it explores the participatory nature of the royal administration and judiciary, both at an imperial and a local level, and its reliance on petitioners, supplicants and rescript; reassesses the role of the legislative projects of local officials, whose efficacy is so often taken for granted; and tests the real impact of these institutions and their claims on the lives of Indigenous people through a careful re-reading of all surviving records of early visitations, showing that for decades colonial control remained an illusion and that in practice power remained far from the hands of colonial officials in the New Kingdom.

Focusing on the relation and conflict between imperial, colonial, and local levels, Chapter 1 lays out the historical context that gave rise to the collective freedom suit. It first traces the process of making law and policy according to the imperial state’s reform imperatives here directed at the privatization and revival of an extractive metal industry based on the once rich copper mines of El Cobre near Santiago de Cuba. Crucial to the production of artillery in the Crown’s arms industry, copper was at the time a strategic resource for the imperial state. But for the beneficiaries of the privatized mining estate, the most valuable resource were the former royal slaves who had long lived in quasi freedom as an unconventional pueblo in the mining jurisdiction. A growing demand for slaves in the colony led to the re-enslavement, removal, and sale of hundreds of cobreros, or natives of El Cobre, thereby upending former local customary practices. A denied offer for a collective self-purchase, or coartación, and land eventually led to a wrongful enslavement action in Madrid. The chapter shows the major impact of imperial Bourbon reforms and of global factors in this so-called hinterland region of empire.

Follows the American consuls as they begin to become cultural brokers linking Americans to remnants of the great Mediterranean empires as America begins to consider an imperialistic turn in the wake of the Monroe Doctrine.

A graph superimposes the growth–decline curves of major Late Rider Empires, from 1200 to 1800. This was a period of shift from horses to sails. West European feudalism indirectly led to respect for law and a curiosity revolution. Inciting exploration, the latter began to give rise to transoceanic empires, first of all Spanish. But at first, Mongol horsemen seized a record-size area, unsurpassed among land-borne empires. Up to 1750 all truly large empires except Spanish remained land bound: Manchu Qing, Russia, Ottoman, and Mughal. The burgeoning French, Portuguese, and British empires were still modest. Much of the Mongol hold meant sparsely populated superficial tribute area, but by conquering China the Mongol empire also became the world’s most populous. Later on, Ming, Mughal, and Qing shared this eminence. Nomad empires were a phenomenon that rose and ended with the Rider phase. The Inca and Aztec empires retraced from scratch the human self-domestication process that the Old World underwent thirty-five centuries earlier, but they still lacked metals and the wheel.

This chapter underscores the central arguments of this volume by emphasizing the need for a simultaneous analysis of multiple flows of forced migrations. Focusing on the 1790s, it first looks at the transportation of convicts, vagrants, and deserters from Peninsular Spain and the Northern African presidios to the garrisons and the military outposts of Spanish America. Then it examines the flows of war captives, refugees, and convicts that originated from the Haitian Revolution and spread out across the Spanish Caribbean. The concluding section reflects on continuities and discontinuities in the regimes of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire in the Early Modern period and the nineteenth century. From this perspective, the chapter suggests the need for an integrated study of all punitive relocations and for the investigation of those processes whereby the “political” nature of punishment and the punished was construed or marginalized.

Economic historians have placed commercialization at the centre of Europe’s early modern capitalism, emphasizing the importance of domestic and international trade, shipbuilding and concomitant manufactures, the financial sector, and urbanization. As the Iberian polities extended geographically to Africa, Asia and the Americas during the early modern period, trade, whether domestic, international or colonial, had a critical effect upon economic development. However, the economic impact of colonial expansion was uneven across Iberia. Iberia commercial exchange associated with the overseas empires produced surprisingly few backward and forward linkages in the European national economies. The question this chapter seeks to address is thus to what extent and how Iberian trade, especially colonial trade, supported or hindered economic development in the early modern period.

On 19 March 1812, after much deliberation, the Spanish parliament, the Cortes, promulgated Spain’s first written constitution, the celebrated Constitution of Cádiz.1 Seen in the context of the Age of Revolutions, a time when political revolutions in the Thirteen Colonies, France, and Haiti were accompanied by written constitutions, the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz was not exactly at the vanguard of the Atlantic world. Nonetheless, the importance and peculiarity of this constitution lay not in the content or nature of the document but in who was involved in its design. The constitution of the United States of America, the many French constitutions during the revolutionary period, and the various Haitian constitutions written beginning in 1801 were primarily a product of one hemisphere or the other, but not both. In contrast, Spain’s Constitution of 1812 came about as a result of an imperial parliament with deputies representing the multiplicity of territories of Spain’s oceanic empire.

New Spain’s integration into the Pacific Basin played an important role in the viceroyalty’s political and social history. Interactions between the two become visible in descriptions of Spain’s distributive struggles. The conclusion argues that diverging notions of a deserving self and undeserving other produced by such disputes were strategic responses to a changing world in which the increasing mobility of people and goods created both opportunities and fierce competition over limited benefits and resources. Consideration of the ways in which these men and women engaged with the logic of assessment has resulted in a more variegated understanding of their views of the world, as well as their places within it, that acknowledges not only individual agendas but their divergent relationships to collectives as well. While Pacific and transpacific exchanges continued to have an impact on distributive struggles after 1640, the importance of the hierarchy of beneméritos, as it developed in the wake of the diminished conquest, once again altered discussions about worthiness and unworthiness and the ways in which people identified themselves and others.

With the expansion of Spanish activities into the Pacific Basin, New Spain increasingly became a global point of intersection for imperial, commercial, and religious networks. The mobility of persons and goods affected external perceptions of New Spain’s place in a globalizing world, as well as its residents’ self-perception. The Introduction observes that these transformations have typically been studied through the lens of a historiographic narrative about creolization. After reviewing debates about the use of the creole paradigm for the study of Spanish identities in the Indies, the chapter introduces the notion of the deserving self, which had emerged in the context of late medieval struggles over the distribution of royal favor, as an alternative framework for studying the interrelationship between movement and processes of identity-making and identification at this crossroad of transoceanic networks. Finally, it explains the link between various conceptualizations of a deserving self and the stories people recounted about the world and the desirability of global integration.