One of the most momentous actions in the history of the Spanish colonial empire was the crown's expulsion and expropriation proceedings against the Society of Jesus in 1767. This topic has long received much scholarly attention. Perhaps of greater significance, but of almost total historiographical neglect, was the Spanish government's management, redistribution, and liquidation of the Jesuit assets during 1767-1820. As a result of those processes, hundreds of the best real and improved properties in Spanish America changed hands and millions of pesos were siphoned to Spain from overseas.

In the middle of the seventeenth century a Spanish adventurer, dressed in a traditional Andean cusma tunic and wearing a silver diadem, convinced tens of thousands of Indians in a remote part of the viceroyalty of Peru that he was a direct descendant of the former Inca emperors. More than a hundred native chiefs accepted him as their overlord, carried him on a litter, furnished maidens for his service, and followed him in battle when he promised to liberate them from Spanish control. Although Indian rebellions occurred frequently in colonial Peru, this particular one is unique because a European led it. Initially this imposter secured approval for his actions from the Spanish provincial governor and Jesuit missionaries, but later.when the Indians rebelled, the fake Inca was apprehended, imprisoned for seven years, then hanged. The story of his “empire” is a ten year episode that has not been printed in English and is not widely known in Spanish.

Labor questions put their indelible stamp on colonial life, whether in Brazil, Spanish America, or the North American colonies. Methods of labor recruitment varied among these regions, however, as did the social consequences of enslavement, race mixture, and destruction or modification of native cultures.

The poverty of the Amazon region, the old state of Maranhão e Grão Pará, prevented a system of black slavery such as characterized the Brazilian Northeast. Indians, whether slave, or held as free men in mission villages, dominated the labor market. The perennial lay-ecclesiastical fight for jurisdiction over the Indian has been vividly documented by historians such as Boxer, Kiemen, and Leite. This ground need not be retraced. What may be of interest is to examine the variety of sources from which labor was supplied to the plantations, cities, and fortresses of Maranhão e Grão Pará during the first half of the eighteenth century, just before the disruptions brought by Pombal's reforms.

The Bourbon reforms of the late eighteenth century are important in understanding the fiscal, economic, and political structure both prior to and following the independence of Latin America. Although these measures have been generally analyzed in great detail, the decrees and compliance with them varied from region to region. This becomes quite obvious when one views Central America during the period. Considered a “backwater colony” by contemporary historians, the Reino de Guatemala still was strongly affected by fiscal reforms and subsequent political changes. An inordinately strong merchant class controlled not only commerce, but equally prices, trade regulations, and tax collection. The area was more a fief than a kingdom, with Spanish and Guatemalan merchants ruling over the Central American domain. The new Bourbon measures represented more than an attempt to gather additional fiscal resources, but to actually regain that sovereignty which earlier Spanish monarchs allowed to dwindle.

At the end of the eighteenth century, Guanajuato was one of the richest and most cultured provincial cities in New Spain. Mining had for years been a source of wealth, and the provincial aristocracy of Guanajuato could easily compete both in culture and in gracious living with the upper classes of viceregal Mexico. The Alamán family belonged to that upper circle of Guanajuato. They were wealthy and, on their maternal side, their ancestry sprang from the better houses of Castile. When, in 1792, the first male child was born to the family, he was christened in the best aristocratic tradition, for he was baptized Lucas Ignacio José Joaquín Pedro de Alcantara Juan Bautista Francisco de Paula Alamán.

William Wheelwright, an American merchant-mariner and entrepreneur from Massachusetts, was the successful pioneer of commercial steam navigation in the Pacific in 1840 but, as is frequently the case, his predecessors prepared the way. Steam powered the Industrial Revolution from the late eighteenth century, and was soon applied to the movement of ships. Practical steam navigation on sheltered inland waters or open oceans depended upon James Watt's development of the steam engine from 1769 to 1782, including such improvements as the use of expansive steam, external condensers which reduced the loss of heat and power, and double-acting pistons. Inventors quickly adapted the new power mechanism to boats.

The chances of an eighteenth-century merchant's business correspondence surviving to the present are remote, but it is even less likely that an editor could persuade publishers today to issue a five-volume collection of such material. Apart from its sheer massiveness —5,600 documents and nearly 4,000 pages of text—there are several reasons that make the appearance of Negócios colonials an event of unusual significance. First, it represents a major addition to the scant literature available concerning the activities of Portuguese merchants during the first imperial centuries; second, it is by far the most extensive and diversified published collection of mercantile papers pertaining to the colonial era of the New World; and thirdly, since the papers relate to the activities of a prominent Lisbon merchant during most of Brazil's Golden Age (1695-1760), they make it possible for the first time to comprehend many of the strategies and difficulties that arose in the conduct of trade between Portugal and her most important colony during that aureate era.