La naturaleza de la sociedad colonial fué en nuestra historiografía, desde fines del siglo XVIII, motivo de denodados conflictos. Concolorcorvo (1773), uno de los primeros viajeros en relatar sus impresiones del Río de la Plata, manifestó no saber que en esa región existiese mayorazgo alguno. Casi cuarenta años más tarde, Azara fue el primer intelectual, conocedor del Río de la Plata, que repitiendo la afirmación de Concolorcorvo, dió fundamento a la posteriormente denominada excepcionalidad argentina. Sostenía Azara, quien sin duda debía hallarse muy influído por la lectura de Jovellanos, que entre los españoles (incluye los criollos blancos) radicados en esta región de la América Española reinaba “…la más perfecta igualdad, sin distinción de nobles ni de plebeyos. No se conocen entre ellos ni feudos, ni sustituciones ni mayorazgos.” También E. M. Brackenridge, un diplomático Norteamericano que escribió unas memorias de viaje por América del Sur, repite a Azara al afirmar que no había en Buenos Aires “…familias de viejo arraigo” y que “la igualdad general dominante parecía atraer a los hombres a una unión más estrecha.”

The long-traditional view of the Roman Catholic Church in Spanish America as a monolithic, wealthy, and all powerful institution has been gradually modified by successive studies over the last thirty years. From these examinations emerges the picture of a complex institution characterized by diversity, and internal conflict. New research continues to enlarge and clarify understanding of the Church's role as an institution of the Spanish empire.

What follows will, in highlighting the colonial Church's relationship to the Spanish crown, add to this view of it as a complex and diverse institution. An examination of crown policy with regard to Church finance in the sixteenth century shows that the episcopal hierarchy of the Mexican colonial Church had a subordinate relationship to the crown in the era of the Counter Reformation. Rather than a strong Church influencing the crown, what emerges is the portrait of a relatively weak, dependent institution, supported by the king. The secular church hierarchy had only enough power to carry out its function and serve as a counterpoint to the religious orders, not enough to achieve financial independence on its own. The basis for this relationship lies in the patrimonial nature of Castilian government and its dominant position over the Church hierarchy because of the Patronato Real.

Northeast Brazil had traditionally maintained two functionally separate but structurally related Catholic Churches: on the coast, usually in the state capitals, the “ official church ” has been manned and officiated by a well-trained bureaucratic hierarchy; and in the hinterlands, the backlanders have often practiced a variety of “ folk Catholicism.” In a social and economic context, the Brazilian Northeast can also be divided into the “ far Northeast” of Gilberto Freyre and Jorge Amado, the world of opulent sugar and cacao planters on the one hand, and on the other the Northeast of drought, poverty, hunger, and superstition described by Rachel de Queiroz and Graciliano Ramos. In this divergent Northeast, religion has played an important role in the lives of the backlanders, and often priests, both the practitioners of the folk Catholicism and the ordained of the official church have managed to influence the politics of the region.

Although the Franciscan Province in the West Indies was the first in the New World, it was the Province founded in Mexico shortly after its conquest by Cortés that became the parent unit of most of the other Provinces in Spanish America. By its extraordinary missionary achievements it likewise set the pace for the work of the other Provinces. It would require much more than a few pages to present a mere outline of the history of the Franciscan mother Province of Spanish America; we can call attention only to some outstanding facts.

It has become a well-established fact that agricultural and mineral production underwent marked increase during the eighteenth century in Latin America. An expanding European market, regular and abundant maritime transportation, the lowering of taxes, the reduction of prices of crown monopolies, and the granting of government loans to industry were all factors which, in varying degree, stimulated increased production. Less well known, however, is the fact that in some areas production failed to rise above an unimpressive level despite these favorable conditions and official encouragement. The Central American mining industry, for example, experienced no noticeable change in productivity during the last half of the eighteenth century, although trade increased in volume, stimulative legislation was implemented, and penetrating suggestions—reflecting rays of the Enlightenment— were offered by miners and government officials.

Scholarly studies of the Mexican revolutionary period seldom have approached the subject from the standpoint of how this momentous struggle was actually waged by its combatants. While considerable investigation has rendered valuable insights into leading personalities and movements of the time, no comparable effort has been made to unravel the myriad military complexities and paradoxes of one of the major wars waged on the North American continent.

A case in point concerns the foreign soldiers who fought side by side with Mexican troops in the rebel armies. Such military personnel are commonly referred to in modern-day parlance as mercenaries, a term indicating “paid soldiers in the service of a foreign country.” However, not all foreigners who served in the Revolution were professional soldiers for hire, nor did all have previous military experience. Such words and phrases as soldiers of fortune or adventurers, in vogue during the period, more clearly define the status of these combatants as “men fighting for pay or love of adventure under the flag of any country.” Be that as it may, all of the terms given above are basically synonymous and can be used interchangeably to refer to the foreign volunteers who joined the various armed factions contending for supremacy in Mexico.

Amid the mixed emotions with which Cortés prepared A% to enter the Mexican capital in early November, 1519, was the gnawing fear that his military position therein would be an untenable one. Even the most courageous and least professional military man among the invaders must have realized that a Spanish force of fewer than five hundred men, far within the interior of a hostile and strange land, literally had entered a lion’s den as it marched into the populous island-city of Tenochtitlán via the narrow and ever so vulnerable causeway that stretched some seven miles between it and the mainland. So it was that even as his courage and curiosity took him into Tenochtitlán, his military mind and his sense of responsibility for the welfare of his men led Cortés to seek a means whereby the Spaniards could dominate the waters of Lake Texcoco and the lacustrine communities, including Tenochtitlán itself. Only after the Spaniards had become masters of the adjacent countryside—in this instance the waters and shores of a lake—could they know that inner satisfaction and quiet confidence that comes from a sincere sense of physical security. Only when the Spaniards had established their mastery over the lake area could it be said that the initiative so important to continuance of the conquest rested in their hands. With his infantry, his cavalry and his artillery momentarily stalled in the insular setting in which they found themselves, Cortés needed to create a new military force which, when thrown into the balance, would tip the scales once again in favor of the Spaniards.

Early in his political life the famous British statesman, W. E. Gladstone, had close contact with colonial problems. His maiden speech in the House of Commons, June 3, 1833, was a defense of his father against charges that slaves were mistreated on the Gladstone plantations in Demerara; his first government post was that of Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for the Colonies; before the end of the 1830's he had served on many committees which studied questions relating to the colonies; and in 1846 he was Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. In 1835 and again in 1849 he drafted pamphlets on the British colonial empire; by mid-nineteenth century he was a leading advocate of colonial self-government; and his speech “Our Colonies” at Chester, November 12, 1855 (published as a pamphlet), was a clear statement of his creed that “ freedom and voluntaryism ” should govern the relationship between Britain and the overseas portions of the British Empire. While in later years noncolonial issues received most of his attention, he never abandoned his faith in freedom as the basic remedy for intra-imperial problems. In the closing years of his political career he fought magnificently but vainly to apply that principle of freedom (which had stilled colonial discontent) to the age-old Irish question.