Long before the Spanish conquest, mines in south-central Michoacán were worked to provide native people with copper for tools and ornaments. (See map.) After the Conquest Spaniards went after gold and silver but left copper mining to the Indians. However, Indians were eventually divested of control of this resource as they were of so many others. Evolution of the pattern of copper mine ownership and the securing of a labor force are the topics of this paper, particularly as they are illustrated in the case of the Crown's mine, San Bartolomé Inguarán.

The main outlines of Spain's trading relations with its Latin American colonies are well known. Although in the eighteenth century, under pressure from international political and domestic economic considerations, the Bourbon monarchs had permitted some liberalization, the fundamental policy remained that of confining transatlantic commerce to the mother country. Even after the so-called free trade laws were issued by Charles III, only certain ports within the peninsula and relatively few merchants were able to engage in the American trade. These merchants acted on their own account buying and selling cargoes within Spain or from Europe, or as commission agents arranging the import-export cycle for a fixed fee or percentage. Few were manufacturers in their own right and most gained a substantial part of their business from the fact that Spain remained to a large extent a channel through which foreign manufactures were sent to the colonies. Organized in their powerful guilds, they constituted an effective and influential vested interest group, determined to protect their highly privileged position against any attempted incursions by foreigners or Spaniards. Their reasons, of course, were obvious and often denounced at the time. Commerce with America was highly lucrative and large fortunes were made from it, particularly during the last quarter of the eighteenth century when a significant expansion in the value and volume of trade took place.

The Riego Revolt of January 1, 1820 awakened hopes in much of the Spanish-speaking world that constitutionalism might again speed up the process of modernization. A few days later, King Ferdinand VII reinstated the Constitution of 1812, the “Niña Bonita” of the Cádiz years. Asking his overseas subjects to take the oath to the Constitution, he likewise urged them to participate in the impending parliamentary elections. He announced an amnesty for the insurgents in the Americas and assured everyone that all would be forgotten. The Spanish government was less disposed to welcome back the hated afrancesados, who had collaborated with the French invaders. Such vindictiveness, of course, incited political anarchy throughout Spain. The economic weakness of the Peninsula, plus the financial drain of war overseas, further heightened national chaos. These were indeed troublesome years for Spain and her second constitutional experiment. Prospects for reconciliation with American dissidents were not at all promising. If peace could not be restored in America, what action was Spain prepared to take? Would she accept the inevitable—the Independence of the Americas? These were some of the questions that tormented Spanish leaders in Madrid. Other Europeans, keenly interested in the developments taking place in Spain and America, appreciated their economic and international significance. The fate of European liberalism was also at stake.

The growth of the Spanish Empire and its governmental machinery in the sixteenth century created a demand for letrados, a uniquely Spanish form of civil servant. They were men who came mostly from the impoverished lower nobility and who were trained in law as preparation for serving in the burgeoning bureaucracy. Law, whether canon or civil, offered a young man in sixteenth century Spain entry into well-paying, secure and prestigious jobs in church and state. Doctores and licenciados (the holders of the highest professional degrees) from Salamanca, Valladolid, Alcalá de Henares and other universities could be found all over the New World where they held positions as magistrates, judges, bishops, canons, university professors and town councilmen. They constituted both an administrative elite and a class unto themselves. In the latter half of the sixteenth century the demand for letrados was increased by the growing insularity of the Spaniards themselves — away from the more cosmopolitan Flemish and European orientation of the days of Charles V and toward an hispanization of the civil service.

Criminal justice records provide the historian with a wealth of data on social deviance, and on the role of the judiciary in defining and controlling it. They can as well comment on the most invisible group for the social historian: the “innocent bystanders,” the respectable folk who distinguish themselves neither by their power and influence nor by their deviance. This essay illustrates the value of one kind of judicial data, local criminal investigations in Brazil, to provide information on the working citizens of a community. Changes in the characteristics of that population may be indicative of wider social stress in the Brazilian Independence period.

Readers of John Womack's monumental Zapata and the Mexican Revolution are familiar with the names of the great Morelos sugar plantations whose drive for modernization in the late nineteenth century eventually pushed desperate peasants to revolt. Many of these haciendas bore names of Indian villages long since destroyed by indigenous population decline and the hacendados' thirst for land: Cuahuixtla, Chinameca, Zacatepec, Atlacomulco, Cocoyoc; others had religious appellations testifying to the piety or ecclesiastical status of their founders: Santa Inés, Santa Clara, San Vicente; an occasional hacienda, such as Casasano, even carried the name of its founder. Yet one hacienda that figures prominently in Womack's account bore the curious designation Hospital. Though considerably smaller than many of its neighbors, Hospital emerges from Womack's narrative as perhaps the most villainous of all Morelos latifundia. To the land-starved villagers of Anenecuilco, its owner scornfully suggested that they “farm in a flowerpot,” and Hospital became a principal target of zapatista revenge.

The social milieu in which slavery took place in Latin America, especially colonial Colombia and Ecuador, was markedly different than in Brazil, the Caribbean, or the thirteen colonies. Paternalistic attitudes of church and government, protective legislation, a slow, even stagnant, pace of economic development and other factors created a situation which a knowledgeable and enterprising slave could often turn to his advantage and even manipulate.

From the beginning the Catholic Church took the position that slavery was a contractual arrangement whereby the slave placed his time and the result of his labor at the disposal of his master, but that he remained a human being with certain innate rights: the right to life, limb, body and reputation. A master could not keep his slaves from marrying, for example, for to do so deprived him of the rights of the body. For a violation of any of these rights the master must make restitution to the slave, as if he were a free man. Moreover, in Catholic theology the soul of the black man was equally as important as the soul of any human being.

A watershed in Peru's development, and perhaps its most traumatic experience as an independent republic, was its humiliating defeat at the hands of Chile during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). The impact of the war was profound. Virtually every aspect of Peruvian political, economic, and social life was affected. The army was defeated, the country invaded, and Lima occupied. By the peace treaty, Peru's nitrate-bearing southern provinces were handed over to Chile, depriving it of its most important source of income. The economy of the country was further undermined by the war-time destruction of many coastal sugar and cotton plantations. Economic collapse was accompanied by political chaos. Fighting continued after the end of the war as forces loyal to General Andrés A. Cáceres, who had carried out an effective guerrilla campaign against the Chileans in the sierra, now aimed their guns at the Chilean-imposed government of General Miguel Iglesias. In December 1885 they captured Lima, paving the way for Cáceres' election as president.

Late in the spring of 1783, a Franciscan friar, Antonio de los Reyes, arrived in the Province of Sonora and Sinaloa, the first prelate for the newly created bishopric of Northwest New Spain. The bishop was accompanied by his young nephews, Padre José Almada y Reyes and his brother Antonio. A third brother had decided to remain behind in Spain with his parents. The brothers were hidalgos, from the town of Aspe in the province of León.

New Spain was expanding northwestward and the Almada brothers were part of the large influx of peninsulares immigrating from the mother country in the latter third of the 18th century. Their uncle, the bishop, represented royal recognition and promotion of that movement. Like the Almadas, most of the immigrants coming to the Northwest were from the small towns and cities of northern Spain. They brought with them a tradition of urban life in the peninsula dating back into at least the eleventh century. For them, the town was the focal point of civilized society — the center of learning, of business, and of whatever level of culture society had achieved. Not surprisingly, they settled in the embryonic urban centers then emerging in the Province of Sonora and Sinaloa. Urban life was what they knew and what they wanted. They aimed to re-create in the Northwest what they had grown up in back home.

These brief remarks on the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, Licenciate Alonso de Zorita, and the Franciscan Order in sixteenth-century Mexico should not be interpreted as characteristic of either the century or the colonial period as a whole. Church and state generally complemented each other, but the origins “of the longenduring conflict between clerical and anticlerical forces” in Mexico and the Borderlands “reach into earliest colonial times.” An example is the jurisdictional dispute between Archbishop Juan Pérez de la Serna and Viceroy Diego Carrillo de Mendoza y Pimental in the 1620s. Another is the long and bitter conflict between Franciscan missionaries and Spanish governors in seventeenth-century New Mexico. Nevertheless, cooperation between representatives of Church and State in New Spain is apparent even before the arrival of the saintly “Twelve Apostles” headed by Fray Martín de Valencia in 1524.

Richard Greenleaf, in urging ethnohistorians of Indian response to Spanish Catholic culture to be attentive to the inquisitorial record, pointed especially to two unusually rich bodies of documentation, one generated by the Oaxacan enquiry of the 1540's and 1550's; the other by the “idolatry trials” of Yucatán in 1562. Most of the material relating to the Yucatecan episode has long been easily accessible to scholars through France Scholes' and Eleanor Adams' magnificent publication of 1938. Scholes, in his introduction to that work, and then in an article he wrote in conjunction with the great ethnographer of the Maya, Ralph Roys, judged the Indian confessions elicited in the course of the inquisition to be largely based on fact, and therefore concluded that the Maya Indians of Yucatán, after their apparent conversion, had not only continued to worship their old idols, but had returned to an intensified practice of human sacrifice in which some victims had been subjected to preliminary crucifixion.

The War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), pitting Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay, continues to provoke debate over its causes and implications. No antique quarrel between battlefield historians, the historiography of the War revolves around the basic questions of nineteenth century economic colonialism, imperialism and dependency. My contribution to the continuance of the discussions is that the nature and outcome of the war were shaped significantly by the participation of the Triple Alliance's indispensible fourth ally, Great Britain—in some ways, the most implacable of all independent Paraguay's nineteenth century foes.

The history of the encomienda is an oft' told tale, although certain questions about the institution still provoke debate. Even the Paraguayan encomienda has received conscientious scholarly attention, most of which concentrates on the Habsburg period rather than the eighteenth century, when the institution had been eliminated in many areas.

But in eighteenth century Paraguay the encomienda was still an important institution. Members of the provincial elite placed great value on its possession. Since high position in the province was synonymous with encomendero status, membership in the encomendero class was exceedingly important. The crown's decision to abolish the system in the 1770s had important consequences for the future of Paraguay. In the short run it meant a gain for royal interests; in the long run it spelled disaster for the Spanish crown.

During its first half-century of independence, Peru fought in five international conflicts, had thirty-one different governments, and operated under thirteen various constitutions or provisional charters. The international wars, uncertain terms of office, and a frequency of change in constitutions were all symptoms of an unsettled political environment. Additional symptoms included forceful overthrows of government, political exile, conspiracies, and foreign intervention. By mid-century, Peruvian writers complained of political corruption, graft, lack of public spirit, disrespect for the law, militarism, elitism, mobocracy, a mania for public office (empleomanía), and in general of the social and political disintegration.

The pulpería, a country store and tavern, stood with the estancia as the most important socio-economic institutions of the Argentine pampa. The store served multiple social and commercial functions (both licit and illicit) and survived into the twentieth century despite virulent verbal attacks and calls for legislative restriction from the colonial era on. Some commentators lauded the pulpería as the outpost of civilization on the savage frontier and projected the pulpero or proprietor as civilization's lonely representative in a barbarian world. He supposedly embodied patriotism, culture, and free enterprise in a hostile, alien environment of anti-social, localistic, unlettered gauchos—the itinerant horsemen of the pampas. Evidence weighs heavily in the opposite direction; however, and the pulpero of fact rather than myth functioned as a contraband capitalist exploiting the landless rural masses and preying upon ranchers whose livestock provided the goods for illicit trade. Far from encouraging culture and civilization on the vast pampa, the pulpería housed excessive drinking and gambling, prostitution, and served as an arena for violent, often fatal, knifefights.

Spain's imperial government, in facing the political and military threat posed by the Wars of Independence in America, could be no stronger than the sum of its parts. Among the important questions not previously detailed concerning Spanish American independence, a significant one is why metropolitan Spain itself responded so weakly and indecisively to the danger. There were, of course, severe constraints on resources as well as limitations in terms of the leadership. These two elements, however, while they were certainly real, need not have been automatically decisive. After all, despite incredible hardship and difficulty, the Spanish Comisión de Reemplazos—the Cádiz-based supply committee made up of merchants—alone and by its own tally between 1811 and 1820 dispatched thirty expeditions of peninsular troops to America involving more than 47,000 men and a cost of 350 million reales. The Morillo expedition in 1815involved 12,254 men. The so-called “Great Expedition” that gathered at Cádiz for use in Buenos Aires consisted of 14,000 men before it revolted in January 1820. In July 1820 the minister of War told the Cortes that Spain had sent a total of 27,342 troops to America since the king's restoration in 1814. Thus there was a military response from the metropolis, to say nothing, of course, of the more critical military mobilization of the American viceregal governments. One could also argue that, despite the undoubted failings of individual Spanish leaders under both the Cortes and the absolutist regimes, the political chaos at least brought a number of differing political persuasions to power. After all, Spain experienced in these years six major transformations of its political system. The leadership ran the gamut of political ideology, from extreme conservatives to extreme liberals. Pintos Vieites, in an attempt to revise Ferdinand VII favorably, even argues that the king in the first restoration purposely appointed moderates in order to hear their advice. While the parliamentarians of 1812 and 1820 tended to be young and relatively inexperienced, most of the ministers had served in the previous reign or had substantial experience.

On September 27, 1821, Mexico achieved its de facto independence from Spain when Agustín de Iturbide led his 16,000-man “Trigarante” Army into Ciudad México, thus culminating the revolution inaugurated by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Castillo in 1810. In December 1822, the United States gave official diplomatic recognition to Mexico, followed shortly thereafter by Great Britain in 1823. Despite such action on the part of the United States government, however, no official minister was dispatched to Mexico until May 1825. Based upon the circumstances of this delay and upon conditions in Mexico, when a United States minister did arrive in Ciudad México to meet with Mexican officials, the stage was set for a significant confrontation which would determine the tenor of Mexican-United States relations until the twentieth century. This was the confrontation between Joel R. Poinsett and Lucas Alamán.

Samuel J. Prescod's path into Barbados' House of Assembly is singular in the island's history. The first Afro-Barbadian to sit on the island's highest elective body, he became its first representative from Bridgetown, the most populous and colorful constituency in Barbados. Most significantly, Prescod's electoral victory on June 6, 1843 symbolized the primary triumph of genuine freedom for the Barbadian working class, an accomplishment the Colonial Office was unable to implement in the island's community for almost thirty years through forced imperial legislation.

Once the two largest sugar colonies in the slave-owning Caribbean, Jamaica and Haiti trace their separate paths of development back to the revolutionary struggles of the 1790's. While the French colony of Saint Domingue was transformed in a way few societies have ever been, Jamaica remained seemingly untouched by the conflagration that consumed its neighbour. When the slaves and free coloureds of Saint Domingue rebelled in the autumn of 1791, Jamaican society faced the greatest challenge of its history. The dramatic spectacle of violent self-liberation was acted out almost before the eyes of its blacks and mulattoes, while the ruling white elite experienced a dilemma that seemed to oppose its prosperity to its survival. This paper looks at the reaction of different social groups in the island in an attempt to explain its continuing stability.