When Antonio María Bucareli took up his duties in 1771 as the forty-sixth viceroy of New Spain, he assumed command of a magnificent complexity of land areas, large and small, whose people constituted a cultural and social entity ranging from the traditional Apache to the European gentleman of the Enlightenment.He governed a key area at a significant time. Shortly before Bucareli's arrival in Mexico, José de Gálvez had completed an intensive inspection of the country, had instituted...

Here is an intriguing exploration of the ways in which the history of the Spanish Conquest has been misread and passed down to become popular knowledge of these events. The book offers a fresh account of the activities of the best-known conquistadors and explorers, including Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro. Using a wide array of sources, historian Matthew Restall highlights seven key myths, uncovering the source of the inaccuracies and exploding the fallacies and misconceptions behind each m...

A "lucid" analysis of the territorial formation of Spain and Portugal in both Europe and the Americas ( Publishers Weekly).Frontiers of Possession asks how territorial borders were established in Europe and the Americas during the early modern period and challenges the standard view that national boundaries are largely determined by military conflicts and treaties. Focusing on Spanish and Portuguese claims in the New and Old Worlds, Tamar Herzog re...

Colombia's status as the fourth largest nation in Latin America and third most populous—as well as its largest exporter of such disparate commodities as emeralds, books, processed cocaine, and cut flowers—makes this, the first history of Colombia written in English, a much-needed book. It tells the remarkable story of a country that has consistently defied modern Latin American stereotypes—a country where military dictators are virtually unknown, where the political left is congenitally we...

Boadas i Rivas was born in Barcelona in 1894 and died in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1972. Together with Medir Mart and Pere Vandellós, he was one of the leaders of the first anarcho-syndicalist action group organised in Catalonia from late 1917 onwards, before the six-year period of “pistolerismo” erupted in Barcelona. He can, therefore, be regarded as the pioneer of those Barcelona anarcho-syndicalist action groups of which so much has been said; though little is known about the indivi...

The organization of several thousand Irish American men into a military outfit, which then attempted to invade Canada from within the United States, is a significant historical event that remains largely unexplored from an Irish and Irish American perspective. This study offers a fuller exploration of the details behind the Fenian invasion, asking why Irish immigrants were motivated to shape American international policy and examining the ways in which the Fenians defined identity as a tra...

Between 1777 and 1816, botanical expeditions crisscrossed the vast Spanish empire in an ambitious project to survey the flora of much of the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. While these voyages produced written texts and compiled collections of specimens, they dedicated an overwhelming proportion of their resources and energy to the creation of visual materials. European and American naturalists and artists collaborated to manufacture a staggering total of more than 12,000 bot...

Momentous changes swept Spain in the fifteenth century. A royal marriage united Castile and Aragon, its two largest kingdoms. The last Muslim emirate on the Iberian Peninsula fell to Spanish Catholic armies. And conquests in the Americas were turning Spain into a great empire. Yet few in this period of flourishing Spanish power could define “Spain” concretely, or say with any confidence who were Spaniards and who were not. Speaking of Spain offers an analysis of the cultural and p...

In March 1812, while Napoleon’s brother Joseph sat on the throne of Spain and the armies of France occupied much of the country, legislators elected from Spain and its overseas territories met in the Andalusian city of Cádiz. There, as the cornerstone of a government in exile, they drafted and adopted the first liberal constitution in the Hispanic world, a document that became known as the Cádiz Constitution of 1812.The 1812 Constitution was extremely influential in and beyond Euro...

This book analyzes the reasons for the emergence and extinction of the Croatian name in four Slovene border regions. The author uses comparative methods and a broad spectrum of sources. In the early Modern Age, the Croatian name established itself in these areas as a temporary phenomenon, replacing the original Slovene name, which at that time had a «pre-national» content and was also used by a considerable portion of today’s Croats. Extending the use of the Croatian name to the Slovene bo...

Based on rigorous analysis of the propaganda of five Western European separatist parties, this book provides in-depth examination of the ‘nationalism of the rich’, defined as a type of nationalist discourse that seeks to end the economic ‘exploitation’ suffered by a group of people represented as a wealthy nation and supposedly carried out by the populations of poorer regions and/or by inefficient state administrations. It shows that the nationalism of the rich represents a new phenomenon ...

Spanish-British relations changed during the first three decades of the 19th century. Both states emerged victorious from the Napoleonic wars and were united by the alliance, but their respective strength was totally different. While Great Britain enhanced its status as a sea power, strong enough to affect the political situation in Europe, Spain sank to the rank of a secondary state. Britain, protecting clearly defined interests, carried out long-term and rational policy. Spain’s policy w...