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[[File:America noviter delineata.jpg|thumb|220px|A 17th–century Dutch map of the Americas]]
The '''[[historiography]] of [[Spanish America]]''' in multiple languages is vast and has a long history.<ref>See the volumes of ''Handbook of Middle American Indians (HMAI), Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources''. 4 vols. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1972 for a compendium of early modern sources and histories.</ref><ref>J. Benedict Warren, "An Introductory Survey of Secular Writings in the European Tradition on Colonial Middle America, 1503–1818." HMAI vol. 13, pp. 42–137.</ref><ref>Ernest J. Burrus, S.J. "Religious Chroniclers and Historians: A Summary with Annotated Bibliography." HMAI vol. 13, pp. 138–186</ref> It dates back to the early sixteenth century with multiple competing accounts of the conquest, Spaniards’ eighteenth-century attempts to discover how to reverse the decline of its empire,<ref name=":0">[[Jorge Canizares-Esguerra|Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra]], ''How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001.</ref> and people of Spanish descent born in the Americas ([[criollos]]) search for an identity other than Spanish, and the creation of creole patriotism.<ref>[[David Brading|D.A. Brading]], ''The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1991.</ref> Following independence in some parts of Spanish America, some politically engaged citizens of the new sovereign nations sought to shape national identity.<ref>see [[Lucas Alamán]], ''Historia de Mejico''. 5 vols.</ref>  In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, non-Spanish American historians began writing chronicles important events, such as the conquests of the [[Aztec Empire]] and the [[Inca Empire]],<ref>[[William H. Prescott]], ''History of the Conquest of Mexico'' (1843) and ''History of the Conquest of Peru'' (1847), which have gone through multiple editions.</ref> dispassionate histories of the Spanish imperial project after its almost complete demise in the hemisphere,<ref>[[Edward Gaylord Bourne]], ''Spain in America, 1450–1580.'' 4 vols.  A new edition with a new introduction and supplementary bibliography was published in 1962. New York: Barnes & Noble.</ref>  and histories of the southwest borderlands, areas of the United States that had previously been part of the Spanish Empire, led by [[Herbert Eugene Bolton]].<ref>Herbert Eugene Bolton, "The Epic of Greater America," American Historical Review 38–448–474 (April 1933), presidential address.</ref>  At the turn of the twentieth century, scholarly research on Spanish America saw the creation of college courses dealing with the region,  the systematic training of professional historians in the field, and the founding of the first specialized journal, ''[[Hispanic American Historical Review]]''.<ref>Howard F. Cline, "Latin American History: Development of Its Study and Teaching in the United States Since 1898," in ''Latin American History: Essays on Its Study and Teaching, 1898–1965''. Howard F. Cline, ed. Austin: University of Texas Press 1967, pp. 6–16.</ref><ref>J. Franklin Jameson, "A New American Historical Journal", ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 1:2–7 (Feb. 1918).</ref>  For most of the twentieth century, historians of colonial Spanish America read and were familiar with a large canon of work. With the expansion of the field in the late twentieth century, there has been the establishment of new subfields, the founding of new journals, and the proliferation of monographs, anthologies, and articles for increasingly specialized practitioners and readerships. The [[Conference on Latin American History]], the organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the [[American Historical Association]], awards a number of prizes for publications, with works on early Latin American history well represented.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://clah.h-net.org/?page_id=169|title = CLAH » Recipients and Committees}}</ref> The [[Latin American Studies Association]] has a section devoted to scholarship on the colonial era.

==General works==
[[File:CartedAmerique.jpeg|thumb|right|"Carte d'Amérique" by French cartographer [[Guillaume Delisle]] 1774]]
[[File:Hispanic America (orthographic projection).svg|thumb|right|[[Spanish America]], showing modern boundaries with the U.S.]]
Although the term "colonial" is contested by some scholars as being historically inaccurate, pejorative, or both,<ref>[[James Lockhart (historian)|James Lockhart]] and [[Stuart B. Schwartz]], ''Early Latin America''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1983. They state in the final sentence of the textbook that "at the deepest level, there are only two periods in the history of the Western Hemisphere, preconquest and postconquest, with the entire span since the arrival of the Europeans a single, unbroken continuum in most respects." p. 426.</ref><ref>Mark A. Burkholder,(2016) "Spain’s America: from kingdoms to colonies, ''Colonial Latin American Review'', 25:2, 125–153, {{doi|10.1080/10609164.2016.1205241}}</ref><ref>Annick Lempérière. 2004. "La ‘cuestión colonial.’ Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos. http://nuevomundo.revues.org/437; {{doi|10.4000/nuevomundo.437}}</ref> it remains a standard term for the titles of books, articles, and scholarly journals and the like to denote the period 1492 – ca. 1825.

The first two volumes of the ten-volume ''[[The Cambridge History of Latin America|Cambridge History of Latin America]]'' focus on the colonial era, with the following eight volumes concerned with the independence era to circa 1980.<ref>''Cambridge History of Latin America'', Leslie Bethell, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984.</ref>  The purpose of the project was "to produce a high-level synthesis of existing knowledge which will provide historians of Latin America with a solid basis for future research, which students of Latin America will find useful and which will be of interest to historians of other areas of the world" (vol. 1, p. xiv).  Volume One deals with the prehispanic era, conquest and settlement, and the establishment of government and commerce.  Volume Two focuses on economic and social history, with chapters on Blacks, Indians, and women, groups that were generally excluded from scholarly attention until the late twentieth century.<ref>McFarlane, A. (1987). Latin American History: A new synthesis? History, 72(236), 453–463. Retrieved from {{JSTOR|24415752}}</ref> Some colonial historians reviewing the first two volumes criticized the overall structure of the series and the colonial-focused volumes themselves. These concern the “presentist,” structure of the project, seeing the colonial era as a prelude to the modern era rather than giving full weight to the three hundred years of rule by the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empire; cursory treatment of the linkages between Europe and the Americas; the lack of linkages between the articles; and lack of comparison between Spanish America and Brazil.<ref>McAlister, Lyle N. (1985). ''[[American Historical Review]]'', 90(5), 1304–1305. {{doi|10.2307/1859870}}</ref> The emphasis on social and economic history and the general lack of discussion  of the institutions of the Catholic Church and the State may be a reflection of academic interests of the contributors and the era of the 1960s and 1970s when many contributors were trained.<ref>Wells, Alan. (1987). ''The History Teacher'', 20(3), 429–431. {{doi|10.2307/493129}}</ref> The almost complete absence of contributions by Latin American or Spanish scholars comes in for criticism, with one reviewer considering  that issue  “the fundamental flaw of this entire production to date.”<ref>Hamnett, B. (1986). The English Historical Review, 101(400), 688–690. Retrieved from {{JSTOR|571485}}</ref>

A number of general works used as textbooks have focused on the colonial era for both Spanish America and Brazil, providing an overview of the field. A major synthesis comparing Spanish America and Brazil, by two contributors to the ''Cambridge History of Latin America'', is [[James Lockhart (historian)|James Lockhart]]'s and [[Stuart B. Schwartz]]'s 1983 ''Early Latin America''.<ref>[[James Lockhart (historian)|James Lockhart]] and [[Stuart B. Schwartz]], ''Early Latin America:  A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil''.  New York: Cambridge University Press 1983.</ref>  They argue that Spanish America and Brazil were structurally similar and "that political and cultural differences between Spanish and Portuguese America were less significant than the economic and social differences between central and peripheral regions."  This idea was proposed in [[Stanley J. Stein]] and [[Barbara H. Stein]]'s ''The Colonial Heritage of Latin America'' (1970),<ref>Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, ''The Colonial Heritage of Latin America''. New York: Oxford University Press 1970 {{ISBN|978-0-19-501292-7}}</ref> but which Lockhart and Schwartz work out in more detail, examining both internal as well as external linkages. ''Early Latin America'' is written as a textbook and although it has not undergone multiple editions for a mass market, it remains an important and affordable work synthesizing considerable material found in the first two volumes of the ''Cambridge History of Latin America''.<ref>McFarlane, A. (1987). Latin American History: A new synthesis? History, 72(236), p. 462. Retrieved from {{JSTOR|24415752}}</ref>  A standard work on colonial Latin America that has gone through multiple editions is Mark Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson's ''Colonial Latin America''.<ref>Mark Burkholder and Lyman L. Johnson, ''Colonial Latin America 9th edition''. New York: Oxford University Press 2014.</ref> [[Matthew Restall]] and [[Kris Lane]] have published ''Latin America in Colonial Times'' for the textbook market.<ref>Matthew Restall and Kris Lane, ''Latin America in Colonial Times''. New York: Cambridge University Press 2011</ref> Collections of primary source documents have been published over the years, which are especially valuable for classroom use.<ref>James Lockhart and Enrique Otte, ''Letters and People of the Indies: Sixteenth Century''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1976.</ref><ref>Kenneth Mills and [[William B. Taylor (historian)|William B. Taylor]], eds. ''Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History''. Lanham MD: SR Books 1998.</ref><ref>Kenneth Mills, William B. Taylor, and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, ''Colonial Latin America: A Documentary History''. Lanham MD: SR Books 2002.</ref><ref>Richard Boyer and Geoffrey Spurling, ''Colonial Lives: Documents on Latin American History, 1550–1850''. New York: Oxford University Press 1999.</ref>

There are relatively few general works on in English on a single country, but Mexico has been the subject of a number of histories.<ref>Michael C. Meyer, William Sherman, and Susan Deeds, ''The Course of Mexican History''.  10th ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. There is a significant portion of it on colonial history.</ref><ref>Michael C. Meyer and William H. Beezley, ''The Oxford History of Mexico''.  New York: Oxford University Press 2000.</ref><ref>William H. Beezley, ''A Companion to Mexican History and Culture''. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2011.</ref> Two general works concentrating on the colonial period are by [[Ida Altman]] and coauthors.<ref>Ida Altman, Sarah Cline & Juan Javier Pescador,  ''The Early History of Greater Mexico''.  Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2003</ref> and [[Alan Knight (historian)|Alan Knight]].<ref>Alan Knight, ''Mexico: The Colonial Era, 1540–1810'', New York: Cambridge University Press 2002.</ref>

Multi-volume reference works have appeared over the years. The ''[[Handbook of Latin American Studies]]'', based in the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress, annually publishes annotated bibliographies of new works in the field, with contributing editors providing an overview essay. The five-volume ''[[Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture]]'' appeared in 1996, with short articles by multiple authors.<ref>Barbara A. Tenenbaum, ''Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture'' 5 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1996.</ref> A general three-volume work published in 2006 is ''Iberia and the Americas''.<ref>J. Michael Francis, ed. ''Iberia and the Americas''. Santa Barbara: ABC Clio 2006.</ref> Various other more specialized encyclopedias have appeared, such as the two-volume '' [[Encyclopedia of Mexico|Encyclopedia of Mexico: History, Society, and Culture]]''.<ref>Michael Werner, ed. Chicago: Fitzroy and Dearborn 1997.</ref> Anthropology and ethnohistory have multi-volume works devoted to Spanish America, including the six-volume ''[[Handbook of South American Indians]]'' (1946–1959)<ref>[[Julian Steward]], ed. ''Handbook of South American Indians'' 7 vols. New York : Cooper Square, 1963.</ref> The [[National Science Foundation]] provided funding to create the ''[[Handbook of Middle American Indians]]'' (1964–1976).<ref>Helen Delpar, ''Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975''. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 2008, p. 137</ref> A three-volume work, ''[[Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures]]'' has articles on the sweep of Mesoamerican culture from pre-Contact to the late twentieth century.<ref>David Carrasco, ed. ''The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures''. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press 2001.</ref> Another specialized work appearing in tandem with the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage is ''The Christopher Columbus Encyclopedia''. 2 vols.<ref>Silvio Bendini, ed. New York: Simon and Schuster 1992.</ref>  Useful bibliographic tools for colonial Mexico are the three volumes by historical geographer [[Peter Gerhard]] dealing with civil administrative and ecclesiastical jurisdictions in central Mexico,<ref>Peter Gerhard, ''A Guide to the Historical Geography of New Spain'', 1972. Revised edition 1993. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.</ref> the north,<ref>Peter Gerhard, ''The Northern Frontier of New Spain''. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979.</ref> and the southeastern frontier.<ref>Peter Gerhard, ''The Southeast Frontier of New Spain''. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1982.</ref>

Useful historiographical essays on colonial Spanish America include those in ''[[Oxford Handbook of Latin American History|The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History]]''.<ref>José C. Moya, ''The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History'', New York: Oxford University Press 2011.</ref> The historiographical essays deal with [[New Spain]],<ref>Kevin Terraciano and Lisa Sousa, "Historiography of New Spain," ''Oxford Handbook'', pp. 25–64.</ref> colonial Spanish South America,<ref>Lyman L. Johnson and Susan M. Socolow, "Colonial Spanish America", ''Oxford Handbook'', pp. 65–97</ref> sexuality,<ref>[[Asunción Lavrin]] "Sexuality in Colonial Spanish America", ''Oxford Handbook'', pp. 132–152.</ref> and the independence era.<ref>Jeremy Adelman, "Independence in Latin America" in ''Oxford Handbook'', pp. 153–180.</ref> Many important essays by major figures in the field have appeared journals over the years.<ref>[[Charles Gibson (historian)|Charles Gibson]] and [[Benjamin Keen]], "Trends of United States Studies in Latin American History," ''American Historical Review'', LXII (July 1957),</ref><ref>Charles Gibson, "Writings on Colonial Mexico," ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 55:2(1975).</ref> [[Eric Van Young]] has published a number of historiographical essays focusing on colonial Mexico.<ref>[[Eric Van Young]], "Recent Anglophone Historiography on Mexico and Central America in the Age of Revolution (1750–1850)," ''Hispanic American Historical Review'', 65 (1985): 725–743.</ref><ref>Van Young, Eric. "Two Decades of Anglophone Historical Writing on Colonial Mexico: Continuity and Change since 1980". ''[[Mexican Studies|Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos]]'' (2004), vol. 20. No. 2, Summer, 275–326</ref>

Original scholarly research, bibliographic review essays, and reviews of individual works appear in an increasing number of scholarly journals, including ''[[Hispanic American Historical Review]]'' (1918–), ''[[The Americas (journal)|The Americas]]'', (1944–) ''[[Journal of Latin American Studies]]'' (1969–), ''[[Bulletin of Latin American Research]]'' (1981–), ''Colonial Latin American Review'' (1992–), ''Journal of Colonial Latin American Studies'' (2016–), and others. The digitization of journals and their availability online make it far easier for access.  In recent years, the U.S. [[National Endowment for the Humanities]] has overseen the development of electronic listservs on a variety of topics. H-LATAM and others publish book reviews online, accessible to the public.

==Early historiography==
From the early sixteenth century onward, Spaniards wrote accounts of Spain's overseas explorations, conquests, religious evangelization, the overseas empire. The authors range from conquerors, crown officials, and religious personnel.<ref>J. Benedict Warren, "An Introductory Survey of Secular Writings in the European Tradition on Colonial Middle America, 1503–1818." ''Handbook of Middle American Indians'' vol. 13, pp. 42–137.</ref><ref>Ernest J. Burrus, S.J. "Religious Chroniclers and Historians: A Summary with Annotated Bibliography." ''Handbook of Middle American Indians'' vol. 13, pp. 138–186</ref> The early development of the idea of Spanish American local patriotism, separate from Spanish identity, has been examined through the writings of a number of key figures, such as [[Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés]], [[Bartolomé de las Casas]], [[Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas]], [[Fray Juan de Torquemada]], [[Francisco Javier Clavijero]], and others.<ref>[[David Brading]], ''The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991.</ref>  Spaniards grappled with how to write their own imperial history and Spanish Americas created a "patriotic epistemology."<ref name=":0"/>
[[File:Bartolomé de las Casas (1552) Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias.png|thumb|left|Cover of [[Bartolomé de las Casas]], ''[[A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies]]'' (1552), which provided grist for the [[Black legend (Spain)|Black Legend]]]]
[[File:AntonioHerreraCuellar.jpg|thumb|right|[[Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas]], early Spanish historian of Spain's overseas empire]]

European rivals of Spain wrote a number of polemics, characterizing the Spanish as cruel, bigoted, and exploitative. The so-called [[Black legend (Spain)|Black Legend]] drew on [[Bartolomé de Las Casas]]'s contemporary critique, ''[[A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies]]'' (1552) and became an entrenched view of the Spanish colonial era.<ref>William S. Maltby, ''The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660''. Durham: Duke University Press 1971.</ref><ref>Benjamin Keen, "The Black Legend Revisited: Assumptions and Realities," ''Hispanic American Historical Review'', 49:4(1969) 703–719.</ref> Defenders of the Spanish attempts to defend the Indians from exploitation created what was called the [[White Legend]] of Spanish tolerance and protection of the Indians.<ref>Lewis Hanke, ''Aristotle and the American Indians'' (1959), and the ''Spanish Struggle for Justice''</ref> The question was debated in the mid to late twentieth century and continues to have some salience in the twenty-first.<ref>Lewis Hanke, "A Modest Proposal for a Moratorium on Grand Generalizations," ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 51:1 (1971) 112–127.</ref><ref>Benjamin Keen, "The White Legend Revisited," Hispanic American Historical Review 51(2)(1971) 336–355.</ref><ref>Margaret R. Greer and Walter Mignolo, eds. (2007). ''Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007.</ref>

Scottish scholar [[William Robertson (historian)|William Robertson]] (1721–1793), who established his scholarly reputation by writing a biography of Spain's Charles V, wrote the first major history in English of Spanish America, ''The History of America'' (1777). The work paraphrases much of Spanish historian [[Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas]]'s ''Décadas'', it also contained new sources. It reached a wide readership when Britain was rising as a global empire. Robertson drew on Las Casas's ''A Short Account'', of Spanish cruelty, he noted Las Casas likely exaggerated.<ref>Brading, ''The First America'', pp. 432–441.</ref> Spanish historians debated whether to translate Robertson's history to Spanish, which proponents supported because of Robertson's generally even-handed approach to Spanish history, but the project ultimately shelved when powerful politician [[José de Gálvez]] disapproved.<ref>Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, ''How to Write the History of the New World'' pp. 171–182.</ref>
 
Scholars in France, particularly [[Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon|Comte de Buffon]] (1707–1788), [[Guillaume Thomas François Raynal]] (1713–1796) and [[Cornelius de Pauw]] (1739–1799), whose works generally disparaged the Americas and its populations the region, which Iberian-born Spaniards ("peninsulars") and Latin American-born Spaniards ("criollos") sought to counter.<ref>Brading, ''The First America''.</ref><ref>Cañizares-Esguerra, ''How to Write the History of the New World''.</ref>
[[File:Alexandre humboldt.jpg|thumb|right|Portrait of [[Alexander von Humboldt]] painted shortly after his return from Spanish America by [[Friedrich Georg Weitsch]], 1806]]
A major figure in Spanish American history and historiography is Prussian scientist and explorer [[Alexander von Humboldt]].<ref>D.A. Brading, "Scientific Traveller", chapter 23 in ''The First America'', pp. 514–534</ref> His five-year scientific sojourn in Spanish America with the approval of the Spanish crown, contributed new knowledge about the wealth and diversity of the Spanish empire. Humboldt's self-funded expedition from 1799 to 1840 was the foundation of his subsequent publications that made him the dominant intellectual figure of the nineteenth century. His ''Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain'' was first published in French in 1810 and was immediately translated to English.<ref>[https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/85270#page/8/mode/1up ''Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne''] (1811); English translation: [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/85282#page/12/mode/1up ''Political essay on the kingdom of New Spain containing researches relative to the geography of Mexico''], (1811) biodiversitylibrary.org</ref>  Humboldt's full access to crown officials and their documentary sources allowed him to create a detailed description of Spain's most valuable colony at the turn of the nineteenth century. "In all but his strictly scientific works, Humboldt acted as the spokesman of the [[Spanish Enlightenment|Bourbon Enlightenment]], the approved medium, so to say, through which the collective inquiries of an entire generation of royal officials and creole savants were transmitted to the European public, their reception assured by the prestige of the author."<ref>Brading, ''The First America'', p. 517.</ref>
[[File:Lucas Alamán, portrait.jpg|thumb|[[Lucas Alamán]], conservative politician and the author of a 5 volume history of Mexico]]
In the early post-independence era, history writing in the nations of Spanish America was accomplished by those from a particular country or region.  Often these writings are part of the creation of a national identity from a particular political viewpoint. Politically conservative historians looked to the colonial era with nostalgia, while politically liberal historians considered the colonial era with disdain. An important example is Mexico's conservative politician and intellectual [[Lucas Alamán]]. His five-volume ''Historia de Mejico'' is the country's first history, covering the colonial era up to and including the struggle for independence. Alamán viewed crown rule during the colonial era as ideal, and political independence that after the brief monarchy of [[Agustín de Iturbide]], the Mexican republic was characterized by liberal demagoguery and factionalism.<ref>Lucas Alamán, Historia de Mejico. 5 vols. 1849–52</ref> Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Mexican liberal [[Vicente Riva Palacio]], grandson of insurgent hero [[Vicente Guerrero]], wrote a five-volume history of the colonial era from a liberal viewpoint,<ref>"Vicente Riva Palacio" in ''Encyclopedia of Mexico''. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn 1997, p. 1282.</ref><ref>Vicente Riva Palacio, ‘‘México á través de los siglos Historia general y completa del desenvolvimiento social, político, religioso, militar, artístico, científico y literario de México desde la antigüedad más remota hasta la época actual ... ’’ Barcelona: Espasa y Compañía 1888–89.</ref> During the era of [[Porfirio Díaz]] (1876–1911), writing a new history of Mexico became a priority and [[Justo Sierra]], minister of education, wrote an important work, ''The Political Evolution of the Mexican People'' (1900–02), whose first two major sections deal with "aboriginal civilizations and the conquest" and the colonial era and independence .<ref>Justo Sierra, ''The Political Evolution of the Mexican People''. Austin: University of Texas Press 1969.</ref>

In the United States, the work of [[William H. Prescott|William Hickling Prescott]]  (1796–1859) on the conquests of Mexico and Peru became best sellers in the mid-nineteenth century, but were firmly based on printed texts and archival sources.<ref>Robin A. Humphreys,  "William Hickling Prescott: The Man and the Historian". Hispanic American Historical Review 39:1–19 (Feb. 1959)</ref> Prescott's work on the conquest of the Aztec Empire was almost immediately translated to Spanish for a Mexican readership, even though it had an underlying anti-Catholic bias. For conservative Mexicans, Prescott's description of the Aztecs as "barbarians" and "savages" fit their notion of the indigenous and the need for the Spanish conquest.<ref>Brading, ''The First America'', pp. 633–634.</ref>

The United States victory in the [[Mexican–American War]] (1846–48), when it gained significant territory in western North America, incorporated territory previously held by Spain and then independent Mexico and in the United States the history of these now-called [[Spanish-American borderlands|Spanish borderlands]] became a subject for historians.<ref>Howard F. Cline, "Imperial Perspectives on the Borderlands", in ''Latin American History: Essays on Its Study and Teaching, 1898–1965'', vol. 1, pp. 224–227. Austin: University of Texas Press 1967.</ref> In the United States, [[Hubert Howe Bancroft]] was a leader in the development of the history of Spanish American history and the borderlands.<ref>Howard F. Cline, "Hubert Howe Bancroft, 1832–1918" in Handbook of Middle American Indians vol. 13, pp. 326–347.</ref> His multivolume histories of various regions of northern Spanish America were foundational works in the field, although sometimes dismissed by later historians, "at their peril."<ref>Howard F. Cline, "Latin American History: Development of Its Study and Teaching in the United States Since 1898," ''Latin American History: Essays on Its Study and Teaching''. Austin: University of Texas Press 1967, p. 7.</ref>  He accumulated a vast research library, which he donated to [[University of California, Berkeley]]. The [[Bancroft Library]] was a key component to the emergence of the Berkeley campus as a center for the study Latin American history.  A major practitioner of the field was Berkeley professor [[Herbert E. Bolton]], who became director of the Bancroft Library. As President of the [[American Historical Association]] laid out his vision of an integrated history of the Americas in "The Epic of Greater America".<ref>H.E. Bolton, "The Epic of Greater America". ''[[The American Historical Review]]'', 38:448–474 (April 1933).</ref>

Starting around the turn of the twentieth century, university-level courses on Latin American history were created and the number of historians trained in the use of "scientific history," using primary sources and even-handed approach to the writing of history increased. Early leaders in the field founded the ''[[Hispanic American Historical Review]]'' in 1918, and then as the number of practitioners drew, they founded the professional organization of Latin American historians, the [[Conference on Latin American History]] in 1926. The development of Latin American history was first examined in a two-volume collection of essays and primary sources, prepared for the Conference on Latin American History,<ref>Howard F. Cline, ed. ''Latin American History: Essays on Its Study and Teaching, 1898–1965''. 2 vols.  Austin: University of Texas Press 1967.</ref> and in a monograph by Helen Delpar, ''Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975''.<ref>Helen Delpar, ''Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States, 1850–1975''. University of Alabama Press 2007.</ref> For more recent history of the field in Great Britain, see [[Victor Bulmer-Thomas]], ed. ''Thirty Years of Latin American Studies in the United Kingdom 1965–1995''.<ref>Victor Bulmer-Thomas,  ''Thirty Years of Latin American Studies in the United Kingdom 1965–1995''. London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1997.</ref>

==European Age of Exploration and the early Caribbean==
[[File:"America" (Engraving) Nova reperta (Speculum diuersarum imaginum speculatiuarum 1638).tif|right|350px|thumb|[[Amerigo Vespucci]] awakens "America" in a [[Stradanus]]'s engraving (circa 1638)]]
The European age of expansion or the age of exploration focuses on the period from the European point of view: crown sponsorship of voyages of exploration, early contacts with indigenous peoples, and the establishment of European settlements.<ref>[[J.H. Parry]] ''The Age of Reconnaissance''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1981.</ref>  There were a spate of publications that appeared in order to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Columbus's 1492 voyage.  A number of important contributions published earlier include the two-volume ''First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old''.<ref>Fredi Chiappelli, ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press 1976.</ref> [[Hugh Honour]]'s beautifully illustrated ''The New Golden Land: European Images of America from Discoveries to the Present Time'' includes many allegorical images of "America" as a befeathered, half-naked denizen of the "[[New World]]", which began appearing in Europe in the mid-sixteenth century.<ref>New York: Pantheon Books 1975.</ref>

Early European settlements in the Caribbean and the role of the family of Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus have been the subject of a number of studies.<ref>William D. Phillips and Carla Rahn Phillips, ''The Worlds of Christopher Columbus''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1992.</ref><ref>Troy S. Floyd, ''The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean, 1492–1526''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1973.</ref>  Historical geographer [[Carl O. Sauer]]'s ''The Early Spain Main'' remains a classic publication.<ref name=":5">Carl O. Sauer, ''The Early Spanish Main''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1966, 1992.</ref> The 500th anniversary of Columbus's first voyage was marked with a large number of publications, a number of which emphasize the indigenous as historical actors, helping to create a fuller and more nuanced picture of historical dynamics in the Caribbean.<ref>Samuel M. Wilson, ''Hispaniola, Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus''. Tuscoloosa: University of Alabama Press 1990.</ref> [[Ida Altman]]'s study of the rebellion of the indigenous leader [[Enriquillo]] includes a very useful discussion of the historiography of the early period.<ref>Ida Altman, "The Revolt of Enriquillo and the Historiography of Early Spanish America," ''The Americas'' vol. 63(4)2007, 587–614</ref>  The importance of the early Caribbean to the [[Atlantic World]] and [[Colonial Spanish America]] is explored in a recent anthology by historians.<ref>[[Ida Altman|Altman, Ida]] and David Wheat, eds. ''The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2019. {{ISBN|978-0803299573}}</ref>

==Historiography of the conquest==
[[File:Lopez de Gomara.jpg|thumb|left|[[Francisco López de Gómara]]'s account of the conquest of the Aztec Empire (1555). Conqueror [[Bernal Díaz del Castillo]] sought to set the record straight with his ''True History of the Conquest of New Spain'']]
[[File:Codex azcatitlan222.jpg|thumb|[[Codex Azcatitlan]] showing Cortés, Malinche, and a black slave]]
The history of the [[Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire]] and of the [[conquest of the Inca Empire]] has long fascinated scholars and the general public. With the quincentenary of the first Columbus voyage in 1492, there has been a renewed interest in the very early encounter between Europeans and New World indigenous peoples.<ref>Steve J. Stern, "Paradigms of Conquest: History, Historiography, and Politics," ''Journal of Latin American Studies'' 24, Quincentenary Supplement  (1992):1–34.</ref>  Sources for the histories of the conquest of the Aztec Empire are particularly rich, and the historiographical debates about events and interpretations from multiple viewpoints inform the discussions.<ref>Ida Altman, Sarah Cline, and Javier Pescador, "Narratives of Conquest" in ''The Early History of Greater Mexico''. Prentice Hall 2003, pp. 97–114.</ref>

Spanish conqueror [[Hernán Cortés]] wrote to Charles V during the events of the conquest, attempting to his explain his actions and demonstrate the importance of the conquest. [[Bernal Díaz del Castillo]] wrote important accounts of the conquest, and other, less prominent Spanish conquerors petitioned the crown to garner rewards from the crown.  In addition to these accounts by the European winners, are those by their indigenous allies, particularly the Tlaxcalans and Texcocans, but also the defeated rulers of Mexico-Tenochtitlan.  A "vision of the vanquished" was recorded by sixteenth-century Franciscan, [[Bernardino de Sahagún]] as the last volume of his ''General History of the Things of New Spain'', often known as the [[Florentine Codex]].
 
Revisionist history of the conquest was being written as early as the sixteenth century. Accounts by Spanish participants and later authors have long been available, starting with the publication of [[Hernán Cortés]]'s letters to the king, [[Francisco López de Gómara]]'s biography of Cortés commissioned by Cortés's son and heir Don Martín. That laudatory biography prompted an irate Bernal Díaz del Castillo to write his "true history" of the conquest of New Spain, finished in 1568, but first published in 1632. Multiple editions of Cortés's letters and [[Bernal Díaz del Castillo]]'s "true history" have appeared over the years. Accounts from the various Nahua perspectives have appeared, including Franciscan [[Bernardino de Sahagún]]'s two accounts of the conquest from the Tlatelolco viewpoint, book XII of the [[Florentine Codex]],<ref>Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book XII. [[Arthur J.O. Anderson]] and Charles Dibble, translators and editors. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1975.</ref><ref>Bernardino de Sahagún, ''The Conquest of New Spain, 1585 Revision'', Howard F. Cline and Sarah Cline, editors and translators. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1989.</ref><ref>S.L. Cline, "Revisionist Conquest History: Sahagún's Book XII," in ''The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-Century Aztec Mexico''. Ed. [[Jorge Klor de Alva]] et al. Institute for Mesoamerican Studies, Studies on Culture and Society, vol. 2, 93–106. Albany: State University of New York, 1988.</ref> Anthologies of accounts of the conquest from additional Nahua perspectives have appeared.<ref>Miguel León-Portilla, ed. ''The Broken Spears''. 3rd ed. Boston: Beacon Press 2007,</ref><ref>Stuart B.Schwartz, ''Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico''. Boston: Bedford/St Martin's Press 2000.</ref><ref>James Lockhart, editor  & translator, ''We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico''. Los Angeles: UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California Press 1993.</ref>  Spanish accounts of the conquest of Yucatán have been available in print, but now accounts by Maya conquerors have been published in English translation.<ref>Matthew Restall, ‘’Maya Conquistador’’ Boston: Beacon Press 1998.</ref> The so-called "new conquest history" aims to encompass any encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples in contexts beyond complex indigenous civilizations and European conquerors.<ref>Matthew Restall, "The New Conquest History," ''History Compass'', vol 10, Feb. 2012.</ref>

A scholarly debate in the twentieth century concerned the so-called [[Black legend (Spain)|Black Legend]], which characterized the Spanish conquest and its colonial empire as being uniquely cruel and Spaniards as fanatical and bigoted. It engaged historians in Spain, Argentina, and in the English-speaking scholarly world. In the United States, [[Lewis Hanke]]'s studies of Dominican [[Bartolomé de Las Casas]] opened the debate, arguing that Spain struggled for justice in its treatment of the indigenous.<ref>Hanke, Lewis, ''The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America'' (1949)</ref> [[Benjamin Keen]] took the position that the assessment of Spanish mistreatment was largely true.<ref>Benjamin Keen, "The Black Legend Revisited: Assumptions and Realities", ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 49, no. 4 (1969) 703–719</ref>  [[Charles Gibson (historian)|Charles Gibson]] edited a volume of writings on the Spanish Black Legend.<ref>Gibson, Charles, ed. ''The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New'' (1971)</ref>  Sverker Arnoldson (1960) and William B. Maltby (1971) showed that anti-Spanish attitudes in Europe antedated Las Casas's writings and had multiple origins.<ref>Arnoldson, Sverker, ''La Conquista española según el juicia de la posteridad: Vestigios de la leyenda negra'' 1960</ref><ref>Maltby, William B. ''The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660''. 1971.</ref> Generally the Spanish Black Legend is no longer a source of scholarly debate; however, anti-Spanish attitudes and stereotypes continue to affect modern debates about immigration in the United States and other issues, although the explicit label Black Legend is generally not invoked.<ref>[https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/opinion/09horwitz.html?ex=1310097600&en=713eb1dd87fa4796&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss Immigration and the curse of the Black Legend] accessed 2 February 2018.</ref>

==Demography==
[[File:FlorentineCodex BK12 F54 smallpox.jpg|thumb|Nahua depiction of [[smallpox]], in Book 12 of the ''[[Florentine Codex]]'']]
The catastrophic fall in the indigenous populations of Spanish America was evident from the first contacts in the Caribbean, something that alarmed [[Bartolomé de las Casas]].  The impacts of the demographic collapse has continued to garner attention following the early studies by Sherburne F. Cook and [[Woodrow Borah]], who examined censuses and other materials to make empirical assessments.<ref>Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, ''Essays in Population History'' 3 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1971-1979.</ref>  The question of sources and numbers continues to be an issue in the field, with David P. Henige's ''Numbers from Nowhere'', a useful contribution.<ref>David P. Henige, ''Numbers from Nowhere: the American Indian Contact Population Debate'', Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1998.</ref>   Noble David Cook's ''Born to Die''<ref>Noble David Cook, ''Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1998.</ref> as well as [[Alfred Crosby]]'s ''[[The Columbian Exchange]]'' are valuable and readable accounts of epidemic disease in the early colonial period. Regional studies of population decline have appeared for a number of areas including Mexico, Peru, Honduras, and Ecuador.  The moral and religious implications of the collapse for Spanish Catholics is explored in an anthology with case studies from various parts of colonial Spanish America, ''The Secret Judgments of God''.<ref>Noble David Cook and W. George Lovell, eds. ''The Secret Judgments of God: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America''. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1992.</ref>  Religious and moral interpretations of disease gave way in the eighteenth century to scientific public health responses to epidemics.<ref>Donald B. Cooper, ''Epidemic Disease in Mexico City, 1761-1813: An Administrative, Social, and Medical Study''. Austin: University of Texas Press 1965.</ref><ref>Pamela Voekel, ''Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico'', chapter 7 “The Rise of Medical Empiricism”. Durham: Duke University Press 2002.</ref><ref>Martha Few, ''For All Humanity: Mesoamerican and Colonial Medicine in Enlightenment Guatemala''. Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2015.</ref>

==Institutional history==
[[File:AntonioMendoza.jpg|thumb|Don [[Antonio de Mendoza]], first viceroy of New Spain, who set many lasting policies during his term]]
[[File:Portrait of José de Gálvez.jpg|thumb|right|[[José de Gálvez]] (1720–1787), ''Visitador generál'' in New Spain and later member of the [[Council of the Indies]], who implemented the Bourbon reforms]]

The institutional history of Spain's and Portugal's overseas empires was an early focus of historiography. Laying out the structures of crown rule (civil and ecclesiastical) created the framework to understand how the two overseas empires functioned.  An early study in English of Spanish America was [[Edward Gaylord Bourne]]'s four-volume ''Spain in America'' (1904), a historian who "viewe[ed] the Spanish colonial process dispassionately and thereby escape[d] the conventional Anglo-Protestant attitudes of outraged or tolerant disparagement."<ref>Charles Gibson and Benjamin Keen, "Trends of United States Studies in Latin American History," ''[[The American Historical Review]]'', LXII (July 1957), 857</ref> In 1918 Harvard professor of history [[Clarence Haring]] published a monograph examining the legal structure of trade in the Habsburg era, followed by his major work on the Spanish empire (1947).<ref name=":1">Clarence Haring, ''Trade and Navigation between Spain and the Indies in the Time of the Habsburgs''. Cambridge MA: Harvard Economic Studies 1918.</ref><ref name=":6">Clarence Haring, ''The Spanish Empire in America'', New York: Oxford University Press 1947.</ref> A relatively early, specialized study of the [[Guipuzcoan Company of Caracas|Caracas Company]] (1728–1784) is in this vein of institutional history.<ref>Roland Dennis Hussey, ''The Caracas Company, 1728–1784: A Study in the History of Monopolistic Trade'', Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1934.</ref> One of the few women publishing scholarly works in the early twentieth century was [[Lillian Estelle Fisher]], whose studies of the viceregal administration and the [[intendant]] system were important contributions to institutional.<ref>Lillian Estelle Fisher, ''Viceregal Administration in the Spanish American Colonies''. Berkeley: University of California Press 1926</ref><ref>Lillian Estelle Fisher, ''The Intendant System in Spanish America'', Berkeley: University of California Press 1919.</ref> Other important works dealing with institutions are Arthur Aiton's biography of the first viceroy, Don [[Antonio de Mendoza]], who set many patterns for future administrators in Spanish America.<ref>Arthur S. Aiton, ''Antonio de Mendoza, First Viceroy of New Spain''. Durham:  Duke University Press 1927.</ref> and [[J.H. Parry]] on the high court of New Galicia and the sale of public office in the Spanish empire.<ref>J.H. Parry, ''The Audiencia of New Galicia in the Sixteenth Century''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1948.</ref><ref>J.H. Parry, ''The Sale of Public Office in the Spanish Indies under the Habsburgs''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1953.</ref> Further research has been published more recently.<ref>Kenneth J. Andrien, "The Sale of Fiscal Offices and the Decline of Royal Authority in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1633–1700," ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 62, no. 1 (1982) 49-71.</ref> An important institutional study by Mark A. Burkholder and Douglas S. Chandler examines collectively the high courts.<ref>Mark A. Burkholder and Douglas S. Chandler, ''From Impotence to Authority: The Spanish Crown and the American Audiencieas, 1687–1808''. Columbia MS: University of Missouri Press 1977.</ref>  Scholars have examined how flexible the Spanish bureaucracy was in practice, with [[John Leddy Phelan]] publishing a study of the bureaucracy of seventeenth-century Quito, and an important general article.<ref>John Leddy Phelan, ''The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century: Bureaucratic Politics in the Spanish Empire'', Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1967.</ref><ref>John Leddy Phelan, "Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy," ''Administrative Science Quarterly'' 5:1 (1960): 47–65.</ref> A study of the bureaucracy of Mexico City from the late colonial era to the early Mexican republic is worth noting.<ref>Linda Arnold, ''Bureaucracy and Bureaucrats in Mexico City, 1742–1835''. Tucson: University of Arizona Press 1988.</ref> Kenneth J. Andrien has examined the viceroyalty of Peru in the seventeenth century.<ref>Kenneth J. Andrien, ''Crisis and Decline: The Viceroyalty of Peru in the Seventeenth Century''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1985.</ref> [[Jonathan I. Israel]]'s work on seventeenth-century Mexico is especially important, showing how creole elites shaped state power by mobilizing the urban plebe to resist actions counter to their interests.<ref>Jonathan I. Israel, ''Race, Class, and Politics in Colonial Mexico, 1610–1670''. London 1975.</ref>

The early Caribbean has been the focus of a few important works, but compared to the central areas, is much less studied. Worth noting are a study of sixteenth-century crown efforts at defense<ref>Paul E. Hoffman, ''The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Caribbean, 1535–1585: Patrimonialism and Royal Parsimony''. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1980.</ref> and works on colonial Florida.<ref>Amy Turner Bushnell, ''The King's Coffer: Proprietors of the Spanish Florida Treasury, 1565–1702''. Gainesville: University of Florida Press 1981.</ref><ref>Amy Turner Bushnell, ''Situado and Sabana: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida''. Athens: University of Georgia Press 1981.</ref>

The limits of royal power have also been examined.<ref>John H. Coatsworth, "The Limits of Colonial Absolutism: The State in Eighteenth-Century Mexico," in ''Essays in the Political, Economic, and Social History of Colonial Spanish America'', Karen Spalding, ed. Newark 1982.</ref> [[Woodrow Borah]]'s ''Justice By Insurance'' (1983) shows how the Spanish crown's establishment of tax-funded legal assistance to Indians in Mexico provided the means for indigenous communities to litigate in the Spanish courts.<ref>Woodrow Borah, ''Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-real''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1983</ref> A useful general examination in the twenty-first century is Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, "Institutions of the Spanish American Empire in the Habsburg Era".<ref>in ''A Companion to Latin American History'', Thomas H. Holloway, ed. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2011, pp. 106–123.</ref> A recent development in the history of institutions focuses on cultural aspects of state power.<ref>Alejandro Cañeque, ''The King's Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico''. New York: Routledge, 2004.</ref>

Church-state relations and religion in Spanish America have also been a focus of research, but in the early twentieth century, it did not receive as much attention as the subject merits. What has been called the "spiritual conquest," the early period of evangelization in Mexico, has received considerable treatment by scholars.<ref>Robert Ricard, ''The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay in the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572'', Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1966. Originally published in French 1933.</ref> Another classic publication on the period is John Leddy Phelan's work on the early Franciscans in Mexico.<ref>John Leddy Phelan, ''The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World: A Study in the Writings of Gerónimo de Mendieta''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1956.</ref> The economic foundations of the Catholic Church have been examined for the early colonial era.<ref>John Frederick Schwaller, ''Origins of Church Wealth in Mexico''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1985.</ref> The Holy Office of the Inquisition in Spanish America has been a subject of inquiry since [[Henry Charles Lea]]'s works at the turn of the twentieth century.<ref>Henry Charles Lea, ''The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies''. New York: MacMillan 1908.</ref> In the twentieth century, Richard E. Greenleaf examined the Inquisition as an institution in sixteenth-century Mexico.<ref>Richard E. Greenleaf, ''The Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1963.</ref>  Later work on the Inquisition has used it voluminous records for writing social history in Mexico and Peru.

The [[Bourbon Reforms]] of the late eighteenth century have been more broadly studied, examining the changes in administrative arrangements with the Spanish crown that resulted in the intendancy system.<ref>Jacques A. Barbier, ''Reform and Politics in Bourbon Chile, 1755–1796''. Ottawa 1980</ref><ref>J.R. Fisher, ''Government and Society in Colonial Peru: The Intendant System, 1784–1814''. London: Athlone 1970.</ref><ref>John Fisher, "Imperial Rivalries and Reforms" in ''A Companion to Latin American History'', Thomas H. Holloway, ed. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2011, pp. 178–194.</ref>

An important shift in church-state relations during the Bourbon Reforms, was the crown's attempt to rein in the privileges of the clergy as it strengthened the prerogatives of the crown in a position known as regalism.<ref>[[Nancy Farriss|N.M. Farriss]], ''Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 1759–1821''. London: Athlone 1968.</ref> Pamela Voekel has studied cultural aspects of the Bourbon reforms on religion and popular piety.<ref>Pamela Voekel, ''Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico''. Durham: Duke University Press 2002.</ref>

Trade and commerce in the Bourbon era have been examined, particularly the institution of ''comercio libre'', the loosening of trade strictures within the Spanish Empire.<ref>John R. Fisher, "Imperial ‘Free Trade’ and the Hispanic Economy, 1778–1796," ''Journal of Latin American Studies'' 13 (1981): 21–56.</ref><ref>John R. Fisher, ''Commercial Relations between Spain and Spanish America in the Era of Free Trade, 1778–1796''. Liverpool: University of Liverpool, Centre for Latin American Studies 1985.</ref> The administrative reorganization opened up new ways for administrators and merchants to exploit the indigenous in Mexico via forced sale of goods in exchange for red dye production, [[cochineal]], which was an extremely valuable commodity.<ref>Brian R.  Hamnett, ''Politics and Trade in Southern Mexico, 1750–1821''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1971.</ref><ref>Jeremy Baskes, ''Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000.</ref>

In the late eighteenth century Spain was forcibly made aware in the [[Seven Years' War]] by the capture of Havana and Manila by the British, that it needed to establish a military to defend its empire. The crown established a standing military and filled its ranks with locals.<ref>Lyle N. McAlister, ''The "Fuero Militar" in New Spain, 1764–1800''. Gainesville: University of Florida Press 1957.</ref><ref>Christon I. Archer, ''The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760–1810'', Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1977.</ref><ref>Leon G. Campbell, ''The Military and Society in Colonial Peru, 1750–1810''. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1978.</ref><ref>Allan J. Kuethe, ''Military Reform and Society in New Granada, 1773–1808''. Gainesville: University of Florida Press 1978.</ref><ref>Ben Vinson III, ''Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico''.  Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001.</ref>

==Social history==
Scholars of Latin America have focused on characteristics of the region's populations, with particular interest in social differentiation and stratification, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and family history, and the dynamics of colonial rule and accommodation or resistance to it. [[Social history]] as a field expanded its scope and depth beginning in the 1960s, although it was already developed as a field previous to that.  An important 1972 essay by James Lockhart lays out a useful definition, "Social history deals with the informal, the unarticulated, the daily and ordinary manifestations of human existence, as a vital plasma in which all more formal and visible expressions are generated."<ref>James Lockhart, "The Social History of Colonial Spanish America: Evolution and Potential". [[Latin American Research Review]] vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 1972), p. 6, revised, 1999 in ''Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History'', Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 27–80.</ref>   Archival research utilizing untapped sources or those only partially utilized previously,  such as notarial records, indigenous language materials, have allowed new insights into the functioning of colonial societies, particularly the role of non-elites. As one historian put it in 1986, "for the social historian, the long colonial siesta has long given way to sleepless frenzy."<ref>Fred Bronner, "Urban Society in Colonial Spanish America: Research Trends," ''Latin American Research Review'' vol. 21, No. 1 (1986), p. 50.</ref>

===Conquest era===
[[File:Cortez & La Malinche.jpg|thumb|250px|[[Hernán Cortés]] and [[La Malinche]] meet [[Moctezuma II]] in [[Tenochtitlan]], November 8, 1519, shown in the pictorial history of the conquest, ''[[Lienzo de Tlaxcala]]''(Facsimile c. 1890).]]
The social history of the conquest era shift in the way the period is treated, focusing less on events of the conquest and more on its participants. James Lockhart's path-breaking ''Spanish Peru'' (1968) concerns the immediate post-conquest era of Peru, deliberately ignoring the political events of the internecine conflicts between Spanish factions. Instead it shows how even during that era, Spanish patterns took hold and a multiracial colonial society took shape.<ref>James Lockhart, ''Spanish Peru''. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1968, revised 1994).</ref>  His companion volume, ''The Men of Cajamarca'' examines the life patterns of the Spanish conquerors who captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca who paid a huge ransom in gold for his freedom, and then murdered. The prosopographical study of these conquerors records as much extant information on each man in existing sources, with a general essay laying out the patterns that emerge from the data.<ref>James Lockhart, ''The Men of Cajamarca'' Austin: University of Texas Press 1972.</ref>  A comparable work for the early history of Mexico is Robert Himmerich y Valencia's work on encomenderos.<ref>Robert Himmerich y Valenica, ''The Encomenderos of New Spain, 1521–1555.'' Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991.</ref>  New research on encomenderos in Spanish South America has appeared in recent years.<ref>Ana María Presta, ''Encomienda, familia y negocios en Charcas Colonial: Los encomenderos de La Plata''. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos 2000.</ref><ref>José de la Puente Brunke, ''Encomienda y encomenderos en el Perú''. Seville: Deputación de Sevilla 1992.</ref><ref>José Ignacio Avellaneda, ''The Conquerors of the New Kingdom of Granada''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1996.</ref>

Gender as a factor in the conquest era has also shifted the focus in the field.  New work on Doña Marina/[[La Malinche|Malinche]], Hernán Cortés's consort and cultural translator sought to contextualize her as a historical figure with a narrow range of choices. The work has aided the rehabilitation of her reputation from being a traitor to "her" people.<ref>Frances Karttunen, "Rethinking Malinche," in ''Indian Women of Early Mexico''. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1997.</ref><ref>Camilla Townsend, ''Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2006.</ref> The role of women more generally in the conquest has been explored for the Andean region.<ref>Karen Powers, ''Women in the Crucible of the Conquest''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2005</ref>

The role of blacks in the conquest is now being explored,<ref>Matthew Restall, "Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America," ''The Americas'' 57:2(2000)171–205.</ref> as well as Indians outside the main conquests of central Mexico and Peru.<ref>Matthew Restall, ''Maya Conquistador''. Boston: Beacon Press 1998.</ref>

===Elites===
[[File:Pedro romero terreros.jpg|thumb|left|[[Pedro Romero de Terreros]], the first count of Regla, a mining magnate of Mexico]]
[[File:Miguel Cabrera - Doña María de la Luz Padilla y (Gómez de) Cervantes - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|right|Doña María de la Luz Padilla y Gómez de Cervantes, ca. 1760. Oil on canvas by [[Miguel Cabrera (painter)|Miguel Cabrera]], [[Brooklyn Museum]]]]
Among elites are crown officials, high churchmen, mining entrepreneurs, and transatlantic merchants, enmeshed in various relationships wielding or benefiting from power as well as the women of this strata, who married well or took the veil. Many are immortalized in contemporary portraits and the subject later, individual biographies or collective biographies.

The history of elites and the role of economic stratification remain important in the field, although there is now a concerted effort to expand research to non-elites.<ref>Magnus Morner, "Economic Factors and Stratification in Colonial Spanish America with Special Regard to Elites," ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 63, no. 2 1983: 335–369</ref><ref>John Kicza, "Elites in New Spain," ''Latin American Research Review vol.21(2) 1986, pp. 189–196.''</ref><ref>Fred Bronner, "Urban Society in Colonial Spanish America: Research Trends," ''Latin American Research Review'' vol. 21, no. 1 1986, 7–72.</ref> Elites lived in cities, the headquarters and nexus of civil and religious hierarchies and their large bureaucracies, the hubs of economic activity, and the residence of merchant elites and the nobility. A large number of studies of elites focus on particular cities: viceregal capital and secondary cities, which had a high court (''audiencia'') and the seat of a bishopric, or were ports from overseas trade. The intersection of silver entrepreneurs and elites in Mexico has been examined in D.A. Brading's classic ''Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810'', focusing on Guanajuato and in Peter Bakewell's study of Zacatecas.<ref>[[David Brading]], ''Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1971.</ref><ref>Peter J. Bakewell, ''Silver and Society in Zacatecas'', New York: Cambridge University Press 1971.</ref>  Merchants in Mexico City have been studied as a segment of elites for Mexico City in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.<ref>Louisa Schell Hoberman, "Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Mexico City: A Preliminary Portrait," ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 57 (1977): 479–503.</ref><ref>Louisa Schell Hoberman, ''Mexico's Merchant Elite: 1590–1660: Silver, State, and Society''. Durham: Duke University Press 1991.</ref><ref>John Kicza, ''Colonial Entrepreneurs: Families and Business in Bourbon Mexico City''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1983.</ref> as well as merchants in late colonial Veracruz.<ref>Jackie R. Booker, ''Veracruz Merchants, 1770–1829: A Mercantile Elite in Late Bourbon and Early Independent Mexico''. Boulder: Westview Press 1993.</ref> Merchants in other areas have been studies as well.<ref>Susan Migden Socolow, ''The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810''.</ref><ref>Ann Twinam, ''Miners, Merchants, and Farmers in Colonial Colombia'' . Austin: University of Texas Press 1982.</ref> Some extraordinarily successful economic elites, such as miners and merchants, were ennobled by the Spanish crown in the eighteenth century.<ref>Doris Ladd, ''The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780–1826''. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, Latin American monographs, 40, 1976.</ref> Individual biographies of successful entrepreneurs have been published.<ref>Peter Bakewell, ''Silver and Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth-Century Potosí: The Life and Times of Antonio López de Quiroga'', Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press 1988.</ref><ref>Edith Boorstein Courier, ''The Silver King: The Remarkable Life of the Count of Regla in Colonial Mexico''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2003.</ref>

Churchmen who made an important imprint on their respective eras include [[Juan de Zumárraga]],<ref>[[Joaquín García Icazbalceta]], ''Don Fray Juan de Zumárraga, Primer Obispo y Arzobispo de México'', 4 vols. Rafael Aguayo Spencer and Antonio Castro Leal, eds. Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, S.A. 1947.</ref> [[Pedro Moya de Contreras]],<ref>Stafford Poole, ''Pedro Moya de Contreras: Catholic Reform and Royal Power in New Spain''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1987.</ref> [[Juan de Palafox y Mendoza]],<ref>Cayetana Alvarez de Toledo, ''Politics and Reform in Spain and Viceregal Mexico: The Life and Thought of Juan de Palafox 1600–1659''. Oxford: Clarendon Press 2004</ref> [[Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora]],<ref>Irving Leonard, ''Don Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, a Mexican Savant of the Seventeenth Century''. Berkeley: University of California Press 1929.</ref> and [[Manuel Abad y Queipo]].<ref>[[Lillian Estelle Fisher]]. ''Champion of Reform, Manuel Abad y Queipo''. New York: Library Publishers 1955</ref> A few nuns and uncloistered religious women (''beatas'') wrote spiritual biographies. Advocates for the formal church recognition of holy persons, such as [[Rosa of Lima]], St. [[Mariana de Jesús de Paredes]] ("the Lily of Quito"), and St. [[Philip of Jesus|Felipe de Jesús]], wrote hagiographies, mustering evidence for their cases for beatification and canonization. Modern scholars have returned to colonial-era texts to place these women in a larger context.<ref name="morgan saints">Ronald J. Morgan, ''Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600–1810''. Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2002.</ref><ref>Kathleen A. Myers and Amanda Powell, ''A Wild Country out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journey of a Colonial Mexican Nun''. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1999.</ref>

Studies of ecclesiastics as a social grouping include one on the Franciscans in sixteenth-century Mexico.<ref>Francisco Morales, ''Ethnic and Social Background of the Franciscan Friars in Seventeenth-Century Mexico''. Washington DC: Academy of American Franciscan History 1973.</ref> For eighteenth-century Mexico William B. Taylor's ''Magistrates of the Sacred'' on the secular clergy is a major contribution.<ref>William B. Taylor, ''Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996.</ref> An important study on the secular clergy in eighteenth-century Lima has yet to be published as a monograph.<ref>Paul Ganster, "A social history of the secular clergy of Lima during the middle decades of the eighteenth century," Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA 1989.</ref>  In recent years, studies of elite women who became nuns and the role of convents in colonial society have appeared. Elite indigenous women in Mexico had the possibility of becoming nuns, although not without controversy about their ability to follow a religious vocation.<ref>Asunción Lavrin, "Indian Brides of Christ: Creating New Spaces for Indigenous Women in New Spain," ''Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos'' 15, no. 2 (1999), 225–60.</ref><ref>Ann Miriam Gallagher, "The Indian Nuns of Mexico City's Monasterio de Corpus Christi, 1724–1821," in ''Latin American Women, Historical Perspectives'', ed. Asunción Lavrin. Westport and London: Greenwood Press 1978.</ref><ref>Mónica Díaz, "The Indigenous Nuns of Corpus Christi: Race and Spirituality," in ''Religion in New Spain'', eds. Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2007, pp. 179–192.</ref>

===Indigenous peoples===
[[File:POMA1105.jpg|thumb|300px|Guaman Poma de Ayala and his son on the way to Lima, illustration from his ''Nueva Coronica'' (NC, p.&nbsp;1105)]] 
The publication of ''The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas'' gave recognition to the field of indigenous history or [[ethnohistory]] that had been developing during the twentieth century. Two volumes, each with two parts, cover the prehispanic and post-Contact history of indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica<ref>''The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas'', Vol. II ''Mesoamerica''. New York: Cambridge University Press 2000 {{ISBN|978-0521652056}}</ref> and South America <ref>''Cambridge History of Native Peoples of the Americas'' Vol. I ''South America''. Cambridge University Press 2000.</ref> In the twentieth century, historians and anthropologists of studying colonial Mexico worked to create a compendium of sources of [[Mesoamerica]]n ethnohistory, resulting in four volumes of the ''[[Handbook of Middle American Indians]]'' being devoted to Mesoamerican [[ethnohistory|ethnohistorical]] sources.<ref>Howard F. Cline,  ed. ''Handbook of Middle American Indians, Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources'', Vols. 12–15. Austin: University of Texas Press 1972–1975.</ref>

Two major monographs by historian [[Charles Gibson (historian)|Charles Gibson]], the first on the post-conquest history of Tlaxcala, the indigenous polity that allied with Cortés against the Mexica, and the second, his monumental history of the Aztecs of central Mexico during the colonial era, were published by high-profile academic presses and remain classics in Spanish American historiography. Gibson was elected president of the [[American Historical Association]] in 1977, indicating how mainstream Mesoamerican ethnohistory had become.<ref>Charles Gibson, ''Tlaxcala in the Sixteenth Century''. New Haven: Yale University Press 1952.</ref><ref name=":2">Charles Gibson, ''The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1964.</ref> Litigation by Mexican Indians in Spanish courts in Mexico generated a huge archive of information in Spanish about how the indigenous adapted to colonial rule, which Gibson and other historians have drawn on.<ref>Woodrow W.Borah, ‘’Justice by Insurance’’.</ref><ref name=":2"/> Scholars utilizing [[New Philology (Latin America)|texts in indigenous languages]] have expanded the understanding the social, political, and religious history of indigenous peoples, particularly in Mexico.<ref>James Lockhart, ''The Nahuas After the Conquest''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1992.</ref><ref>Matthew Restall, "A History of the New Philology and the New Philology in History", ''Latin American Research Review''  Volume 38, Number 1, 2003, pp. 113–134</ref>

Indigenous history of the Andean area has expanded significantly in recent years.<ref>Karen Spalding, "The Colonial Indian: Past and Future Research Perspectives." Latin American Research Review, vol. 7, no. 1 (Spring 1972), pp. 47–76.</ref><ref>Karen Spalding, ''Huarochiri: an Andean Society Under Inca and Spanish Rule''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1984</ref> Andean peoples also petitioned and litigated in the Spanish courts to forward their own interests.<ref>Steve J. Stern, ''Peru's Indian Peoples and the Challenge of the Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640''. 1982.</ref><ref>Susan E. Ramírez, ''The World Upside Down: Cross-Cultural Contact and Conflict in Sixteenth Century Peru''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996.</ref>

The topic of indigenous rebellion against Spanish rule has been explored in central and southern Mexico and the Andes.  One of the first major rebellions in Mexico is the 1541 [[Mixtón War]], in which indigenous in central Mexico's west rose up and a full-scale military force led by New Spain's first viceroy.<ref>Ida Altman, ''The War for Mexico's West: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524–1550''. Albuquerque: New Mexico, 2010.</ref>  Work on rebellion in central Mexican villages showed that they were local and generally short-lived.<ref>William B. Taylor, ''Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages'. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1979.''</ref> and in the southern Maya area there were more long-standing patterns of unrest with religious factors playing a role, such as the [[Tzeltal Rebellion of 1712]].<ref name=":3">[[Victoria Bricker|Victoria Reifler Bricker]], ''The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual''. Austin: University of Texas Press 1981.</ref><ref>Kevin Gosner, ''Soldiers of the Virgin: The Moral Economy of a Colonial Maya Rebellion''. Tucson: University of Arizona Press 1992.</ref> Seventeenth-century rebellions in northern Mexico have also garnered attention.<ref>Charlotte M. Gradie, ''The Tepehuan Revolt of 1616: Militarism, Evangelism and Colonialism in Seventeenth-Century Nueva Vizcaya''. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 2000.</ref>

Andean resistance and rebellion have increasingly been studied as a phenomenon.  The indigenous writer [[Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala]] (1535–ca. 1626) who authored ''[[El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno]]'' has garnered significant attention.  The nearly 1,200-page, richly illustrated manuscript by an elite Andean is a critique of Spanish rule in the Andes that can be considered a lengthy petition to the Spanish monarch to ameliorate abuses of colonial rule.<ref>Rolena Adorno, ''Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru''. Austin: University of Texas Press 1988.</ref>  General accounts of resistance and rebellion have been published.<ref>Steve J. Stern, ed. ''Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th centuries''. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1987.</ref><ref>[[Scarlett O'Phelan Godoy]], ''Rebellions and Revolts in Eighteenth-Century Peru and Upper Peru''. Vienna:  Bohlau Verlag 1985.</ref> The great eighteenth-century rebellion of [[Tupac Amaru]] that challenged colonial rule has been the focus of much scholarship.<ref>Charles F. Walker, ''The Tupac Amaru Rebellion'' . Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2014.</ref><ref>Charles F. Walker, ''Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru, 1780–1840''. Durham: Duke University Press.</ref><ref>Leon G. Campbell, "The Army of Peru and the Tupac Amaru Revolt: 1780–1783". ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 56:1(1976) 31–57.</ref><ref>Ward Stavig, ''The World of Tupac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1999.</ref>

===Race===
The study of race dates to the earliest days of the Spanish Empire, with debates about the status of the indigenous – whether they had souls, whether they could be enslaved, whether they could be Catholic priests, whether they were subject to the Inquisition.  The decisions steered crown and ecclesiastical policy and practices.  With the importation of Africans as slaves during the early days of European settlement in the Caribbean and the emergence of race mixture, social hierarchies and racial categories became complex.  The legal division between the ''República de indios'', that put the indigenous population in a separate legal category from the ''República de españoles'' that included Europeans, Africans, and mixed-race [[castas]] was the crown's policy to rule its vassals with racial status as one criterion. 
[[File:Retrato de una señora principal con su negra esclava por Vicente Albán.jpg|thumb|An elite woman with her black slave, Quito]]
Much scholarly work has been published in recent years on social structure and race, with an emphasis on how Africans were situated in the legal structure, their socioeconomic status, place within the Catholic Church, and cultural expressions.  Modern studies of race in Spanish America date to the 1940s with the publication of Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán's monograph on Africans in Mexico.<ref>Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán, ''La población negra de México, 1519–1810: Estudio etnohistórico''. Mexico City: Fuente Cultural 1946.</ref> In the United States, the 1947 publication of [[Frank Tannenbaum]]'s ''Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas'' cast Latin American slavery as more benevolent compared to that in the United States.  In Tannenbaum's work, he argued that although slaves in Latin America were in forced servitude, they incorporated into society as Catholics, could sue for better treatment in Spanish courts, had legal routes to freedom, and in most places abolition was without armed conflict, such as the Civil War in the United States.<ref>Frank Tannenbaum, ''Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas''. New York: Vintage Books 1947.</ref> The work is still a center of contention, with a number of scholars dismissing it as being wrong or outdated, while others consider the basic comparison still holding and simply no longer label it as the "Tannenbaum thesis."<ref>Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slave, Law, and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” ‘’Law and History Review‘’ 22, no. 2 (July 2004), 383–387.</ref>

The 1960s marked the beginning of an upsurge in studies of race and race mixture.  Swedish historian Magnus Mörner's 1967 ''Race Mixture in the History of Latin America'', published by a trade press and suitable for college courses, remained important for defining the issues surrounding race.<ref>Magnus Mörner, ''Race Mixture in the History of Latin America''. Boston: Little Brown 1967.</ref> The historiography on Africans and slavery in Latin America was examined in Frederick Bowser's 1972 article in ''Latin American Research Review'', summarizing research to date and prospects for further investigation.  His major monograph, ''The African Slave in Colonial Peru, African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650'', marked a significant advance in the field, utilizing rich archival sources and broadening the research area to Peru.<ref>Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1974,''</ref><ref>Bowser, Frederick. "The African in Colonial Spanish America: Reflections on Research Achievements and Priorities," Latin American Research Review, vol. 7, no. 1 (Spring 1972), pp. 77–94.</ref>
[[File:Ignacio María Barreda - Las castas mexicanas.jpg|thumb|250px|Depiction of the casta system in 18th c. [[Mexico]]]]

The debates about race, class, and "caste" took off in the 1970s with works by a number of scholars.<ref>John K. Chance and William B. Taylor, "Estate and Class in a Colonial City: Oaxaca in 1792," ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'', 19:4 (October 1977), pp. 454–87</ref><ref>Robert McCaa, Stuart B. Schwartz, and Arturo Grubessich, "Race and Class in Colonial Latin America: A Critique," ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 21:3 (July 1979), pp. 421– 433</ref><ref>Patricia Seed, "Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City 1753," ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 62(4)1982, 569–606.</ref><ref>Patricia Seed, Philip F. Rust, Robert McCaa and Stuart B. Schwartz, "Measuring Marriage by Estate and Class: A Debate," ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 25:4 (October 1983), pp. 703–723</ref><ref>Bruce Castleman, "Social Climbers in a Colonial Mexican City: Individual Mobility within the Sistema de Castas in Orizaba, 1777–1791," ''Colonial Latin American Review'' 10:2 (December 2001) 229–49.</ref><ref>Aaron P. Althouse, "Contested Mestizos, Alleged Mulattos: Racial Identity and Caste Hierarchy in Eighteenth-Century Pátzcuaro, Mexico," ''The Americas'' Vol. 62, No. 2 (Oct., 2005), pp. 151–175</ref> Scholars have been also interested in how racial hierarchy has been depicted visually in the eighteenth-century flowering of the secular genre of [[casta]] painting. These paintings from the elite viewpoint show racial stereotypes with father of one race, mother of another, and their offspring labeled in yet another category.<ref>María Concepción García Sáiz, ''Las castas mexicanas: Un género pictórico americano''. Milan: Olivetti 1989.</ref><ref>Ilona Katzew, ''Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico''. New Haven: Yale University Press 2004.</ref><ref>Sarah Cline, "Guadalupe and the Castas: The Power of a Singular Colonial Mexican Painting," ''Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos'' vol. 31 (2) summer 2015, 218–247., analyzes the only known casta painting with an overt religious theme.</ref>

Elites' concern about racial purity or "limpieza de sangre" (purity of blood), which in Spain largely revolved around whether one was of pure Christian heritage, in Spanish America encompassed the "taint" of non-white admixture.  A key work is María Elena Martínez's ''Genealogical Fictions'', showing the extent to which elite families sought erase blemishes from genealogies.<ref>María Elena Martínez, ''Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008</ref>   Another essential work to understand the workings of race in Spanish America is Ann Twinam's work on petitions to the crown by mulattos and pardos for dispensation from their non-white status, to pursue education or a profession, and later as a blanket request not tied to professional rules prohibiting non-whites to practice. In the decades following Tannenbaum's work, there were few of these documents, known ''cédulas de gracias al sacar'', with just four cases identified, but the possibility of upward social mobility played an important role in framing scholarly analysis of dynamics of race in Spanish America.<ref>Ann Twinam, ''Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2015.</ref>  Considerable work on social mobility preceded that work, with R. Douglas Cope's ''The Limits of Racial Domination'' remaining important.<ref>R. Douglas Cope, ''The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico, 1660–1720''. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1994.</ref>

The incorporation of blacks and indigenous into Spanish American Catholicism meant that they were part of the spiritual community. Recent work indicates that blacks in Castile were classified as "Old Christians" and obtained licenses to migrate to the Spanish Indies, where many became artisans and a few became wealthy and prominent.<ref>Chloe Ireton, "'They are Alacks of the Caste of Black Christians': Old Christian Black Blood in the Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Iberian Atlantic". ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 97:4 (Nov. 2017) 579–612.</ref> The Church did not condemn slavery as such.  The Church generally remained exclusionary in the priesthood and kept separate parish registers for different racial categories.  Black and indigenous confraternities (''cofradías'') provided a religious structure for reinforcement of ties among their members.<ref>Susan Schroeder, "Jesuits, Nahuas, and the Good Death Society in Mexico City, 1710–1767," ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 80, no. 1 (2000), 43–76.</ref><ref>Nicole von Germeten, ''Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexcians''. Gainesville: University of Florida Press 2006.</ref><ref>Karen B. Graubart, “So Color de una Cofradía: Catholic Confraternities and the Development of Afro-Peruvian Ethnicities in Early Colonial Peru,” ''Slavery & Abolition'' 33, no. 1 (2012), 43–64.</ref>

Work on blacks and Indians, and mixed categories, has expanded to include complexities of interaction not previously examined. Works by [[Matthew Restall]] and others explore race in Mexico.<ref>Matthew Restall, ed. ''Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Yucatan''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2005.</ref><ref>Matthew Restall, ''The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009.</ref><ref>Robert C. Schwaller, “The Importance of Mestizos and Mulatos as Bilingual Intermediaries in Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” ''Ethnohistory'' 59:4 (Fall 2012)</ref> There is also new work on the colonial Andes as well.<ref>Rachael Sarah O’Toole, ''Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru''. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2012.</ref><ref>Lolita Gutiérrez Brockington, ''Blacks, Indians, and Spaniards in the Eastern Andes: Reclaiming the Forgotten in Colonial Mizque, 1550–1783''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2006.</ref><ref>Joanne Rappaport, “Así lo parece por su aspect: Physiogomy and the Construction of Difference in Colonial Bogotá,” ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 91:4(2011): 601–631.</ref><ref>Charles B. Medina, "Caught between Two Rivals: the Spanish African Maroon Competition for Captive Indian Labor in the Region of Esmeraldas during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries," ''The Americas'' 63:1(2006): 113–136</ref>

===Gender, sexuality, and family===
[[File:Sor Juana by Miguel Cabrera.png|thumb|left|Sor [[Juana Inés de la Cruz]], 17th c. Mexican intellectual known in her lifetime as the "Tenth Muse." Painting by [[Miguel Cabrera (painter)|Miguel Cabrera]]]]
[[File:Mariana de Jesús.jpg|thumb|St Mariana de Jesús, the "Lily of Quito," known for her spirituality]]
[[File:Catalina de Erauso.jpg|left|thumb|[[Catalina de Erauso]], the "lieutenant nun"]]

Women's history and gender history developed as a field of Spanish American history in tandem with its emergence in the United States and Europe, with [[Asunción Lavrin]] being a pioneer.<ref>Asunción Lavrin, ed. ''Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives'', Westport CT: Greenwood Press 1978.</ref><ref>Lavrin, "In Search of the Colonial Woman in Mexico: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in ''Latin American Women'', pp. 23–59.</ref><ref>Susan Migden Socolow. ''The Women of Colonial Latin America''. New York: Cambridge University Press 2000.</ref>  Works continue to increase, gain scholarly attention, and historiographic assessment.<ref>Sueann Caulfield, "The History of Gender in the Historiography of Latin America", ''Hispanic American Historical Review'', 81, 3–4 (2001).</ref> Studies of elites generally has led to the understanding of the role of elite women in colonial Spanish America as holders of property, titles, and repositories of family honor.<ref>Asunción Lavrin and Edith Couturier, "Dowries and Wills: A View of Women's Socioeconomic role in Colonial Guadalajara and Puebla, 1640–1790." ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 59, no. 2 (May 1979) 280–304.</ref><ref>Doris M. Ladd, ''The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780–1826''. Austin: University of Texas Latin American Center, 1976.</ref><ref>Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds. ''The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1998.</ref> Crown concerns over inappropriate choice of marriage partners, such as mixed-race unions or partners of unequal socioeconomic status, prompted edicts empowering parents to control marital decisions.<ref>Patricia Seed, ''To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1989.</ref>

Early works on Mexican nun Sor [[Juana Inés de la Cruz]], a singular seventeenth-century poet, famous in her own time,<ref name=":4">Irvin A. Leonard, ''Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-century Persons, places and practices'', chapter on Sor Juana. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1959.</ref><ref>Octavio Paz, ''Sor Juana of, The Traps of Faith''. trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1988.</ref> widened to study elite women who were eligible to become nuns, and further expanded to examine the lives of ordinary, often mixed-race, urban women.<ref>James Lockhart, ''Spanish Peru'', chapter devoted to women, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1968, 2nd ed., 1994.</ref>  Nuns and convents have been well studied.<ref>Asunción Lavrin, ''Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico'' Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008.</ref><ref>Nancy E. Van Deusen, ''Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001.</ref>  Spanish American holy women such as Saint [[Rose of Lima]] and the [[Mariana de Jesús de Paredes|Lily of Quito]], beatas, as well as the popular saint of Puebla, Mexico, [[Catarina de San Juan]], have been the subject of recent scholarly work.<ref name="morgan saints"/><ref>Madre María de José, ''A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Nun'', ed. and trans. Kathleen Meyers and Amanda Powell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1999.</ref>

Gender has been the central issue of recent works on urban and indigenous women.<ref>Silvia Arrom, ''The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857'' Stanford: Stanford University Press 1985.</ref><ref>Steve J. Stern, ''The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico''. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1995.</ref> The role of indigenous women in colonial societies has been explored in a series of recent works.<ref>Susan Schroeder, et al. eds. ''Indian Women of Early Mexico''. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 1997.</ref><ref>Kimberly Gauderman, ''Women's Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America''. Austin: University of Texas Press 2003.</ref><ref>Jane Mangan, ''Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí''. Durham: Duke University Press 2005.</ref><ref>Karen B. Graubart, ''With our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2007.</ref>

The history of sexuality has expanded in recent years from studies of marriage and sexuality<ref>Asunción Lavrin, ed.''Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America'', Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1989.</ref> to homosexuality,<ref>Pete Sigal, ed. ''Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2003.</ref><ref>Martin Nesvig, "The Complicated Terrain of Latin American Homosexuality,"''Hispanic American Historical Review'' August–November 2001 81(3–4): 689–730; {{doi|10.1215/00182168-81-3-4-689}}</ref> and other expressions of sexuality,<ref>Nicole von Germeten, ''Violent Delights, Violent End: Sex, Race, and Honor in Colonial Cartagena de Indias''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2013.</ref><ref>Martha Few, ''Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala''. Austin: University of Texas Press 2002.</ref> including bestiality.<ref>Zeb Tortorici and Martha Few, "Writing Animal Histories" in ''Centering Animals in Latin American History''. Durham: Duke University Press 2013, pp. 1–30.</ref>  Of particular note is Ann Twinam's work on honor and illegitimacy in the colonial era;<ref>Ann Twinam, ''Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America'' Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999.</ref> there is a similar work for Peru.<ref>[[María Emma Mannarelli]], ''Private Passions and Public Sins: Men and Women in Seventeenth-Century Lima''. Sidney Evans and Meredith Dodge, trans. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 20007.</ref> The memoir of the nun-turned-[[cross-dressing]] soldier, [[Catalina de Erauso]], is a picaresque tale and one of the few autobiographies form the colonial era.<ref>Catalina de Erauso, ''Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World''. Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto, trans. Boston: Beacon Press 1996.</ref> The problem of priests soliciting sexual favors in the confessional box and church responses to the abuse draws on Inquisition cases.<ref>John Chuchiak IV, "Secrets Behind the Screen: Solicitantes in the Colonial Diocese of Yucatan and the Yucatec May, 1570–1785" in ''Religion in New Spain'', Susan Schroeder and Staffor Poole, eds. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2007, pp. 83–110.</ref>

Records of the Holy Office of the Inquisition have been a fruitful archival source on women in Mexico and Peru, which include women of color. Inquisition records by definition record information about those who have run afoul of the religious authorities, but they are valuable for preserving information on mixed-race and non-elite men and women and the transgressions, many of which were sexual, that brought them before the tribunal.<ref>Solange Alberro, ed. ''La actividad del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición en Nueva España, 1571–1990'', Mexico City: INAH 1981.</ref><ref>Richard Boyer, ''The Lives of Bigamists: Marriage, Family and Community in Colonial Mexico''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1995.</ref>

A useful contribution to gender and the history of medicine is Nora E. Jaffary's ''Reproduction and Its Discontents: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750–1905'', which examines the understandings of virginity, conception, and pregnancy; contraception, abortion and infanticide; and "monstrous births" in Mexican colonial and nineteenth-century history.<ref>Nora E. Jaffary, ''Reproduction and Its Discontents: Childbirth and Contraception from 1750–1905''. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2016.</ref>

Women have been studied in the context of family history, such as the work of Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru and others.<ref>Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, ''Familia y orden colonial''. Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 1998.</ref><ref>Eduardo Cavieres and René Salinas, ''Amor, sexo, y matrimonio en Chile tradicional''. Valparaíso: Universidad Católica de Valparaíso 1991.</ref>  The history of children in Spanish America has become a recent focus.<ref>Tobias Hecht, ed. ''Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society''. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2002.</ref><ref>Ondina González and Bianca Premo, ed. ''Raising and Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2007.</ref><ref>Bianca Premo, ''Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima''. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2005.</ref>

==Religion and culture==
[[File:Warriorangel.jpg|thumb|right|''Archangel Uriel'', anonymous, 18th century, [[Cuzco School]], typical [[Ángel arcabucero|harquebus angel]], likely by an indigenous artist]] 
[[File:Dibujo Escudo de Armas de México.jpg|thumb|Creoles appealing to [[Our Lady of Guadalupe|the Virgin of Guadalupe]] during an eighteenth-century epidemic afflicting the indigenous in Mexico City, 1743]]

The conversion and incorporation of the indigenous into Christendom was a key aim of Spanish colonialism. The classic work of Robert Ricard examines the sixteenth-century "spiritual conquest" prior to the arrival of the Jesuits. Although much scholarly work has been done since it was originally published in 1933 in French, it remains an important work.<ref>Ricard, Robert. ''The spiritual conquest of Mexico: An essay on the apostolate and the evangelizing methods of the mendicant orders in New Spain, 1523–1572''. Trans. Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1966.</ref> Translating Christian texts to indigenous languages and creating dictionaries was a crucial element in the project.  A great deal has been written about Central Mexico and Nahuatl texts, with [[Louise Burkhart]]'s ''The Slippery Earth'' being particularly important.,<ref>Louise Burkhart, ''The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico''. Tucson: University of Arizona Press 1989.</ref> but clerics in the Andean region grappled with the issues as well.<ref>Alan Durston, ''Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650''. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2007.</ref><ref>Juan Fernando Cobo Betancourt, "Colonialism in the Periphery: Spanish Linguistic Policy in New Granada, c. 1574–1625," ''Colonial Latin American Review'', Vol 23, No. 2, 118–142.</ref>

There is a long tradition of writings by Spanish religious personnel, but more recently there has been an expansion of research on indigenous Catholicism and deeper research on cultural aspects the spiritual conquest,<ref>Osvaldo F. Pardo, ''The Origins of Mexican Catholicism: Nahua Rituals and Christian Sacraments in Sixteenth-Century Mexico''. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2004.</ref> such as religious theater and dance.<ref>Barry D. Sell and Louise Burkhart, ''Nahuatl Theater''. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 2004.</ref><ref>Paul A. Scolieri, ''Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the Choreography of Conquest''. Austin: University of Texas Press 2013.</ref> In Mexico, indigenous language sources have given new perspectives on religious belief and practice.<ref>Sarah Cline, "The Spiritual Conquest Reexamined:  Baptism and Church Marriage in Colonial Mexico", ''Hispanic American Historical Review''  vol. 73, no. 3, August 1993, 453–480.</ref><ref>Robert Haskett, ''Visions of Paradise: Primordial Titles and Mesoamerican History in Cuernavaca''. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 2005.</ref><ref>Patricia Lopes Don, ''Bonfires of Culture: Franciscans, Indigenous Leaders, and Inquisition in Early Mexico, 1524–1540''. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press 2010.</ref><ref>Edward W. Osowski, ''Indigenous Miracles: Nahua Authority in Colonial Mexico''. Tucson: University of Arizona Press 2010.</ref><ref>David Taváez, ''The Invisible War: Indigenous Devotions, Discipline, and Dissent in Colonial Mexico''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2011.</ref> For the Maya area, there have been a number of important studies.<ref>Amos Megged, ''Exporting the Catholic Reformation: Local Religion in Early-Colonial Mexico''. Leiden: E.J. Brill 1996.</ref><ref>Pete Sigal, ''From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire''. Austin: University of Texas Press 2000.</ref><ref>Amara Solari, ''Maya Ideologies of the Sacred: The Transfiguration of Space in Colonial Yucatan''. Austin: University of Texas Press 2013.</ref> An important work on Maya religion is Victoria Reifler Bricker's ''The Indian Christ, The Indian King''.<ref name=":3"/> Religion has been an important focus of new work in Andean history, particularly persistence of indigenous beliefs and resistance to Catholic conversion.<ref>Sabine MacCormack, ''Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Colonial Peru''. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1991.</ref><ref>Kenneth Mills, ''Idolatry and Its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750''. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1997.</ref><ref>Susan E. Ramírez, ''To Feed and Be Fed: The Cosmological Bases of Authority and Identity in the Andes''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2005.</ref>

Art and architecture playing an important role in creating visible embodiments of religious culture. Images of saints and religious allegories, and churches that ranged from magnificent cathedrals to modest parish churches and mission chapels. Reshaping indigenous worship also entailed the introduction of Christian saints. In Mexico, the story of the [[Our Lady of Guadalupe|Virgin of Guadalupe]], said to have appeared in 1531 to a Nahua man, [[Juan Diego]], became the major religious cult of colonial Mexico and into the modern era, an essential part of Mexican identity as well as "Queen of the Americas."<ref>Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart, trans. ''The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega's Huei tlamahuiçoltica of 1649''. UCLA Latin American studies, vol. 84; Nahuatl studies series, no. 5. Stanford & Los Angeles, California: Stanford University Press, UCLA Latin American Center Publications 1998.</ref><ref>Stafford Poole. ''Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797'' Tucson: University of Arizona Press 1995.</ref><ref>D.A. Brading, ''Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries''. New York: Cambridge University Press 2001.</ref><ref>Jeanette Favrot Peterson, ''Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to the Queen of the Americas''. Austin: University of Texas Press 2014.</ref>

Colonial architecture in Mexico has been the subject of a number of important studies, with church architecture as a significant component.  Replacing sacred worship spaces of the ancient religion with visible manifestations of Christianity was a high priority for the "spiritual conquest" of the early evangelical period.<ref>George Kubler, ''Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century''. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press 1948.</ref><ref>John McAndrew, ''The Open-Air Churches of Sixteenth-Century Mexico: Atrios, Posas, Open Chapels, and Other Studies''. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1965.</ref><ref>James Early, ''The Colonial Architecture of Mexico''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1994.</ref><ref>James Early, ''Presidio, Mission, and Pueblo: Spanish Architecture and Urbanism in the United States''. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press 2004.</ref> Studies of architecture in Spanish South America and particularly the Andean region is increasing.<ref>Damián Bayon and Murillo Marx, ''History of South American Colonial Art and Architecture''. New York: Rizzoli 1989.</ref><ref>Harold Wethey, ''Colonial Architecture and Sculpture in Peru''. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1949.</ref><ref>Alfredo Benavides Rodríguez, ''La arquitectura en el Virreinato del Perú y en la Capitanía General de Chile. 3rd ed.’’. Santiago de Chile: Andrés Bello 1988.''</ref><ref>Antonio San Cristóbal Sebastián, ''Arquitectura virreynal religiosa de Lima''. Lima: stadium 1988.</ref><ref>Valerie Fraser. ''The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1535–1635''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989.</ref><ref>Teresa Gisbet and José de la Mesa, ''Arquitectura andina, 150–1830''. 2nd ed. La Paz: embajada de España en Bolivia 1997.</ref>
Until the mid eighteenth century, the subject of most paintings was religious in some form or other, so that the historiography of colonial visual culture is weighted toward religion.  Publication on colonial art has a long tradition, especially in Mexico.<ref>Manuel Toussaint, ''Arte colonial en México''.  Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1948. 5th edition 1990.</ref> In recent years there has been a boom in publications on colonial art, with some useful overviews published.<ref>Pál Kelemen, ''Peruvian Colonial Painting''. New York: The Brooklyn Museum 1971.</ref><ref>Marcus Burke, ''Treasures of Mexican Colonial Painting''. Davenport, IA: The Davenport Museum of Art 1998.</ref><ref>Richard Kagan, ''Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793''. New Haven: Yale University Press 2000.</ref><ref>[[Gauvin Alexander Bailey]], ''Art of Colonial Latin America''. London: Phaidon 2005</ref><ref>Kelly Donahue-Wallace, ''Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521–1821''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2008. The work deals exclusively with Spanish America.</ref><ref>Emily Umberger and Tom Cummins, eds. ''Native Artists and Patrons in Colonial Spanish America''. ''Phoebus: A Journal of Art History''. Phoenix: Arizona State University 1995.</ref> Major exhibitions on colonial art have resulted in fine catalogues as a permanent record, with many examples of colonial religious art.<ref>Linda Bantel and Marcus Burke, ''Spain and New Spain: Mexican Colonial Arts in their European Context''. Exhibition catalog. Corpus Christi TX: Art Museum of South Texas 1979.</ref><ref>Diana Fane, ed. ''Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America''. Exhibition catalog.  New York: The Brooklyn Museum in association with Harry N. Abrams. 1996.</ref><ref>''Los Siglos de oro en los Virreinatos de América 1550–1700''. Exhibition catalog. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 1999.</ref><ref>Donna Pierce et al., ''Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life 1521–1821''. Exhibition catalog. Denver: Denver Art Museum 2004.</ref><ref>’’The Arts in Latin America: 1492–1820’’. Exhibition catalog. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art 2006.</ref>

Rituals and festivals reinforced religious culture in Spanish America.  The enthusiasm for expressions of public piety during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was seen as part of "baroque culture."<ref name=":4"/> Specific religious celebrations, such as [[Corpus Christi (feast)|Corpus Christi]] have been studied in both Mexico and Peru.<ref>Linda Curcio-Nagy, "Giants and Gypsies: Corpus Christi in Colonial Mexico City" in ''Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico'', William H. Beezley et al. eds. Wilmington: SR Books 1994, pp. 1–26</ref><ref>Carolyn Dean, ''Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru''. Durham: Duke University Press 1999.</ref>

The autos de fe of the Inquisition were public rituals enforcing religious orthodoxy with the participation of the highest civil and religious authorities and throngs of the faithful observing.<ref>Alejandro Cañeque, "Theater of Power: Writing and Representing the Auto de Fe in Colonial Mexico," ''The Americas'' Vol. 52 (3) Jan. 1996, 321–343.</ref>  There were a variety of transgressions that brought men and women before the Inquisition, including practicing Judaism while passing as Catholic (''judizantes''),<ref>Ana E. Schaposchnik, The Lima Inquisition: The plight of Crypto-Jews in Seventeenth-Century Peru. University of Wisconsin Press 2015.</ref> bigamy,<ref>Richard E. Boyer. ''Lives of the bigamists: marriage, family, and community in colonial Mexico'', Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 1995.</ref> sexual transgressions, blasphemy, and priests soliciting in the confessional. Mocking religious sacraments could bring one before religious authorities, such as the case of the "marriage" of two dogs in late colonial Mexico.<ref>Zeb Tortorici, "In the Name of the Father and the Mother of All Dogs: Canine Baptisms, Weddings, and Funerals in Bourbon Mexico" in ''Centering Animals in Latin American History'', pp. 93–199.</ref>

In the eighteenth century, the crown sought to curtail public manifestations of piety ("baroque display") by bringing in new regulations. Pamela Voekel's ''Alone Before God: Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico'' shows how the crown targeted elaborate funerary rites and mourning as an expression of excessive public piety.  Mandating that burials be outside the consecrated ground of churches and church yards but rather in suburban cemeteries, elites pushed back. They had used such public displays as a way of demonstrating their wealth and position among the living and guaranteeing their eternal rest in the best situated places in churches.<ref>Pamela Voekel, ''Alone Before God: Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico''. Durham: Duke University Press 2002.</ref>  Another crown target was Carnaval celebrations in Mexico City, which plebeians joined with enthusiasm since Carnaval generally overturned or mocked traditional order, including religious authorities. Also to better ensure public order of plebeians, the crown sought to regulate taverns as well as public drinking, particularly during festivals. Since elites consumed alcohol in their private residences, the regulations were aimed at controlling commoners.<ref>Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán, ''Propriety and Permissiveness in Bourbon Mexico'', trans. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Sergio Rivera Ayala. Wilmington: SR Books 1999, pp. 103–121.</ref>

==History of science==
[[File:José Celestino Mutis.jpg|thumb|right|Cleric [[José Celestino Mutis]], head of the [[Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada]] (1783–1816), whose work deeply impressed [[Alexander von Humboldt]].]]
At the same time that the crown was attempting to suppress baroque religious culture, it was promoting scientific work, to which eighteenth-century clerics contributed.<ref>Karl, Schmitt. "The Clergy and the Enlightenment in Latin America: An Analysis." ''The Americas'', April 1959 (vol. 15), no. 4.</ref><ref>Alfred Owen Aldridge, ''The Ibero-American Enlightenment''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1971.</ref> These include [[José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez]],<ref>Alberto Saladino García, ''Dos científicos de la Ilustración hispanoamericana: J.A. Alzate y F.J. de Caldas''. Mexico: UNAM 1990</ref><ref>Mitchell A. Codding, “Perfecting the geography of New Spain: Alzate and the Cartographic legacy of Sigüenza y Góngora,” ''Colonial Latin American Review'', vol 2, 1994, pp. 185–219.</ref> and [[José Celestino Mutis]]. Seventeenth-century Mexican polymath secular priest Don [[Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora]] made astronomical observations as did his Jesuit contemporary [[Eusebio Kino]]. In the earlier period, Franciscan [[Bernardino de Sahagún]]'s collection of information on Aztec classification "earthly" things in Book XI, such as the flora, fauna, soil types, land forms, and the like in the [[Florentine Codex]] was not clearly related to the project's religious aims.<ref>Bernardino de Sahagún, ''The Florentine Codex, Book XI, The Earthly Things''. Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles Dibble, eds. and trans. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 1963.</ref>

The [[Spanish American Enlightenment]] produced a huge body of information on Spain's overseas empire via scientific expeditions.  The most famous scientific traveler in Spanish America was [[Alexander von Humboldt]], whose travel writings and scientific observations remain important sources for the history of Spanish America, most especially his ''Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain'' (1811);<ref>English translation: [https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/85282#page/12/mode/1up ''Political essay on the kingdom of New Spain containing researches relative to the geography of Mexico''], (1811) biodiversitylibrary.org</ref> but other works as well.  Humboldt's expedition was authorized by the crown, but was self-funded from his personal fortune.  Prior to Humboldt's famous expedition, the crown funded a number of important scientific expeditions to [[Botanical Expedition to the Viceroyalty of Peru|Peru and Chile]] (1777–78), [[Royal Botanical Expedition to New Granada|New Granada]] (1783-1816),<ref>Enrique Pérez Arbeláez, ''José Mutis y la Real Expedición botánica al Virreinato del Perú''.  Bogotá: Anatres, 1967; 2nd ed. Instituto Colombiano de Cultura Hispánica 1983.</ref> [[Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain|New Spain]] (1787–1803),<ref>Harold W. Rickett, "The Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain," ''Chronica Botanica'' 11, no. 1 (1947), 1–81.</ref><ref>Francisco de Solano, et al., eds. ''La Real Expedición Botánica a Nueva España, 1787–1800''. Madrid: CSIC 1987.</ref> which scholars are examining afresh.<ref>Iris H. W. Engstrand, ''Spanish Scientists in the New World: The Eighteenth-Century Expeditions''. Seattle: University of Washington Press 1981.</ref><ref>Daniela Bleichmar, ''Visible Empire: Botanitical Expeditions & Visible Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2012.</ref><ref>Paula S. De Vos, "Research, Development, and Empire: State Support of Science in Spain and Spanish America, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries," ''Colonial Latin America Review'' 15, no. 1 (June 2006) 55–79.</ref>

Beyond examining particular expeditions, history of science in Spain and the Spanish Empire has blossomed generally, with primary sources being published in scholarly editions or reissued, as well the publication of a considerable number of important scholarly studies.<ref>Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, ''Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations in the History of Science in the Iberian World''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2006.</ref><ref>Antonio Barrera-Osorio, ''Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution''. Austin: University of Texas Press 2006</ref><ref>Daniela Bleichmar et al., eds. ''Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500–1800''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2008.</ref><ref>Antonio Lafuente, “Enlightenment in an Imperial context: Local Science in the Late Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World,” ''Osiris'' 2nd series. 15 (2000): 155–173.</ref><ref>José Luis Peset, ed. ''Ciencia, vida, y espacio en Iberoamérica''. 3 vols. Madrid: CSIC 1989.</ref><ref>Neil Franklin Safier, ''Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America''. Chicago: University 2008.</ref>

==Economic history==
[[File:Spanish Galleon.jpg|thumb|200px|[[Spanish galleon]], the mainstay of transatlantic and transpacific shipping, engraving by [[Albert Durer]]]]
Trade and commerce, commodity production, and labor systems have been extensively studied in colonial Spanish America.  An important collection of articles is found in ''The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America: Volume 1: The Colonial Era and the Short Nineteenth Century'',<ref>Victor Bulmer-Thomas, John H. Coatsworth, and Roberto Cortés Conde, eds. New York: Cambridge University Press 2006.</ref> as well as in the first two volumes of ''The Cambridge History of Latin America''.<ref>Leslie Bethell, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press 1986.</ref>  As with other aspects of colonial history, economic history does not fit neatly into a single category, since it is bound up with crown policy, the existence of exploitable resources, such as silver, credit, capital and entrepreneurs. In the development of the agricultural sector, the availability of fertile soil and adequate water, expanses of land for grazing of cattle and sheep, as well as the availability of labor, either coerced or free were factors. The export economy relying on silver production and to a lesser extent dye for European textile production stimulated the growth of regional development. Profitable production of foodstuffs and other commodities, such as wool, for local consumption marked the development of a colonial economy. General works on economic history continue to contribute to the understanding colonial Spanish America.<ref>J.R. Fisher, ''Commercial Relations between Spain and Spanish America in the Era of Free Trade, 1778–1796''. Liverpool: Centre for Latin American Studies 1985.</ref>

===Early labor systems===
Following on precedents in Spain following the Catholic reconquest of Muslim Spain, conquerors expected material rewards for their participation, which in that period was the [[encomienda]]. In Spanish America, the encomienda was a grant of indigenous labor and tribute from a particular community to private individuals, assumed to be in perpetuity for their heirs.  Where the encomienda initially functioned best was in regions where indigenous populations were hierarchically organized and were already used to rendering tribute and labor.  Central Mexico and the Andes presented that pattern.  The encomienda has an institution has been well studied concerning its impacts on indigenous communities and how Spanish encomenderos profited from the system.<ref>Silvio Zavala, ''La encomienda Indiana''. Mexico: Editorial Porrúa 1935, 1973.</ref>  James Lockhart examined the shift from encomienda labor awarded to just a few Spaniards, to the attempt by the crown to expand access to labor via the ''[[repartimiento]]'' to later arriving Spaniards who had been excluded from the original awards. This also had the effect of undermining the growing power of the encomendero group and the shift to free labor and the rise of the landed estate.<ref>James Lockhart, “Encomienda and Hacienda: the Evolution of the Great Estate in the Spanish Indies”. ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 49 (1969): 411–429. Revised in ''Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History'', Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999, pp. 1–26.</ref>  In Central America, forced labor continued as a system well into the nineteenth century.<ref>William Sherman, ''Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth Century Central America''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1979.</ref>  Regional variations on the encomienda have been studied in Paraguay, an area peripheral to Spanish economic interests. The encomienda there was less labor coercion than mobilizing networks of indigenous kin that Spaniards joined.<ref>Elman R. Service, "The Encomienda in Paraguay" ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 31(2) 230–252.</ref><ref>Shawn Michael Austin, "Guaraní kinship and the encomienda community in colonial Paraguay, sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries," Colonial Latin American Review 24:4(2015) 545–571.</ref>

[[Slavery in Latin America|Slave labor]] was utilized in various parts of Spanish America. African slave labor was introduced in the early Caribbean during the demographic collapse of the indigenous populations.  The slave trade was in the hands of the Portuguese, who had an early monopoly on the coastal routes in Africa.  Africans learned skilled trades and functioned as artisans in cities and labor bosses over indigenous in the countryside.  Studies of the African slave trade and the economic role of blacks in Spanish America have increased, particularly with the development of [[Atlantic history]].  Asian slaves in Spanish America have been less well studied, but monograph on Mexico indicates the promise of this topic.<ref name="seijas1">Tatiana Seijas, ''Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians''. New York: Cambridge University Press 2014.</ref> One of the few women to achieve fame in colonial Mexico was [[Catarina de San Juan]], a slave in seventeenth-century Puebla.

The mobilization of indigenous labor in the Andes via the [[Mit'a|mita]] for the extraction of silver has been studied.<ref>Peter J. Bakewell, ''Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545–1650''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1984.</ref><ref>Jeffrey A. Cole, ''The Potosí Mita, 1573–1700: Compulsory Labor in the Andes'', Stanford: Stanford University Press 1985.</ref><ref>Enrique Tandeter, ''Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosí, 1692–1826''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1993.</ref> Encomienda or repartimiento labor was not an option in Mexico's north; the workforce was of free laborers, who initially migrated from elsewhere to the mining zone.

===Silver===
[[File:Capitulo-CIX.jpg|thumb|Potosi, the "cerro rico" that produced massive amounts of silver from a single site. The first image published in Europe. [[Pedro Cieza de León]], 1553.]]
The major motor of the Spanish colonial economy was silver mining, which produced in upper Peru (now Bolivia) at the single site of production, Potosí. There were multiple sites in Mexico, mainly in the north outside the zone of dense indigenous population, which initially necessitated pacification of the indigenous populations to secure the mining sites and the north–south transportation routes.<ref>[[Philip Wayne Powell]], ''Soldiers, Indians, and Silver: The Northward Advance of New Spain, 1550–1600''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1952.</ref>

Silver and silver mining have occupied an important place in the history of Spanish America and the Spanish Empire, since the two major sources of silver were found in the viceroyalties of [[New Spain]] (Mexico) and Peru, where there were significant numbers of indigenous and Spanish colonists. With changes in eighteenth-century crown policies, silver production was revived after a slump in the seventeenth century.<ref>David Brading and Harry Cross, “Colonial Silver Mining: Mexico and Peru.” ''Hispanic America Historical Review'' 52 (1972): 545–579.</ref><ref>Richard Garner and Spiro E. Stefanu, ''Economic Growth and Change in Bourbon Mexico''. Gainesville: University of Florida Press 1993.</ref> The impact of silver on the world economy was profound in both Europe and Asia.<ref>Carlos Marichal, “The Spanish American Silver Peso: Export Commodity of the Ancien Regime, 1550–1800”, ''From Silver to Cocaine'', pp. 25–52.</ref><ref>William Schell, Jr. "Silver Symbiosis: ReOrienting Mexican Economic History," ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 81(1) Feb. 2001: 89–133.</ref>  An early twentieth-century study dealing with the impact of colonial silver on Spain is Earl Hamilton”s. ''American Treasure and the [[Price Revolution]] in Spain''.<ref>Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1934.</ref> Extensive work on the royal treasury by [[Herbert S. Klein]] and John Tepaske on colonial Spanish American and Spain is ''The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America'' (3 vols.)<ref>Durham: Duke University Press 1982.</ref> Other important publications on economic history include the comparison of New Spain and Peru,<ref>Nils Jacobsen and [[Hans-Jürgen Puhle]], eds. ''The Economies of Mexico and Peru During the Late Colonial Period, 1760–1810''. Berlin: Colloquium 1996.</ref> and on price history.<ref>Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, eds. ''Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1990.</ref>  Mercury was a key component to the process of extracting silver from ore. Mercury for Mexican mining production was shipped from the Almadén mine in Spain, while mercury production in Peru was from the mine at [[Huancavelica]].<ref>Arthur P. Whitaker, ''The Huancavelica Mercury Mine: A Contribution to the History of the Bourbon Renaissance in the Spanish Empire''. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1941.</ref><ref>Kendall W. Brown, "The Spanish Imperial Mercury Trade and the American Mining Expansion Under the Bourbon Monarchy," in ''The Political Economy of Spanish America in the Age of Revolution'', ed. Kenneth J.  Andrien and Lyman L. Johnson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1994, pp. 137–168.</ref>

===Other commodity production===
[[File:Indian collecting cochineal.jpg|thumb|upright|''Mexican Indian Collecting Cochineal with a Deer Tail'' by [[José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez]] (1777)]]
For a number of years scholars deeply researched landed estates, [[haciendas]], and debated whether haciendas were feudal or capitalist and how they contributed to the economic development.<ref>Eric Van Young, "Mexican Rural History Since Chevalier: The Historiography of the Colonial Hacienda," ''Latin American Research Review'', 18 (3) 1983; 5–61.</ref><ref>Eric Van Young, “Rural History” in ''The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History'', José C. Moya, ed.  New York: Oxford University Press 2011, pp. 309–341.</ref>  More recently, scholars have focused on commodity chains and their contribution to globalization, rather than focusing solely on production sites.<ref>Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, ''From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World economy, 1500–2000''. Durham: Duke University Press 2006.</ref>

Sugar as a commodity was cultivated from the earliest colonization in the Caribbean<ref name=":5"/> and brought to Mexico by [[Hernán Cortés]], which supplied domestic demand.<ref>Ward Barrett, ''The Sugar Hacienda of the Marqueses del Valle''. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1970.</ref> There is a vast literature about sugar plantations in various regions of Spanish America and Brazil.<ref>Manuel Moreno Fraginals, ''The Sugar Mill: The Socio-Economic Complex of Sugar in Cuba, 1760–1860''. Trans. Cedric Belfrage. New York: Monthly Review Press 1976.</ref><ref>Stuart B. Schwartz, ''Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680''. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 2004.</ref>  Another tropical export product was cacao, which was grown in Mesoamerica. Once Europeans developed a taste for chocolate, with the addition of sugar, cacao production expanded.<ref>Murdo J. MacLeod, ''Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1973, especially chapters 5, 12, 18.</ref><ref>Eugenio Piñero. ''The Town of San Felipe and Colonial Cacao Economies''. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society 1994.</ref>

The production of mind-altering commodities was an important source of profit for entrepreneurs and the Spanish administration. Tobacco as a commodity was especially important in the late eighteenth century when the crown created a monopoly on its production and processing.<ref>Susan Deans-Smith, ''Bureaucrats, Planters, and Works: the Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico, 1740–1810''. Austin: University of Texas Press 1992.</ref><ref>Jerry W. Cooney, “La Dirección General de la Real Renta de Tabacos and the Decline of the Royal Tobacco Monopoly in Paraguay, 1779–1800.” ''Colonial Latin American Historical Review'' 1:1(1992)101–115.</ref><ref>Charlotte A. Cosner, ''The Golden Leaf: How Tobacco Shaped Cuba and the Atlantic World''. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press 2015.</ref> Demand by the urban poor for local production of [[pulque]], the fermented alcohol from agave cacti, made it profitable, so that large-scale cultivation, including by Jesuit landed estates, met demand; the crown regulated taverns where it was consumed.<ref>Herman Konrad, ''A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico: Santa Lucía, 1576–1767''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1980.</ref> [[Coca]], the Andean plant now processed into cocaine, was grown and the unprocessed leaves consumed by indigenous particularly in mining areas. Production and distribution of coca became big business, with non-indigenous owners of production sites, speculators, and merchants, but consumers consisting of indigenous male miners and local indigenous women sellers. The church benefited from coca production since it was by far the most valuable agricultural product and contributor to the tithe.<ref>Paulina Numhauser, ''Mujeres indias y señores de la coca: Potosí y Cuzco en el siglo XVI''. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra 2005.</ref>
 
Most high quality textiles were imported from Europe via the transatlantic trade controlled by Iberian merchants, but Mexico briefly produced silk.<ref>Woodrow Borah, ''Silk Raising in Colonial Mexico''.</ref> As demand for cheap textiles grew, production for a growing local mass market took place in small-scale textile workshops (''obrajes''), which had low capital inputs, since the expansion of sheep ranching provided a local supply of wool, and low labor costs, with obrajes functioning in some cases as jails.<ref>Richard Salvucci, ''Textiles and Capitalism in Mexico: An economic history of obrajes, 1539–1840''. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1987.</ref> Spanish America is most noted for producing dyes for European textile production, in particular the red dye [[cochineal]], made from the crushed bodies of insects that grew on ''nopal'' cactuses, and [[indigo]].  Cochineal was for Mexico its second most important export after silver, and the mechanisms to engage indigenous in Oaxaca involved crown officials and urban merchants.<ref>Carlos Marichal, “Mexican Cochineal and the European Demand for American Dyes,” ''From Silver to Cocaine'', pp. 76–92.</ref><ref>Brian Hamnett, ''Politics and Trade in Southern Mexico, 1750–1821''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1971.</ref> The blue dye indigo was another important export, particularly from Central America.<ref>[[Murdo J. MacLeod (historian)|Murdo J. MacLeod]], ''Spanish Central America: A Socioeconomic History, 1520–1720'', especially chapter 10.</ref><ref>David McCreery, “Indigo Commodity Chains in the Spanish and British Empires, 1560–1860” in ''From Silver to Cocaine'', pp. 53–75.</ref>

===Trade and transportation===
[[File:La sevilla del sigloXVI.jpg|thumb|230px|16th c. [[Seville]], Spanish port for the transatlantic trade]]
[[File:Puerto de Acapulco Boot 1628.png|thumb|[[Acapulco]] in 1628, Mexican terminus of the Manila galleon]]
[[File:Nebel Voyage 31 Arrieros.jpg|thumb|Arrieros in Mexico. Mules were the main way cargo was moved overland, engraving by [[Carl Nebel]]]]
Crown policy attempted to control overseas trade, setting up the [[Casa de Contratación]] in 1503 to register cargoes including immigration to the overseas empire.  From Spain, sailings to the major ports in Spanish America left from [[Seville]]. It was a distance up from the mouth of the Guadalquivir river, and its channel did not allow the largest transoceanic ships to dock there when fully loaded.

The ''Carrera de Indias'' was the main route of Spain's Atlantic trade, originating in Seville and sailing to a few Spanish American ports in the Caribbean, particularly Santo Domingo, Veracruz, on the Atlantic coast of Panama, Nombre de Dios later [[Portobelo, Colón|Porto Bello]]. Since trade and commerce were so integral to the rise of Spain's power, historians undertook studies of the policies and patterns.<ref name=":1"/><ref>P. and H. Chaunu, ''Seville et l’Atlantique aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles''. Paris: Flammarion 1977.</ref><ref name=":6"/><ref>Woodrow Borah, ''Early Colonial Trade and Navigation between Mexico and Peru''. Berkeley: University of California Press, Ibero-Americana: 38, 1954</ref> [[J.H. Parry]]'s classic ''The Spanish Seaborne Empire'' remains important for its clear explication of transatlantic trade, including ports, ships and ship building,<ref>J.H. Parry, ''The Spanish Seaborne Empire''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1990, 1966.</ref> and there is new work on Spanish politics and trade with information on the fleets.<ref>Geoffrey Walker, ''Spanish Politics and Imperial Trade, 1700–1789''. Bloomington Indiana University Press 1979.</ref>

Transatlantic trading companies based in Spain and with partners, usually other family members, established businesses to ship a variety of goods, sourced in Spain and elsewhere in Europe and shipped to the major ports of the overseas empire.  The most important export from the New World was silver, which became essential for financing the Spanish crown and as other European powers became emboldened, the ships were targeted for their cargo.  The system of convoys or fleets (Spanish: ''flota'') was established early on, with ships from Veracruz and from South America meeting in the Caribbean for a combined sailing to Spain.  Transpacific trade with the Spanish archipelago of the Philippines was established, with Asian goods shipped from Manila to the port of Acapulco. The [[Manila galleon]] brought silks, porcelains, and slaves to Mexico while Spanish silver was sent to Asia. The transpacific trade has been long neglected in comparison to the transatlantic trade and the rise of [[Atlantic history]].<ref>William Schurz, ''The Manila Galleon''. New York 1939.</ref><ref>Manuel Carrera Stampa, “La Nao de la China,” ''Historia Mexicana'' 9, no. 33 (1959), 97–118.</ref>  New works indicate that interest is increasing.<ref>Katharine Bjork, "The Link that Kept the Philippines Spanish: Mexican Merchant Interests and the Manila Trade, 1571–1815," ''Journal of World History'' 9, no. 1 (1998), 25–50.</ref><ref>Shirley Fish, ''Manila-Acapulco Galleons: The Treasure Ships of the Pacific with an Annotated list of Transpacific Galleons, 1565–1815''. Central Milton Keynes: Author House 2011.</ref><ref name="seijas1"/> Although the crown attempted to maintain a closed trading system within the Spanish Empire, the British traded with Spanish Americans, accelerating in the eighteenth century.<ref>Adrian Pearce. ''British Trade with Spanish America, 1763–1808''. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2008.</ref>

Overland transportation of goods in Spanish America was generally by pack animals, especially mules, and in the Andean area llamas as well. But the Spanish did not build many roads allowing cart or carriage transport.<ref>Bruce A. Castleman, ''Building the King's Highway: Labor, Society, and Family on Mexico's Caminos Reales 1757–1804''. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press 2005</ref>  Transit over oceans or coastal sailing was relatively efficient compared to land transportation, and in most places in Spanish America there were few navigable rivers and no possibility of canal construction.  Transportation costs and inefficiency were drags on economic development; the problem was not overcome until railroads were constructed in the late nineteenth century.  For bulky, low value foodstuffs, local supply was a necessity, which stimulated regional development of landed estates, particularly near mines.<ref>John H. Coatsworth, “Obstacles of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” American Historical Review, vol. 83, no. 1, (Feb. 1978) pp. 80–100.</ref> Despite the inefficiencies overland trade, hubs of trade had main routes develop between them, with smaller communities linked by secondary or tertiary roads.  The ability to move silver from remote mining regions to ports was a priority, and the supplies to mines of mercury was essential.<ref>James Lockhart, “Trunk Lines and Feeder Lines: The Spanish Reaction to American Resources” in ''Of the Things of the Indies''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999, pp. 120–157.</ref>

===Environmental impacts===
The environmental impact of economic activity has coalesced as a field in the late twentieth century, in particular [[Alfred Crosby]]'s work on the [[The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492|Columbian Exchange]] and "ecological imperialism."<ref>Alfred Crosby, ''[[The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492]]''. Greenwood Press 1972, Praeger Publishers 2003.</ref><ref>Alfred Crosby, ''Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900''. Cambridge University Press 1986, 1993, 2004</ref>  A general history of the environment is by Shawn William Miller.<ref>Shawn William Miller, ''An Environmental History of Latin America''. New York: Cambridge University Press 2007.</ref> An important general ecological history of central Mexico for the eighteenth century is by Arij Ouweneel.<ref>Arij Ouweneel. ''Shadows over Anáhuac: An ecological interpretation of crisis and development in Central Mexico, 1730–1800''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 1996.</ref> Also important for environmental history is Elinor G.K. Melville's work on sheep grazing and ecological change in Mexico.<ref>Elinor G.K. Melville, ''A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico'' Cambridge University Press 1994, which won the [[Conference on Latin American History]] [[Herbert E. Bolton]] Prize.  Following her death, the [[Conference on Latin American History]] set up prize for environmental history in her honor. http://clah.h-net.org/?page_id=114</ref> For the Andean region, the ecological and human costs of mercury mining, essential to silver production, have recently been studied.<ref>Nicholas A. Robins, ''Mercury Mining and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes''. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2011.</ref>

==End of the colonial era==
Independence in Spanish America occupies an ambiguous place in historiography, since it marks both the end of crown rule and the emergence of sovereign nations. The historiography of Spanish American independence has not had a unifying narrative, and has been generally linked to nation-centric accounts.<ref>[[Jeremy Adelman]], “Independence in Latin America” in ''The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History'', José C. Moya, ed. New York: Oxford University Press 2011, 153–54.</ref> The 2017 publication of Brian Hamnett's ''The End of Iberian Rule and the American Continent, 1770–1830''<ref>Brian Hamnett, ''The End of Iberian Rule and the American Continent, 1770–1830''. Princeton University Press 2017</ref> aims to show how independence came about in both Spanish America and Brazil, focusing on the contingency of that outcome.  He is one of many historians who have argued that political independence was by no means inevitable.  "There was little interest in outright independence."<ref>David Bushnell, "Wars of Independence: South America" in ''The [[Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture]]'', vol. 5, p. 446. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons 1996.</ref>  
Since independence did come about, explanations of why that occurred have been sought in the colonial era. The French capture of the Bourbon monarch Charles IV and his forced abdication in 1808 opened an era of political instability in Spain and Spanish America. Timothy Anna and Michael Costeloe have argued that the Bourbon monarchy collapsed, bringing into being new, sovereign nations, when American-born elites mainly sought autonomy within the existing system.<ref>Timothy Anna, ''The Fall of Royal Government in Mexico City''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1978; ''The Fall of Royal Government in Peru''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1979; ''Spain and the Loss of America''. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1983.</ref><ref>Michael Costeloe, ''Response to Revolution: Imperial Spain and Spanish American Revolutions, 1810–1840''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986.</ref>  Political scientist [[Jorge I. Domínguez]] writes in the same vein about the "breakdown of the Spanish American empire," arguing that  independence was caused by international rivalries and not a splintering of colonial elites, whose conflicts he says could be managed within the existing framework.<ref>Jorge I. Domínguez, ''Insurrection or Loyalty: The Breakdown of the Spanish American Empire''. Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1980.</ref> Hamnett's fifty-year frame of reference allows him to show the Spanish crown's attempts reform, but with the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, the Liberal constitution of 1812, and the repudiation of reform with Ferdinand VII's restoration in 1814 pushed Spanish American elites to outright declarations of independence.  The inflexibility of both the Spanish liberals and the absolutist Ferdinand VII lost Spain its continental Spanish American empire. Spain itself entered a new era at the same time that Spanish American sovereign states were working out their new political reality.

There are a number of standard works on independence, some of which have been revised in subsequent editions. [[Richard Graham (historian)|Richard Graham]]'s ''Independence in Latin America'' remains a succinct examination. A classic work on the era is [[John Lynch (historian)|John Lynch]]'s ''The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826'', followed by many others on leaders ("liberators") as well as the era generally.<ref>John Lynch, ''The Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826'', 2nd ed. New York: Norton 1986.</ref>  A number of histories of colonial Spanish America take the 1808 Napoleonic invasion of Iberia and ouster of the Bourbon monarchy as their end date. General histories of colonial Latin America end with one or more chapters on independence.<ref>e.g., Lockhart and Schwartz, ‘‘Early Latin America’’,  Chapter 11, “Epilogue: the coming of independence.”</ref><ref>Burkholder and Johnson, ‘‘Colonial Latin America’’, Chapter 10, “Crisis and Political Revolution” and Chapter 11, “From Empire to Independence”</ref>  The ''Cambridge History of Latin America'' has its first two volumes devoted to the colonial period generally, while volume 3 is devoted to the transition from independence to individual sovereign nations and the subsequent political chaos, and economic instability in Spanish America.  Brazil largely escaped these problems with the decamping of the Portuguese monarchy to Brazil during the Napoleonic wars and the establishment of an independent Brazilian monarchy by a member of the Braganza dynasty in 1822.<ref>Leslie Bethell, ed. ''The Cambridge History of Latin America'', vol. 3, ''From Independence to ca. 1870''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1984.</ref>

==Further reading==
{{div col|colwidth=30em}}
*Adams, Richard E.W. and [[Murdo J. MacLeod]], eds. ''The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas'', Vol. II, ''Mesoamerica''. New York: Cambridge University Press 2000. {{ISBN|978-0521652056}}
*[[Jeremy Adelman|Adelman, Jeremy]]. "Independence in Latin America" in ''The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History'', José C. Moya, ed. New York: Oxford University Press 2011, pp.&nbsp;153–180. {{ISBN|978-0195166217}}
*[[Leslie Bethell|Bethell, Leslie]], ed. ''The Cambridge History of Latin America''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1985. Vol. 1 {{ISBN|978-0521232234}}, Vol. 2 {{ISBN|978-0521245166}}
*[[David Brading|Brading, D.A.]] ''The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1991. {{ISBN|978-0521447966}} 
*Bulmer-Thomas, Victor, John H. Coatsworth, and Roberto Cortés Conde, eds. ''The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America, vol. 1 The Colonial Era and the Short Nineteenth Century''. New York: Cambridge University Press 2006. {{ISBN|978-0521812894}}
*Burkholder, Mark and Lyman L. Johnson. ''Colonial Latin America'' 9th edition. New York: Oxford University Press 2014.
* Burkholder, Mark A. (2016) "Spain's America: from kingdoms to colonies, ''Colonial Latin American Review'', 25:2, 125–153, {{doi|10.1080/10609164.2016.1205241}}
*[[Jorge Canizares-Esguerra|Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge]], ''How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World''. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001. {{ISBN|978-0804746939}}
*Carmagnani, Marcello, "The Inertia of Clio: The Social History of Colonial Mexico." ''Latin American Research Review'' vol. 20, No. 1 1985, 149–166.
*[[Howard F. Cline|Cline, Howard F.]], ed. ''Latin American History: Essays on Its Study and Teaching, 1898–1965''. 2 vols. Austin: University of Texas Press 1967.
*Delpar, Helen. ''Looking South: The Evolution of Latin Americanist Scholarship in the United States''. University of Alabama Press 2007. {{ISBN|978-0817354640}}
*[[Charles Gibson (historian)|Gibson, Charles]], "Writings on Colonial Mexico," ''Hispanic American Historical Review'' 55:2(1975).
*Ginzberg, Eitan (2020) "Genocide and the Hispanic-American Dilemma," Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal: Vol. 14: Iss. 2: 122–152.  Available at: [https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol14/iss2/10 Genocide and the Hispanic-American Dilemma]
*Hamnett, Brian R. ''The End of Iberian Rule on the American Continent, 1770–1830''. Princeton University Press 2017. {{ISBN|978-1316626634}}
*[[Hispanic American Historical Review]], Special issue: Mexico's New Cultural History: Una Lucha Libre. Vol. 79, No. 2, May, 1999
*Johnson, Lyman L. and Susan M. Socolow, "Colonial Spanish America," ''The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History'', José C. Moya, ed. New York: Oxford University Press 2011, pp.&nbsp;65–97. {{ISBN|978-0195166217}}
*[[James Lockhart (historian)|Lockhart, James]], "The Social History of Colonial Spanish America: Evolution and Potential". ''[[Latin American Research Review]]'' vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 1972) 6–45. 
*Lockhart, James and [[Stuart B. Schwartz]], ''Early Latin American History''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1983. 
*Michael A. Mcdonnell & A. Dirk Moses (2005) Raphael Lemkin as historian of genocide in the Americas, Journal of Genocide Research, 7:4, 501–529, {{doi|10.1080/14623520500349951}}, {{ISBN|978-0521299299}}
*[[Matthew Restall|Restall, Matthew]], "A History of the New Philology and the New Philology in History", ''Latin American Research Review'' – Volume 38, Number 1, 2003, pp.&nbsp;113–134
* Salomon, Frank and [[Stuart B. Schwartz]], eds. ''The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas''. New York: Cambridge University Press 1999. {{ISBN|978-0521333931}}
*[[Carl O. Sauer|Sauer, Carl O]]. ''The Early Spanish Main''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press 1966, 1992.
*Schroeder, Susan and [[Stafford Poole]], eds. ''Religion in New Spain''. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press 2007.
*Stern, Steve J. "Paradigms of Conquest: History, Historiography, and Politics," ''Journal of Latin American Studies'' 24, Quincentenary Supplement (1992):1–34.
*Terraciano, Kevin and Lisa Sousa, "Historiography of New Spain," in José C. Moya, ''The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History'', José C. Moya, ed. New York: Oxford University Press 2011, pp.&nbsp;25–64. {{ISBN|978-0195166217}}
*Thurner, Mark. ''History's Peru: The Poetics of Colonial and Postcolonial Historiography'' University Press of Florida 2010. [https://muse.jhu.edu/book/17492 full text online]
*[[Eric Van Young|Van Young, Eric]], "Mexican Rural History Since Chevalier: The Historiography of the Colonial Hacienda," ''[[Latin American Research Review]]'', 18 (3) 1983; 5–61.
*Van Young, Eric. "Two Decades of Anglophone Historical Writing on Colonial Mexico: Continuity and Change since 1980" [[Mexican Studies]], vol. 20, no. 2, (2004), 275–326.
{{div col end|2}}

===Primary sources===
* Richard Boyer and Geoffrey Spurling, eds. ''Colonial Lives: Documents on Latin American History, 1550–1850'' (2000) [https://www.questia.com/library/117207879/colonial-lives-documents-on-latin-american-history online] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180717124901/https://www.questia.com/library/117207879/colonial-lives-documents-on-latin-american-history |date=2018-07-17 }}

==See also==
{{Portal|Latin America}}
{{div col|colwidth=22em}}
*[[Spanish Empire]]
*[[Spanish American Enlightenment]]
*[[Bourbon Reforms]]
*[[New Spain]]
*[[History of Mexico]]
*[[Economic history of Mexico]]
* [[Creole nationalism]]
*[[History of Roman Catholicism in Mexico]]
*[[New Philology (Latin America)|New Philology]]
*[[Latin American studies]]
{{div col end|3}}

==References==
{{Reflist|20em}}

----{{Historiography}}{{Spanish colonization of the Americas|footer=true}}
{{History of the Americas}}
{{Spanish Empire}}

[[Category:Historiography of the Americas]]
[[Category:Spanish colonization of the Americas|.]]
[[Category:Historiography of Mexico]]
[[Category:Historiography of Spain]]