Leader
Cynthia RaddingGussenhoven Distinguished Professor of Latin American Studies
Professor of History & Director of Graduate Studies
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
The story seems familiar. A North American colonial empire, firmly established since the 1500s, is, by the 1700s, funneling great wealth to the mother country in Europe. The colonies are ethnically, ecologically, and geographically diverse. Slavery, an important part of the colonial economy, is widespread; yet some of the African-descendant population live as free people. Village-dwelling indigenous peoples maintain their community traditions, but along parts of the frontier nomadic tribes live beyond colonial dominion, and the relations between native inhabitants and colonists are tense at best, hostile at worst. By the mid-1700s the colonists are chafing under royal rule. Revolution is in the air.We are, of course, referring not to the British Atlantic seaboard, but to the Spanish empire in what is now the American Southwest. In the eighteenth century the Spanish, like the British, struggled to hang on to their North American colonies. How does Spain’s imperial crisis compare to Great Britain’s? Can we say the eighteenth century witnessed two American Revolutions?
Seminar Recording
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Assigned Readings
- "Indian Mortality in Northwestern New Spain," by Daniel Reff
- "1836 letter from Sonoran Indian governor to the President of Mexico."
- "Captain Berroteran's Report on the Condition of Neuva Vizcaya (1748)."
- "Northern New Spain." Map.
- "The Central Corridor during the first half of the 18th C." Map.
- "Investigation by Juez Pesiquisidor Rodriquez Gallardo of Indian Prisoners at Pitic (1748)."
- "The Province of Sinaloa and Sonora." Map.