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A handful of scholars have written about foreigners in other periods or in other parts of the Spanish American empire. A few authorities in dealing with their own topics have also touched on foreigners. Synthesizing these various views and applying them to colonial Mexico in the first half of the eighteenth century would suggest several things. The most important of these inferences are that Spanish law was reasonably effective in excluding foreigners, that there were a few exceptions such as prisoners of war, illicit traders, and Jesuits, but that even then their numbers were small. Since the kings of Spain and their advisers saw aliens as potential threats to imperial, religious, and mercantile security and since the crown legislated accordingly, it might also be assumed that the Spaniards were both xenophobic and intolerant. Reinforcing this view still further, surviving sixteenth-century Protestant and eighteenth-century Enlightenment prejudices about the Inquisition might exaggerate both the zeal of the Holy Office and the bigotry of Spaniards toward outsiders. The laws were strict, but the documents, primarily from the Archive of the Indies (AGI) in Seville and the National Archive of Mexico (AGN) in Mexico City, suggest that the preceding assumptions misconstrue the situation in New Spain between 1700 and 1760. Prisoners of war often stayed to settle after their release, most foreign merchants had nothing to do with smuggling, and Jesuits were not the only foreign churchmen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Veo con mucha simpatía este amor que sientes por Córdoba, tu patria chica, que tanto se refleja en tu última carta. I am very sympathetic to the love that you feel for Cordoba, your home town, which is expressed so well in your last letter. Writing in 1789, León de Arroyal, one of the lesser-known figures of the Spanish Enlightenment, offered a somewhat unusual vision of his country at a moment when the centralizing policies of Spain's Bourbon monarchy were in full force: ‘We ought to consider Spain’, he wrote, ‘as a country composed of various confederated republics united under the government and protection of its monarchs. We should imagine each town as a miniature kingdom, and the kingdom itself as a large town.’ For all its boldness, Arroya's idea of a confederate Spain, a union of independent city-states or republics, actually belongs to a deep current in Spanish cultural and political life that John Elliott has conceived in terms of the vital and sometimes conflicting tensions between centre and periphery. Other essays in this volume examine the extent to which this enduring theme in Spanish history manifested itself both culturally and politically. This essay addresses the question of centre versus periphery from a historiographical perspective and aims to compare the history produced by the monarchy's official chroniclers – the cronistas del rey – with that written for individual cities and towns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a history of Colombia during the last century of Spanish rule, when the territory of the modern republic of Colombia stood at the heart of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Granada. Based largely on research in Spanish and Colombian archives, it is primarily designed as a contribution to the historiography of Spanish America during the period of Bourbon rule between 1700 and 1810. However, as there is no general history of Colombia during this period, the present study also aims at a synthesis, combining the results of archival research with the evidence and interpretations found in the specialized works of other historians of colonial Colombia. The choice of region and period covered by this study are easily explained. Apart from its intrinsic interest, Colombia, or New Granada as it was called during the period of Spanish rule, is a region that deserves more attention from historians of Spanish America. For, although it was a colony of second rank that did not compare in size or wealth to the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain, New Granada was independent of the great colonial economic systems that focused around silver mining in the older viceroyalties, and stands as a separate and distinctive territory with a character of its own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]