The Catholic Church played a significant role in social action in colonial Latin America: a time when the Church was the most important institution next to the royal government. This collection of classic articles and modern research looks at the Church's active social and political influence.

"Originally a doctrinal thesis of the University of London".

The aim of this study is to define that distinctive blend of enlightened despotism and entrepreneurial talent which created Bourbon Mexico. The period 1763-1810 was a crucial and distinctive stage in the colonial history of Mexico. Jose de Gálvez, the dynamic minister of the Indies, transformed the system of government and restructured the economy. The ensuing 'golden age', far from being the culmination of two hundred years of steady development, sprang rather from a profound regeneration of the New World's Hispanic society. The chief success of Gálvez's policy was the unprecedented mining boom which made Mexico the world's chief silver producer. It was this silver boom which largely financed the revival of the political and economic power of the Spanish monarchy and, in Mexico itself, created a new aristocracy of merchant capitalists and silver millionaires.

Thomas F. McGann Memorial Prize, Rocky Mountain Council on Latin American Studies, 2004 Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2003 In their efforts to impose colonial rule on Nueva Vizcaya from the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, Spaniards established missions among the principal Indian groups of present-day eastern Sinaloa, northern Durango, and southern Chihuahua, Mexico—the Xiximes, Acaxees, Conchos, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras. Yet, when the colonial era ended two centuries later, only the Tepehuanes and Tarahumaras remained as distinct peoples, the other groups having disappeared or blended into the emerging mestizo culture of the northern frontier. Why were these two indigenous peoples able to maintain their group identity under conditions of conquest, while the others could not? In this book, Susan Deeds constructs authoritative ethnohistories of the Xiximes, Acaxees, Conchos, Tepehuanes, and Tarahumaras to explain why only two of the five groups successfully resisted Spanish conquest and colonization. Drawing on extensive research in colonial-era archives, Deeds provides a multifaceted analysis of each group's past from the time the Spaniards first attempted to settle them in missions up to the middle of the eighteenth century, when secular pressures had wrought momentous changes. Her masterful explanations of how ethnic identities, subsistence patterns, cultural beliefs, and gender relations were forged and changed over time on Mexico's northern frontier offer important new ways of understanding the struggle between resistance and adaptation in which Mexico's indigenous peoples are still engaged, five centuries after the "Spanish Conquest."

This book provides a new interpretation of Spanish American independence, emphasising political processes.

Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico includes approximately 250 articles on the people and topics most relevant to students seeking information about Mexico. Although the Concise version is a unique single-volume source of information on the entire sweep of Mexican history-pre-colonial, colonial, and moderns-it will emphasize events that affecting Mexico today, event students most need to understand.