The parish was the fundamental ecclesiastical institution brought by Spain to the New World, and perhaps even the principal instrument of empire. This pioneering study traces the origins and development of the parishes of a single Central American diocese from conquest to independence. Drawing widely on Guatemalan archive sources, it presents a detailed picture of the colonial church at parish level. During the eighteenth century almost all regular parishes were secularized. This brought to an end the ecclesiastical state within a state: a republic of priests and Indians. Although the Crown...

In what is both a specific study of conversion in a corner of the Spanish Empire and a work with implications for the understanding of European domination and native resistance throughout the colonial world, Inga Clendinnen explores the intensifying conflict between competing and increasingly divergent Spanish visions of Yucatan and its destructive outcomes. In Ambivalent Conquests Clendinnen penetrates the thinking and feeling of the Mayan Indians in a detailed reconstruction of their assessment of the intruders. This new edition contains a preface by the author where she reflects upon the...

In this book, Marco Palacios explores the history of Colombia as a coffee-producer, and the implications that coffee has had for its economy, society, and politics since the middle of the nineteenth century. He provides a history of the commercialization of the crop, and relates it to the general evolution of Colombian society, an evolution often determined by coffee even in areas remote from the crop itself. The book also covers the development of the specific institutions that have been set up to manage coffee affairs, and their role in the Colombian state. Since the last quarter of the...

This book examines the relationship between indigenous populations in the north-central highlands of Ecuador and disease, especially those infections introduced by Europeans during the sixteenth century. Disease, of course, existed in the Americas long before 1500. But just as native societies resisted and eventually adapted to European conquest, so too did they adapt to Old World pathogens. Just as the responses of Indian communities to the economic and political demands of Spaniards varied over time, so too did the immunological responses of indigenous populations change over generations....

Much of the so-called Age of Santa Anna in the history of independent Mexico remains a mystery and no decade is less well understood than the years from 1835 to 1846. In 1834, the ruling elite of middle class hombres de bien concluded that a highly centralized republican government was the only solution to the turmoil and factionalism that had characterized the new nation since its emancipation from Spain in 1821. The central republic was thus set up in 1835, but once again civil strife, economic stagnation, and military coups prevailed until 1846, when a disastrous war with the United States...

Buenos Aires is Argentina's national capital and largest city. This book describes the development of the city during the period from 1910 to the early 1940s. It focuses on the role of politics and local government in the evolution of the city, detailing elections, party competition, and debates on important public works issues. The political story is set within the larger context of the overall growth of the capital. This is the first work to cover comprehensively the history of the city for this period and the first to concentrate on the neglected topic of local government.

This book is the first to describe the role of business interest groups, also known as pressure groups, in the development of Brazil during the nineteenth century. Business interest groups strongly affected the modernization and prosperity of agriculture, the pace of industrialization, and patterns of communications. The commercial associations, the most important of business interest groups, also may be seen as institutions through which ties of dependency to better-developed nations overseas were maintained.

This book examines the characteristics of political power in the cities of the colonial Spanish Empire between the 1740s and 1780s, based on a detailed study of the mining city of Oruro in Alto Peru (present-day Bolivia), emphasizing the workings of the judicial system and the role of the bureaucracy. Toward the end of this period, the analysis focuses on the Indian uprisings of the 1780s (the rebellions of Tupac Amaru) and the reasons that led to the alliances or confrontations between the actors of the distinct bands, whether white or Indian.

This volume presents a quantitative study of Cuban slavery from the late eighteenth century until 1880, the year slavery was formally abolished on the island. The core of this study is an examination of the yearly movement of slave prices and changes in the demographic characteristics of the slave market. Incorporating over 30,000 slave transactions from three separate locations in Cuba--Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos--this work comprises the largest extant database on any slave market in the Americas.

The subject of Vassos Argyrou's study is modernization, as reflected in the changing nature of wedding celebrations in Cyprus over two generations. He argues that modernization is not a secular, progressive process that remodels the life of a society, ironing out local differences. Rather, it is an idiom--a legitimizing discourse--in which Cypriots represent, and contest, relationships among social classes, old and young, men and women, city folk and villagers. At the same time, by involving modernization, they are submitting to foreign standards, and accepting the symbolic domination of...