In this debut work, Scott Eastman tackles the complex issue of nationalism in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish Atlantic empire. Preaching Spanish Nationalism across the Hispanic Atlantic challenges the idea that nationalism arose from the ashes of confessional society. Rather, the tenets of Roman Catholicism and the ideals of Enlightenment worked together to lay the basis for a "mixed modernity" within the territories of the Spanish monarchy.

Drawing on sermons, catechisms, political pamphlets, and newspapers, Eastman demonstrates how religion and tradition cohered within...