This book examines the efforts of Spaniards and Portuguese to attract Native peoples and other settlers to the villages, missions, and fortifications they installed in a disputed area between present-day Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. The first part examines how autonomous Native peoples and those who lived in the Jesuit missions responded to the Indigenous policies the Iberian crowns initiated following the 1768 expulsion of the Society of Jesus. The second part examines military recruitment and supply circuits, showing how the political centers’ strategy of transferring part of the costs...

Established in 1638 in a vast Amazonian territory that today encompasses border areas of Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil, the missions of Maynas were one of the Society of Jesus’s main enterprises in Spanish America. Jesuit writings provide a unique insight into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples. In effect, they shed light on how native Amazonians appropriated elements of Christian religiosity and Iberian urban culture. This book is not only about how indigenous populations experienced life in missions. It is above all a study of...