Acknowledgements
Parts of this book began life as chapters of a doctoral thesis in history written at the University of Warwick between 2007 and 2010 titled “Politics, political culture and policy making: the reform of viceregal rule in the Spanish World under Philip V”. I am extremely grateful to Anthony McFarlane and Guy Thomson who supervised the thesis, providing invaluable guidance and encouragement while I was their student and ever since. Fellow PhD students in Latin American history Helen Cowie, Deborah Toner and Andrea Cadelo Buitrago provided camaraderie and a stimulating working environment, particularly through the Latin American History Reading Group that we ran together. In the final stages of the dissertation and the two years I spent at Warwick afterwards, as an IAS-Santander Early Career Fellow and a Teaching Fellow in Latin American History, I had the opportunity of working along two Spanish Postdoctoral Fellows who became close friends and colleagues: Ainara Vázquez Varela and Jordi Roca Vernet. I am profoundly thankful to both of them for their interest in my work and their encouragement. To Ainara, moreover, I am grateful for her help co-organizing the international symposium, “Spanish America in the Early Eighteenth Century”, which gave birth to our co-edited volume Early Bourbon Spanish America: New Perspectives on a Forgotten Era (1700–1759) (Brill, 2013); also for her generosity, sharing with me her work and her sources and taking the time to read and comment on several parts of the thesis and on later work that went into this book. Rebecca Earle and Christopher Storrs examined my thesis. I am particularly indebted to Chris, not only for his comments and his suggestions on my dissertation, but for his support and encouragement in the years since, including an invitation to give a paper to the University of Dundee’s History Research Seminar in September 2014 which helped me figure out the final shape the book would take.
Between finishing my thesis in 2010 and the completion of the book I have benefited from meeting and collaborating with a number of outstanding colleagues who work on different aspects of the Early Bourbon Spanish World. Iván Escamilla, Silvia Espelt-Bombín, Víctor Gayol, Iñaki Rivas Ibáñez, Núria Sala i Vila, and Pablo Vázquez Gestal have been generous with their work and their time and have, in a variety of ways, influenced how I think about the period. To Christoph Rosenmüller I am grateful for his comments on my work, his invitations to collaborate in other forums and his invaluable insights, both in a book, which I once reviewed too harshly, and in later work and discussions. To Aaron Alejandro Olivas I am deeply indebted for his outstanding generosity with his own sources and his valuable suggestions of places where to look for relevant material; his contribution to the volume Ainara and I co-edited in 2013 had a more profound influence in my understanding of early modern Spanish American societies than he knows. Allan Kuethe took an interest in my work early on and has provided invaluable advice and encouragement ever since. Allan has also been very generous with his time and with his own work, for which I am extremely grateful. Finally, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Adrian Pearce. His doctoral thesis was extremely influential in my own work, and his recent book, based on that thesis—The Origins of Bourbon Reform in Spanish South America, 1700–1763 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014)—, an insightful and sophisticated synthesis of the period, provided the stimulus I needed to finish the present book. Adrian has unduly commended my work in print and has consistently encouraged me since we first met in 2009.
I began revising my doctoral thesis into the present book during the year I spent at El Colegio de Micoacán in 2012–13. I am particularly thankful to Rafael Diego-Fernández, Thomas Calvo and Luis Arrioja for making it possible for me to join ColMich’s Centro de Estudios Históricos. Rafa, Thomas and Luis, alongside Víctor Gayol, José Antonio Serrano and Martín González de la Vara gave me an incredibly warm welcome in Zamora and provided a stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable working environment. I am also very thankful to Beatriz Rojas Nieto, whose support, encouragement and friendship since we first met—when I was an undergraduate student in her class at CIDE in 2000—, and particularly during the year I spent at ColMich, have been invaluable. This book was finished at the University of Manchester where I have been lucky enough to have a group of excellent colleagues in the subject area of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies whose camaraderie and friendship have made the process of writing up while balancing teaching and administrative commitments a lot easier.
I would also like to thank Lois Hide, who proofread the final manuscript and helped render my prose more readable. For the infelicities that have made it through I am solely to blame. Lou Roper first invited me to submit the manuscript to Brill’s Early American History Series and gave me valuable feedback on the first book proposal I put together. He, Jaap Jacobs, Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and particularly Nozomi Goto were incredibly patient over the long time it took me to figure out the from which the book would take and to turn it into a complete manuscript. I very much appreciate the suggestions made by the two anonymous reviewers at Brill, which helped me see clear ways in which the book could be improved. Any remaining shortcomings are, of course, my own responsibility. I am also very thankful to the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia which generously allowed me to reproduce a detail of their facsimile of the now-lost “Plan geográfico del Virreinato y de Santafé de Bogotá formado por Francisco Moreno y Escandón y delineado por José Aparicio Morata” as the book’s cover.1
A number of institutions generously funded the research that went into this book. The University of Warwick awarded me a Warwick Postgraduate Research Scholarship and an Overseas Research Scholarship. These, together with a Beca para estudios de postgrado en el extranjero from Mexico’s Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT), allowed me to read for the PhD and to cover travel and research expenses without which this project would have been much more difficult and slower to complete. A Santander Research Grant, a stipend from Fundación Alberto y Dolores Andrade, IAP, and a grant from Warwick’s History Department Postgraduate Research Fund paid for additional research trips to Seville and Madrid. Finally, a CONACyT postdoctoral fellowship allowed me to spend the academic year 2012–13 at El Colegio de Michoacán.
I am ever grateful for the support of my parents, Javier Eissa Ortiz and Gilda Barroso Cedeño, and my sister, Gilda Eissa Barroso. Since I first moved to Britain, they have indefatigably located for me books and documents in Mexican bookstores and archives; without their help, progress would have been much slower and costly. Finally, without Paulina Hoyos neither the thesis nor this book would have ever been possible. Pau’s support, encouragement, companionship and patience over the years, and during three transatlantic relocations, have allowed me to focus on my research and to stay the course even during those times when the future looked particularly gloomy. As a small token of my infinite gratitude, I dedicate this book to her.
F. A. Eissa-Barroso
Manchester, March 2016
José Aparicio Morata and Francisco Antonio Moreno y Escandón, “Plan Geográfico del Virreinato de Santafe de Bogotá Nuevo Reyno de Granada, que manifiesta su demarcación territorial, islas, ríos principales, prouincias y plazas de armas; lo que ocvpan indios bárbaros y naciones extranjeras; demostrando los confines de los dos Reynos de Lima, México, y establecimientos de Portvgal, sus lindantes; con notas historiales del ingreso anual de sus rentas reales, y noticias relatiuas a su actual estado civil, político y militar: formado en servicio del Rey N[uest]ro. S[eñ]or. Por el D. D. Francisco Moreno, y Escandáon, Fiscal Protector de la Real Avdiencia de Santa Fe y Juez Conseruador de Rents. Lo delineo D. Joseph Aparicio Morata año de 1772. Gouernando el Reyno el Ex[elentísi]mo S[eñ]or. Bailio Frey D. Pedro Messia de la Cerda. Fiel reproducción del original elaborada por el Instituto Geográfico Militar de Colombia a solicitud de la Academia de Historia.—1936—Dibujaron J. Restrepo Rivera—A. Villaveces R.—O. Roa A.” Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia. Mapoteca Digital. Mapas de Colombia. Fmapoteca_262_frestrepo_36. Available at http://catalogoenlinea.bibliotecanacional.gov.co/client/es_ES/search/asset/6766/0.