This volume elucidates Bourbon colonial policy with emphasis on Madrid's efforts to reform and modernize its American holdings. Set in an Atlantic world context, the book highlights the interplay between Spain and America as the Spanish empire struggled for survival amid the fierce international competition that dominated the eighteenth century. The authors use extensive research in the repositories of Spain and America, as well as innovative consultation of the French Foreign Affairs archive, to bring into focus the poorly understood reformist efforts of the early Bourbons, which laid the foundation for the better-known agenda of Charles III. As the book unfolds, the narrative puts flesh on the men and women who, for better or worse, influenced colonial governance. It is the story of power, ambition and idealism at the highest levels.

Allan J. Kuethe is an academico correspondiente of the Spanish Royal Academy of History and has published extensively on eighteenth-century Spain and America both in the United States and in Europe. His work began with monographs on military reform, then extended to commercial policy, and, as expressed in the present volume, has advanced to a comprehensive overview of Bourbon Madrid's struggle to modernize and to sustain its vast holdings in the Western hemisphere. He is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor at Texas Tech University, to which he has dedicated his entire academic career. Kenneth J. Andrien specializes in colonial Latin American history, focusing specifically on the Andean region from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Most recently he has broadened his focus to place the history of colonial Latin America within the context of the early modern Atlantic World. He is author of Crisis and Decline: The Viceroyalty of Peru in the Seventeenth Century (1985), The Kingdom of Quito, 1690-1830: The State and Regional Development (1996) and, most recently, Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness under Spanish Rule, 1532-1825 (2001). He has also published numerous articles in journals such as Past and Present, Hispanic American Historical Review, Colonial Latin American Review and Journal of Latin American Studies. He is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in History at Southern Methodist University.