page_title: Historiography of Colonial Spanish America
section_title: Institutional history
hierarchical_section_title: Historiography of Colonial Spanish America / Institutional history
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of José de Gálvez, 1st Marquess of Sonora
context_page_description: The historiography of colonial Spanish America in multiple languages is vast and has a long history. It dates back to the early sixteenth century with multiple competing accounts of the conquest, Spaniards’ eighteenth-century attempts to discover how to reverse the decline of its empire, and Latin American-born Spaniards' search for an identity other than Spanish, and the creation of creole patriotism. Following independence in some parts of Spanish America, some politically-engaged citizens of the new sovereign nations sought to shape national identity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, non-Spanish American historians began writing chronicles important events, such as the conquests of Mexico and Peru, dispassionate histories of the Spanish imperial project after its almost complete demise in the hemisphere, and histories of the southwest borderlands, areas of the United States that had previously been part of the Spanish Empire, led by Herbert Eugene Bolton.
context_section_description: The institutional history of Spain's and Portugal's overseas empires was an early focus of historiography. Laying out the structures of crown rule (civil and ecclesiastical) created the framework to understand how the two overseas empires functioned.  An early study in English of Spanish America was Edward Gaylord Bourne's four-volume Spain in America (1904), a historian who "viewe[ed] the Spanish colonial process dispassionately and thereby escape[d] the conventional Anglo-Protestant attitudes of outraged or tolerant disparagement." In 1918 Harvard professor of history Clarence Haring published a monograph examining the legal structure of trade in the Habsburg era, followed by his major work on the Spanish empire (1947). A relatively early, specialized study of the Caracas Company (1728–1784) is in this vein of institutional history. One of the few women publishing scholarly works in the early twentieth century was Lillian Estelle Fisher, whose studies of the viceregal administration and the intendant system were important contributions to institutional. Other important works dealing with institutions are Arthur Aiton's biography of the first viceroy, Don Antonio de Mendoza, who set many patterns for future administrators in Spanish America. and J.H. Parry on the high court of New Galicia and the sale of public office in the Spanish empire. Further research has been published more recently. An important institutional study by Mark A. Burkholder and Douglas S. Chandler examines collectively the high courts.  Scholars have examined how flexible the Spanish bureaucracy was in practice, with John Leddy Phelan publishing a study of the bureaucracy of seventeenth-century Quito, and an important general article. A study of the bureaucracy of Mexico City from the late colonial era to the early Mexican republic is worth noting. Kenneth J. Andrien has examined the viceroyalty of Peru in the seventeenth century. Jonathan I. Israel's work on seventeenth-century Mexico is especially important, showing how creole elites shaped state power by mobilizing the urban plebe to resist actions counter to their interests.
  The early Caribbean has been the focus of a few important works, but compared to the central areas, is much less studied. Worth noting are a study of sixteenth-century crown efforts at defense and works on colonial Florida.
  The limits of royal power have also been examined. Woodrow Borah's Justice By Insurance (1983) shows how the Spanish crown's establishment of tax-funded legal assistance to Indians in Mexico provided the means for indigenous communities to litigate in the Spanish courts. A useful general examination in the twenty-first century is Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, "Institutions of the Spanish American Empire in the Habsburg Era". A recent development in the history of institutions focuses on cultural aspects of state power.
  Church-state relations and religion in Spanish America have also been a focus of research, but in the early twentieth century, it did not receive as much attention as the subject merits. What has been called the "spiritual conquest," the early period of evangelization in Mexico, has received considerable treatment by scholars. Another classic publication on the period is John Leddy Phelan's work on the early Franciscans in Mexico. The economic foundations of the Catholic Church have been examined for the early colonial era. The Holy Office of the Inquisition in Spanish America has been a subject of inquiry since Henry Charles Lea's works at the turn of the twentieth century. In the twentieth century, Richard E. Greenleaf examined the Inquisition as an institution in sixteenth-century Mexico.  Later work on the Inquisition has used it voluminous records for writing social history in Mexico and Peru.
  The Bourbon Reforms of the late eighteenth century have been more broadly studied, examining the changes in administrative arrangements with the Spanish crown that resulted in the intendancy system.
  An important shift in church-state relations during the Bourbon Reforms, was the crown's attempt to rei
caption: José de Gálvez (1720–1787), Visitador generál in New Spain and later member of the Council of the Indies, who implemented the Bourbon reforms
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