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Spanish New Orleans - An Imperial City on the American Periphery, 1766-1803 (Hardcover)
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Spanish New Orleans - An Imperial City on the American Periphery, 1766-1803 (Hardcover)
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John Eugene Rodriguez's Spanish New Orleans is the first
comprehensive academic analysis of how Spain governed the largest
imperial city in its North American empire. Rodriguez suggests that
the Spanish empire was, at least on the northern edge, slipping
into economic and perhaps political independence a decade before
the overthrow of its Bourbon Spanish rulers in 1808. His work
questions that of earlier historians, who argued that Latin America
was fundamentally conservative and complaisant under Bourbon rule.
Instead, Spanish New Orleans shows that in the capital of
Louisiana, Spanish rulers were slowly losing control of three
interwoven aspects of the city: demography, trade, and political
discourse. Rodriguez demonstrates how the multiethnic, multilingual
population of the city played a central role in encouraging
trans-imperial free trade and especially trade with the United
States, to the point of economic dependence. This dependence in
turn prompted the Bourbon governors in New Orleans to negotiate
both economic and political discourse in a city that was steadily
moving closer in every way to the United States. Far from being a
peripheral city in a peripheral colony, by 1803 New Orleans was
reshaping the Spanish empire beyond the comprehension of the
Spanish king. Chapters on the city's foundational merchants,
literacy, and the judicial system all point to the unique character
of this imperial city on the American periphery. This study marks
new methodological paths for historians of Latin America and early
U.S. history by making use of enormous data compilations on
population, ethnicity, and economics. Rodriguez also analyzes
previously ignored eighteenth-century Spanish-language documents,
including petitions, postal records, and military rosters, and
engages underutilized tools such as signature analysis. Through his
use of original sources and innovative methodologies, Rodriguez
makes new and intriguing comparisons between New Orleans and other
contemporary Spanish imperial cities as well as cities in the
then-expanding United States. In Spanish New Orleans, Rodriguez
goes beyond simply positioning New Orleans within Spanish imperial
history. Taking a broader view, he considers what Spanish New
Orleans reveals about the challenges and opportunities faced by the
Spanish Bourbon empire, and he sheds light on how a new North
American empire could so quickly and easily absorb a Spanish city.
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