Native American, African, and hispanic communities during the middle period in the Colonial Americas

Abstract

As a coherent era in the colonial period of Spanish America, the 17th century begins about 1575 with the end of the conquest phase and continues for 150 years until ca. 1725, when dramatically transformed international trade, the beginnings of economic florescence in previously fringe areas such as Central America, Venezuela, Chile, and Buenos Aires, and the resurgence of silver mining in Mexico after nearly a century of stagnation engendered a new epoch. Seven teenth-century Spanish America has a certain coherence, for while it was far from a stagnant period, the parameters of most of the develop ments were circumscribed and generally can be seen as logical extensions of what had already begun to emerge in the conquest era. The in terpretive syntheses of colonial Latin America composed by James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz (1983) and by Lyle N. McAlister (1984) are of great value to understanding the defining characteristics of the 17th century. These are the first broadly conceived publica tions on the colonial period to integrate the con siderable social history and ethnohistory com posed about the era into their approaches and findings. Thus the primary focus of both, though in the former more than in the latter, is on the colonial societies themselves rather than