In Spanish New Orleans, John Eugene Rodriguez sets out to frame New Orleans within Spanish imperial history and to understand what the city's colonial experience reveals about the late eighteenth-century Bourbon empire. According to Rodriguez, Spain's decision after acquiring Louisiana at the end of the Seven Years' War to Hispanicize the colonial settlers rather than eliminate them proved a double-edged sword. The assimilation approach allowed the empire to rule the colony but required imperial agents to tolerate illicit transimperial free trade. This resulted in the Spanish city becoming “almost entirely dependent upon trade with the United States” (p. 5).Rodriguez arrives at this conclusion by focusing on trade and the city's economy. Historians like Linda K. Salvucci and Tyson Reeder have explored how US traders successfully engaged commerce with Iberian markets, especially in Cuba and South America. Applying this scholarship to Spanish New Orleans, Rodriguez finds that transimperial merchants successfully circumvented mercantilist restrictions by relying on cultural capital, which included religion, place of residence, and access to intelligence on Atlantic markets. By undermining imperial objectives, multinational merchants “created prosperity and stability” for the port before “better-capitalized American newcomers” took over after 1803 (p. 45). Though valuable, Rodriguez's assessment fails to engage with literature from scholars, such as Lawrence N. Powell and Daniel Usner, who have exhaustively studied colonial New Orleans and its licit and illicit economies. Further, the absence of any conversation on slavery and Indigenous trade—pillars of the port city's market—results in an incomplete picture of the colony's economy and transimperial position.Instead, Rodriguez investigates the city's most active white merchants using three themes: demography, trade, and political discourse. His first two chapters explore the ethnic makeup of New Orleans, highlighting the commonalities between “foundational merchants,” who were Gallic, Hispanic, or of northern European ancestry (p. 36). The third and fourth chapters establish that these chimerical traders used their multiple identities—ethnic, national, religious—to successfully practice free trade while fulfilling imperial expectations of vecinos, a status akin to royal citizens, which included settling or marrying locally. The final three chapters examine the intellectual life of New Orleans using literacy rates, legal engagement, and political discourse as calculable indicators.Rodriguez uses creative methodologies to analyze archival sources that range from incomplete and fragmentary to exhaustive and arduous. For example, in chapter 3, to calculate fluctuations in the city's economy using disjointed administrative and tax records, Rodriguez created quantifiable data using Works Progress Administration indexes for the New Orleans Notarial Archives to generate a conservative model of general trade activity into and out of the city. Notarial acts hold much information about simple transactions, but they also retain overwhelming data on sales receipts, contracts for goods, mortgages, and leases. Rodriguez's decision to use indexes was an inventive way to sift through boundless information and verify overall economic growth until 1803 despite two slumps beginning in 1788 and 1795. In chapter 5, Rodriguez offers another compelling example of how to mine quantifiable data from a vast source base. He identifies unique signatures across two notarial books to study their clarity and legibility, and he convincingly argues that New Orleans residents were more literate and therefore more educated than historians have previously believed.What scholars already understood about colonial Louisiana, however, is not disrupted by the book. Rodriguez relies on seasoned Louisiana historians like Gilbert Din, Jack Holmes, and Kimberly Hanger when positioning New Orleans within Spanish imperial history. He establishes that locals were diverse, well-versed in Spanish legal practices, eager to engage in transimperial trade, and, verging on the teleological, destined to embrace the United States. Overall, his work is not dissimilar from that of his predecessors. Moreover, his insights align with the more recent historiographical trend to examine US Americans and adventurers in the Spanish Gulf Coast, represented in the work of David Narrett and Andrew McMichael.Latin Americanists might find the account a useful example of a Spanish imperial city that experienced turbulent mercantilist policies, interimperial contraband, and rocky transitions to free trade. However, shortcomings like the absence of a definition for Hispanization or an interrogation of race may prove too distracting. Indeed, one might observe that Rodriguez gives too much credit to so-called “foundational” merchants who “built the Spanish city,” the result of a prosopographical approach that obscures more than it reveals (p. 35).
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Apr 1, 2024
S. J. Zhang 
Open Access