In this meticulously researched book, Francis Galán recovers the lost history of Los Adaes, the first capital of Texas (now within the state of Louisiana's boundaries), whose name alludes to the area's Caddoan-speaking Indigenous inhabitants. In 1721, the marqués de Aguayo established the Presidio de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de los Adaes to protect the Spanish missions in East Texas and dissuade French encroachment from nearby Louisiana. The book's seven chapters examine various political, social, and economic processes that marked the existence of this frontier outpost, which became the provincial capital in 1729. Drawing on an impressive array of archival documents from 15 repositories in the United States, Mexico, and Spain, Galán chronicles the history of Los Adaes through the stories of a select cast of its inhabitants and situates local developments within regional and continental contexts, always in conversation with the existing literature.Galán argues that Franciscan friars in East Texas were more successful as cultural brokers than in their intended role as missionaries. Ranching, subsistence agriculture, and, especially, smuggling sustained the economy of Los Adaes and the neighboring French settlement of Natchitoches. People of European, Indigenous, and, to a lesser extent, African descent contributed significantly to the ethnogenesis of the Adaeseños (members of Los Adaes' multiethnic community). The presence of African slaves and Indian captives reinforced a borderlands social hierarchy “where greater fluidity of race and ethnicity did not necessarily translate into equality” (p. 13).Adaeseños and their French neighbors systematically ignored the political boundaries that supposedly separated them, interacting frequently through “commerce, faith, and kinship” (p. 1). Real and fictive kinship between the inhabitants of Los Adaes and Natchitoches mirrored the coetaneous dynastic ties between the Spanish and French Bourbon rulers. Despite the latent rivalry, Spanish soldiers supported the French during the Natchez revolt, and Spanish friars celebrated mass and administered the sacraments at Natchitoches, while Spanish settlements in East Texas remained all along dependent on French contraband.Galán blames the relative penury of Adaeseños on two colonial evils: mercantilism and corruption. Governor-commandants, he argues, treated East Texas as a personal fiefdom, often to the detriment of presidio soldiers, which gave rise to what he terms “a premodern form of debt peonage” (p. 38). For much of the eighteenth century, anxieties over British ambitions deviated the Spanish crown's attention to other parts of the Americas. This led to the relative abandonment of the perennially undersupplied Los Adaes, which became dependent on assistance and commerce from neighboring Native peoples and the French. Thus Adaeseños generally disregarded Spanish mercantile policies and engaged in persistent, widespread petty smuggling of firearms, tobacco, alcohol, hides, and captives, which kept Los Adaes afloat.Despite the remoteness of Los Adaes, its inhabitants built important networks with other communities in East Texas and beyond. Most interactions occurred at the local level, involving Caddo and other Native peoples as well as nearby Natchitoches. Adaeseños also maintained important connections with other settled parts of Texas, New Spain, Louisiana, and, especially, various independent Indigenous groups who controlled much of the borderlands throughout the colonial period. The Camino Real, which linked Los Adaes with Saltillo via San Antonio de Béxar and the Presidio de San Juan Bautista on the right bank of the Rio Grande, was the main route connecting East Texas with the rest of New Spain.Los Adaes was officially abandoned in 1773, ten years after Spain's acquisition of Louisiana erased Texas's eastern border with France. According to Galán, the forced relocation of most Adaeseños to San Antonio de Béxar, which became the new provincial capital, caused many sorrows, including loss of life, and generated “great resentment against Spanish rule” (p. 13). Many Adaeseño families, though, stayed in or returned to East Texas, where, under the leadership of Adaes-born Antonio Gil Ybarbo, they established the ephemeral settlement of Bucareli on the lower Trinity River in 1774, followed shortly by the extant town of Nacogdoches, founded in 1779.The author incorporates abundant insights from other scholars into his analyses, although not always critically. Some of his assertions seem unwarranted: for instance, that the “república de españoles” included Africans, or that southern Plains Indians “possibly” sold scalps to French traders from Louisiana (pp. 71, 174). By the 1760s, “Jumanos” did not refer to the earlier traders of West Texas but to the Wichita-speaking Taovaya then living on the Red River, near present-day Spanish Fort (p. 160).I praise the author and the press for including transcriptions of the original Spanish documents in the notes—a wise editorial decision that, unfortunately, most publishers resist. Nine appendixes provide abundant economic and demographic data, including mission and presidio inventories and rosters as well as lists of contraband articles. A useful and thorough glossary of Spanish terms precedes the notes. The editor should have proofread the text more carefully to correct sporadic misspellings and a few questionable translations and transcriptions.All in all, Galán's remarkable book provides a welcome addition to the growing historiography on Spanish North America. It should appeal to scholars and lay cultivated readers interested in borderlands, colonial Latin America, and early America, while its clarity and relatively short length make it suitable to teach undergraduate courses.