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...
