The free colored experience represents an enigma in colonial Spanish American historiography. Even at slavery’s mid-seventeenth-century peak, New Spain’s free colored population outnumbered slaves, and the number of free coloreds continued to grow unabated into the eighteenth century. Throughout this period, New Spain’s free coloreds constituted the largest such population in all of the Americas. A comparable demographic trajectory characterized the free colored experience in Peru. Until now, the predominance of slavery studies, the question of sources, and the problem of conceptualizing the subjectivity of free coloreds have inhibited social historical studies of this important segment of the colonial population.
In Bearing Arms for His Majesty, Ben Vinson has begun the monumental task of recovering this population from historical obscurity. Using New Spain’s militia as his lens, the author sheds light on the free colored experience as it touched on the defense of the colony. He observes that from...
