David Weber spent the first three decades of his career transforming himself into the master synthesizer of Spanish and Mexican history in southwestern North America. In Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment, however, he casts a rigorous comparative gaze across two continents, examining the strategies employed by Spain’s Bourbon reformers to confront the independent Indian nations that contained Spanish expansion from the Argentine pampas to the Great Plains.
John Lynch’s review of Weber’s The Spanish Frontier in North America inspired this massive undertaking. Lynch “gently chided” Weber for failing to compare and contrast Spain’s northern frontier with its frontiers in Central and South America (p. xiii). Weber rose to the challenge and began more than a decade of research in Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. As his enormous bibliography and exhaustive end-notes reveal, Weber has mastered both the Spanish- and English-language literature produced...
