This is the story of how an experienced and enlightened administrator intent on introducing reforms into a frontier settlement badly in need of them was frustrated in that intent by a lack of means and by circumstances. Circumstances forced him to spend most of his term dealing with threats to the security of his colony, first from William Bowles (1791), then from Genet’s conspiracies (1793), and, finally, from internal rebellion led by Anglo-American settlers who would not accept the constraints of living in a Spanish colony that had restrictive laws governing trade (1795). Consequently, education, the hospital, and other areas of civilian life that were the objects of his enlightened concern had to take second place.
This book is more a study of the times than of the man or of the problems of imperial administration in the 1790s. As such, it adds valuable narrative details to our knowledge of the second Spanish period (1783-1821), but leaves a number of analytical questions unanswered. Nor do we learn in every case what became of Nepomuceno de Quesada’s proposals, nor why the government acted on some but not others.
Both the merits and defects of this book can be traced to an overdependence on Nepomuceno de Quesada’s own correspondence as found in the East Florida Papers and to a failure to consult the literature on the Spanish empire during this period (save for Richard Herr’s 18th Century Revolution and Herbert Priestley’s José de Gálvez) while using secondary materials that narrowly focus on Florida or aspects of the events in question. The narrative details might also have been more rigorously subordinated to the analytical framework set up in the introduction and conclusion.
As Borderlands history, this work is standard stuff and a useful addition to the literature; as Latin American history, it leaves much to be desired.
