Colin MacLachlan’s book examines and illustrates the relationship of ideas to action in the government of Spain’s American empire from the beginnings of conquest until the coming of independence. Although something of the same sort was attempted by Mario Góngora in his Studies in the Colonial History of Spanish America, not cited in MacLachlan’s bibliography, a short and coherent account in English of the ideas and values underlying Spain’s policies and practices in the Indies has long been needed, and MacLachlan’s work goes a long way toward meeting this need. He begins by presenting what, following Richard Morse, he calls the “philosophical matrix” of Spain and its empire. He then looks at its practical consequences in the life of Spanish America, and finally considers the way in which it was affected, and subverted, by the introduction of a new, Bourbon “ideology.”

There is a certain rigidity and reductionism about this approach which may well cause some unease. It is not clear, for instance, why the “philosophical matrix” of the Spain of the House of Austria should be considered as in some way less “ideological” than the ideas and attitudes of the Bourbons. Further, since the book has only one reference to Aristotle and two to Aquinas, anyone looking for an authentically philosophical background to Spanish action in the Indies would do better to turn to Anthony Pagden’s The Fall of Natural Man—another book absent from MacLachlan’s bibliography. However, MacLachlan has made a serious and intelligent attempt to analyze and explain the workings of Spanish government in America (and the responses of the creoles) in the context of underlying attitudes and values. He provides some excellent examples of how the system operated in practice, and a good discussion of the new eighteenth-century ideas. MacLachlan shows how these created havoc by destroying the element of predictability in a system which had hitherto been remarkably successful in absorbing tensions and resolving conflicts. Despite far too many misprints and a tendency to bombard the reader with monotone sentences, this book should help make the workings of Spain’s American empire more accessible and more comprehensible to Anglo-American readers sprung from a very different “philosophical matrix.”