Spanish Bourbons and Wild Indians

These essays chronicle the Spanish Empire's "enlightened" policies toward the Indians of the Americas in the late eighteenth century. In "Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment," Weber begins by noting that Indians independently controlled most of the area that Spain claimed to own toward the end of the colonial era. Spaniards, acutely aware that they lived in the Age of Reason and not the Age of Conquest, came to accommodations with some of these "savages" or "wild Indians," wh…