In Service of Two Masters

Download or read book In Service of Two Masters written by Cameron D. Jones and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early 1700s, the vast scale of the Spanish Empire led crown authorities to rely on local institutions to carry out their political agenda, including religious orders like the Franciscan mission of Santa Rosa de Ocopa in the Peruvian Amazon. This book follows the Ocopa missions through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period marked by events such as the indigenous Juan Santos Atahualpa Rebellion and the 1746 Lima earthquake. Caught between the directives of the Spanish crown and the challenges of missionary work on the Amazon frontier, the missionaries of Ocopa found themselves at the center of a struggle over the nature of colonial governance. Cameron D. Jones reveals the changes that Spain's far-flung empire experienced from borderland Franciscan missions in Peru to the court of the Bourbon monarchy in Madrid, arguing that the Bourbon clerical reforms that broadly sought to bring the empire under greater crown control were shaped in turn by groups throughout the Americas, including Ocopa friars, the Amerindians and Africans in their missions, and bureaucrats in Lima and Madrid. Far from isolated local incidents, Jones argues that these conflicts were representative of the political struggles over clerical reform occurring throughout Spanish America on the eve of independence.