On January 4, 1614, a fat thirty-year old mulatto with reddish-black hair rode into the town of Tula and stopped at the inn. The man's horse was a roan mare, thin, saddle-backed, and run down. The stirrups of his saddle were barely intact. Such arrivals, however commonplace, never failed to interest the curious, this time to the stranger's harm. Onlookers told don Gabriel Arías de Riquelme, alcalde mayor, that the man was Juan Vázquez, a bigamist. Don Gabriel, always ready to strike against the lawless, especially one of the “unruly ox drivers” so irksome to the town, acted at once. He arrested Juan, placed him in the local jail, and reported to the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico City.

Carlos Martínez de Irujo y Tacón was first secretary of the Spanish Embassy in London, when he received a promotion and transfer as minister plenipotentiary of the Spanish legation in Philadelphia, replacing the chargé d'affaires, José Jáudenes y Nebot, who returned to Spain for a new assignment. Carlos Martínez de Irujo arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 1796 and assumed his duties. Soon after arrival, the diplomat met, and apparently was captivated by, Sally McKean, the vivacious sixteen-year old daughter of Pennsylvania's chief justice and one of the state's most respected citizens—Thomas McKean. Two years later the couple married at St. Augustine Parochial Church in Philadelphia. Sally McKean, being from an influential American family, along with her own charm, grace, intelligence and beauty, contributed greatly to the success of her husband's mission in the United States. In 1802, as a result of his diplomatic services in Philadelphia, Martínez de Irujo received the Spanish aristocratic title of Marquis of Casa Irujo, with his Philadelphia-born wife becoming the first Marquise of Casa Irujo. He served as Spanish minister in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., until 1808, when he was reassigned to Spain, accompanied by his wife and their six year old son. This Spanish diplomat culminated a brilliant professional career when he was named Secretary of State in 1819.

It is generally accepted that the Bourbon Reforms were designed to reestablish Peninsular vigor through colonial renewal. What is often unappreciated is that this pristinely simple goal obscures an underlying tangle. The essential thrust was to recolonize the Indies, and to this end economic life was reordered so as to accentuate the New World's role as supplier of precious and exotic products and as consumer of Spanish manufactures. Equally important, however, was the fiscal dimension. The crown wished to generate enough revenues to be able to bear the increasing burden of colonial defense, but beyond this it also wanted the overseas dominions to aid the mother country in defraying European expenses judged essential to a great power.

“Let pass Manuel Nunes Viana, a man of medium build, round of face, with brown eyes and black hair”. Made by the official at the register on the Rio Grande in the interior of Brazil on May 14, 1717, this is the only physical description of a charismatic figure whose word was law in the backlands of Brazil in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. A native of Viana do Castelo in northern Portugal, Nunes Viana migrated to Brazil around the 1680's. Salvador was his point of entry but, after killing an assailant he lay low until pardoned by the governor; subsequently, he left for the sertão where he was to establish residence for some 40 years near to the bar of the Rio das Velhas. He sired at least six daughters and four sons. During his lifetime he returned to Portugal on two occasions, and was a minor literary Maecenas although in 1717 his signature is that of a barely literate man. He was financially successful as a result of ventures in cattle ranching, commerce in foodstuffs to the developing mining areas, and investments in alluvial mining. Alone, and in league with his cousin Manuel Rodrigues Soares, he ruled the sertão of the captaincies of Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Pernambuco for two decades, before dying in the mid-1730's. He cocked a snook at governors and viceroys, although his loyalty to the crown was never called into question. If one viceroy in 1715 could report to the crown that Nunes Viana was not only the “most capable” of the inhabitants of the sertão and the best suited to carry out the royal will, the following year the Overseas Council in Lisbon was to refer to him as “guilty of many crimes.” Not surprisingly the king was at a loss to know whether he had a saint or a sinner on his hands. Governors ran the full gamut from regarding him as the only possible instrument to maintain a royal presence in the Brazilian west to considering him a cancer to be eliminated before infecting the loyalty and wellbeing of the colonial flock. To some settlers, he may have been a Robin Hood of the backlands, but for others he was a cruel and despotic figure who meted out arbitrary justice with excessive cruelty. Whatever the divergence of views, one fact was certain: Manuel Nunes Viana was not a man to whom anybody could remain indifferent.

The international situation in which the early Haitian republic found itself between 1820 and 1843 aggravated its internal problems and precipitated its economic decline. The economic structure of the new country had been weakened by the destruction of the colonial sugar plantations during the war of liberation against France (1791-1804). It proved impossible to resurrect these in the republican era, because of the lack of capital and the unwillingness of the ex-slaves to return to plantation life. They wanted property of their own, and this insistence forced successive governments to distribute land to them. Only Henri Christophe, who ruled the North as a kingdom (1806-1820), succeeded in maintaining the old system through forced labor; an experiment which died with him. Dramatic as these changes were, however, they were not sufficient to prevent the resurgence of a new economy based on coffee; a crop which was well suited to peasant cultivation. The shift towards coffee exports had begun in the last years of the colonial era and accelerated in the years after 1804. An economy of smallholders engaged in the cultivation of coffee and provisions existing alongside the remaining plantations could have provided a modest foundation for economic growth. Alexandre Pétion, the first president of Haiti (1806-1818), had envisioned this possibility and it was one of the reasons which he gave for carrying out the first land reform in Latin America. Haiti was a major exporter of coffee in the first half of the nineteenth century, and there were a number of foreign merchants already present in the country to purchase the crop. Instead of economic prosperity, the years after 1820 witnessed an economic decline which made the first black nation virtually ungovernable after 1843 save by the rule of caudillos.