The Riego Revolt of January 1, 1820 awakened hopes in much of the Spanish-speaking world that constitutionalism might again speed up the process of modernization. A few days later, King Ferdinand VII reinstated the Constitution of 1812, the “Niña Bonita” of the Cádiz years. Asking his overseas subjects to take the oath to the Constitution, he likewise urged them to participate in the impending parliamentary elections. He announced an amnesty for the insurgents in the Americas and assured everyone that all would be forgotten. The Spanish government was less disposed to welcome back the hated afrancesados, who had collaborated with the French invaders. Such vindictiveness, of course, incited political anarchy throughout Spain. The economic weakness of the Peninsula, plus the financial drain of war overseas, further heightened national chaos. These were indeed troublesome years for Spain and her second constitutional experiment. Prospects for reconciliation with American dissidents were not at all promising. If peace could not be restored in America, what action was Spain prepared to take? Would she accept the inevitable—the Independence of the Americas? These were some of the questions that tormented Spanish leaders in Madrid. Other Europeans, keenly interested in the developments taking place in Spain and America, appreciated their economic and international significance. The fate of European liberalism was also at stake.

The social milieu in which slavery took place in Latin America, especially colonial Colombia and Ecuador, was markedly different than in Brazil, the Caribbean, or the thirteen colonies. Paternalistic attitudes of church and government, protective legislation, a slow, even stagnant, pace of economic development and other factors created a situation which a knowledgeable and enterprising slave could often turn to his advantage and even manipulate.

From the beginning the Catholic Church took the position that slavery was a contractual arrangement whereby the slave placed his time and the result of his labor at the disposal of his master, but that he remained a human being with certain innate rights: the right to life, limb, body and reputation. A master could not keep his slaves from marrying, for example, for to do so deprived him of the rights of the body. For a violation of any of these rights the master must make restitution to the slave, as if he were a free man. Moreover, in Catholic theology the soul of the black man was equally as important as the soul of any human being.

Richard Greenleaf, in urging ethnohistorians of Indian response to Spanish Catholic culture to be attentive to the inquisitorial record, pointed especially to two unusually rich bodies of documentation, one generated by the Oaxacan enquiry of the 1540's and 1550's; the other by the “idolatry trials” of Yucatán in 1562. Most of the material relating to the Yucatecan episode has long been easily accessible to scholars through France Scholes' and Eleanor Adams' magnificent publication of 1938. Scholes, in his introduction to that work, and then in an article he wrote in conjunction with the great ethnographer of the Maya, Ralph Roys, judged the Indian confessions elicited in the course of the inquisition to be largely based on fact, and therefore concluded that the Maya Indians of Yucatán, after their apparent conversion, had not only continued to worship their old idols, but had returned to an intensified practice of human sacrifice in which some victims had been subjected to preliminary crucifixion.

The pulpería, a country store and tavern, stood with the estancia as the most important socio-economic institutions of the Argentine pampa. The store served multiple social and commercial functions (both licit and illicit) and survived into the twentieth century despite virulent verbal attacks and calls for legislative restriction from the colonial era on. Some commentators lauded the pulpería as the outpost of civilization on the savage frontier and projected the pulpero or proprietor as civilization's lonely representative in a barbarian world. He supposedly embodied patriotism, culture, and free enterprise in a hostile, alien environment of anti-social, localistic, unlettered gauchos—the itinerant horsemen of the pampas. Evidence weighs heavily in the opposite direction; however, and the pulpero of fact rather than myth functioned as a contraband capitalist exploiting the landless rural masses and preying upon ranchers whose livestock provided the goods for illicit trade. Far from encouraging culture and civilization on the vast pampa, the pulpería housed excessive drinking and gambling, prostitution, and served as an arena for violent, often fatal, knifefights.

Samuel J. Prescod's path into Barbados' House of Assembly is singular in the island's history. The first Afro-Barbadian to sit on the island's highest elective body, he became its first representative from Bridgetown, the most populous and colorful constituency in Barbados. Most significantly, Prescod's electoral victory on June 6, 1843 symbolized the primary triumph of genuine freedom for the Barbadian working class, an accomplishment the Colonial Office was unable to implement in the island's community for almost thirty years through forced imperial legislation.