The key issue of this reading is how the Spaniards and Portuguese set about governing the land they had just gained during the conquest. We have spent the first eight weeks of the semester studying indigenous cultures, and this represents a significant change in subject matter—from conquering land to ruling over it. Maintaining power over the colonies in the face of considerable distance, hostile indigenous populations, and ambitious conquistadors, required significant planning, and this chapter provided us with a particularly detailed explanation on how the Spanish empire (with a little bit of time spent on the Portuguese empire) worked to overcome such obstacles. The Spanish bureaucratic system was complicated and composed of a number
