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… language serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse, and it is the peculiarity of man that he alone … possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust … and it is association in [a common perception of] these things which makes a family and a polis. In part because Aristotle was right, polities are at base regimes for the arbitration of contending claims to a wide range of valuable resources, from authority and prestige to access and control of capital and labor. An intuitively appealing view of arbitration regimes posits that their legitimacy ultimately rests on the contenders' conviction that the judges are not self-interested and that the rules are fair. But in fact, these particular strictures need not encumber a legitimate arbitration regime. People may well widely perceive a self-interested arbiter, so long as he or she stands for a greater righteousness, as their rightful judge. Moreover, rules that are just may be repudiated on the basis of their unfair application; and conversely, unjust rules may be accepted if they are perceived to be fairly applied. In sixteenth century Spanish America, arbitration hinged on the authority of the royal sovereign. The king unabashedly protected the interests of the Crown. But the Crown belonged to the king only because as sovereign he possessed specific, emblematic attributes, such as benevolence, wisdom, and Christian zeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A handful of scholars have written about foreigners in other periods or in other parts of the Spanish American empire. A few authorities in dealing with their own topics have also touched on foreigners. Synthesizing these various views and applying them to colonial Mexico in the first half of the eighteenth century would suggest several things. The most important of these inferences are that Spanish law was reasonably effective in excluding foreigners, that there were a few exceptions such as prisoners of war, illicit traders, and Jesuits, but that even then their numbers were small. Since the kings of Spain and their advisers saw aliens as potential threats to imperial, religious, and mercantile security and since the crown legislated accordingly, it might also be assumed that the Spaniards were both xenophobic and intolerant. Reinforcing this view still further, surviving sixteenth-century Protestant and eighteenth-century Enlightenment prejudices about the Inquisition might exaggerate both the zeal of the Holy Office and the bigotry of Spaniards toward outsiders. The laws were strict, but the documents, primarily from the Archive of the Indies (AGI) in Seville and the National Archive of Mexico (AGN) in Mexico City, suggest that the preceding assumptions misconstrue the situation in New Spain between 1700 and 1760. Prisoners of war often stayed to settle after their release, most foreign merchants had nothing to do with smuggling, and Jesuits were not the only foreign churchmen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]