Allan J. Kuethe is an académico correspondiente of the Spanish Royal Academy of History and has published extensively on eighteenth-century Spain and America both in the United States and in Europe. His work began with monographs on military reform, then extended to commercial policy, and, as expressed in the present volume, has advanced to a comprehensive overview of Bourbon Madrid's struggle to modernize and to sustain its vast holdings in the Western hemisphere. He is Paul Whitfield Horn Professor at Texas Tech University, to which he has dedicated his entire academic career. Kenneth J. Andrien specializes in colonial Latin American history, focusing specifically on the Andean region from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Most recently he has broadened his focus to place the history of colonial Latin America within the context of the early modern Atlantic World. He is author of Crisis and Decline: The Viceroyalty of Peru in the Seventeenth Century (1985), The Kingdom of Quito, 1690–1830: The State and Regional Development (1996) and, most recently, Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness under Spanish Rule, 1532–1825 (2001). He has also published numerous articles in journals such as Past and Present, Hispanic American Historical Review, Colonial Latin American Review and Journal of Latin American Studies. He is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in History at Southern Methodist University.