Amazon.com description: Product Description: These lectures chronicle the Spanish Empire's policies toward the Indians of the Americas in the late eighteenth century. Since Indians independently controlled most of the area that Spain claimed to own, the Spaniards began to make significant political accommodations with some of these "savages" or "wild Indians," whom they could neither defeat nor convert. Weber demonstrates that Spain's ideal mission changed between the Habsburg and Bourbon eras and, more importantly, local circumstances and local people, including Indians, determined how a mission would measure up to the Crown's objectives.