Spanish Bluecoats: The Catalonian Volunteers in Northwestern New Spain, 1767-1810

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. Paperback. In quite good condition.. Octavo, [22.5cm/9inches], paperbound with pictorial covers, pp.196, indexed. Fully Illustrated with b-w halftones, &tc. Please feel free to inquire as to particulars and/or additional photographs. ... RJanet R. Fireman, Chief Curator of History, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County noted in Ith San Diego Historical Society Quarterly, -(Winter 1992, Volume 38, Number 1): "Following the Seven Years’ War, military reorganization in North America was high on the Spanish king’s administrative priority list. Attention was addressed toward enhancement of the military in New Spain, and particularly along the northern frontier of what by then had become Spain’s richest American colony. East of the Mississippi, Great Britain’s very presence offered one threat to the Southwest. From within, some Indian populations attacked Spanish property and persons. Commercially driven British seamen, and Russians as well, approached Pacific shores from the East. The Free Company of Catalonian Volunteers was one element of the grandiose design set in place in the last third of the eighteenth century, meant to address these exterior and interior threats to empire. Here, as in others of the Bourbon Reforms, the administrators’ thinking was Eurocentric and metropolitan: certain troops, raised from a particular region and named to reflect pride in that patria chica, would be designated as an elite unit, trained in the homeland, and seasoned by European campaigns. So prepared, they were sent to the broad expanses of northern New Spain, and assigned to hot spots that would benefit from their superior skills.

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