Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire

Ida Altman is Professor of History at the University of New Orleans. Her book Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century received the 1990 Herbert E. Bolton Prize of the Conference on Latin American History.

"The stories that Altman relates are revealing accounts of individual experiences in a transatlantic community."—Hispanic American Historical Review "This superb case study of migration from a Spanish town to an emerging community in New Spain over a 60-year period has broad applicability and implications for the study of transatlantic migration in the early modern period." —John Kicza, Washington State University "The book exposes and illuminates, as no other study that I know of, the process by which people, institutions, and cultural norms traveled from the Old World to the New during the early modern period, and how they adapted to the American milieu. This is a major accomplishment. And Altman delivers it in elegant prose and and engaging style."—International Migration Review "Ida Altman has written a book that both probes deeply the significance of tying together Iberian and American domains under a common Crown government and brilliantly demonstrates how the comparative history of the first global age ought to be approached. . . . Throughout well-organized and well-written chapters on economic, political, religious, and social life, the book underlines its methodological message: in order to understand the nature and impact of migration, researchers must focus on locality."—Comparative Studies in Society and History "With this monograph, Ida Altman completes her innovative conspectus of postconquest culture in specific regions of sixteenth-century Spain and New Spain, begun with her Emigrants and Society. . . . Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire is ground level social history based on careful exploitation of manuscript materials, notably in repositories of Puebla and Mexico City, Seville, and Madrid."—American Historical Review "Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire should be on the book-shelves of every historian of early modern times."The Journal of European Economic History "This book offers a highly readable and interesting account of the experiences and ambitions of ordinary Spanish migrants to America; it is recommended to historians of colonial Spanish America and immigration scholars more generally."—The Historian "The many strengths of this level-headed and well-written book serve to remind us that alas, all too rarely historians undertake sustained research on both sides of the Atlantic. Even less often do they come up with such impressive results."—Journal of Modern History

• Introduction 1. Settlement, space and mobility 2. The economic sphere 3. Politics and public life 4. The religious realm 5. Marriage and family 6. Social relations Conclusion Glossary Notes Bibliography Index.