The Cultural Crossroads of Colonial Central America

The study of colonial Central American history, particularly its cultural history, remains in a nascent stage of development compared to that of other parts of colonial Spanish America such as Mexico and Peru. This partly reflects historical study’s “center–periphery paradigm,” which has tended to concentrate scholarly attention on powerful political and economic centers while neglecting places like Central America, deemed as peripheral. Twentieth-century civil wars and political violence impeded archival research and also directed research agendas toward modern historical topics. Over the last thirty years, a small but lively field has expanded in exciting directions including the following four: colonial religious encounters and the emergence of diverse Mayan Christianities; Afro-Central American society and culture; women, sexuality, and gender in urban society; and the images, ideas, and innovations that brought Central Americans closer together but also sparked controversies and conflicts over the long eighteenth century, here defined roughly as 1670 to 1820.

Creating a ‘Pure and Simple Despotism’

This chapter seeks to locate the political economy of conquest within a wider context of British politics in the age of transoceanic global conflict. The Second Anglo-Maratha War was both the most extensive project of military conquest as well as the least debated colonial misadventure. This war—the most ambitious project of military conquest of the long eighteenth century—was also a secret war. The orderly flow of information about a growing list of subjects—the financial health of the Company, political negotiations with Indian polities, military projects—had become a vital part of early colonial rule. Imperial governance relied on the availability of this information to such an extent that when its transmission was disrupted by/under Richard Wellesley, tectonic shifts in the EIC’s bid for hegemony could not be critically scrutinized. The structures that constituted a distinctive early colonial order—ideological privileging of the military over the civilian, elaborating a legal framework for conquest, nourishing a machine of war, restructuring the hierarchies of power, reconceptualization of land as territory yielding revenue—were animated in the war against the Marathas. The financial exhaustion wreaked by the war typified the political economy of conquest that created an early colonial order in South Asia.