Studies on early modern Spanish administration have revealed its rapid development, ongoing transformations, and adaptation to the New World’s conditions (Osorio, 2008; Cañeque, 2004). These changes did not end after the first decades of colonization. Recent scholarship shows that throughout periods of war, natural disaster, and economic bankruptcy, the Hapsburg rulers developed innovative projects and strategies to improve royal administration in the seventeenth century (Ribot, 2006; Thompson and Yun Casalilla, 1994). Additional scholars have demonstrated early eighteenth-century transformations laid the foundation for the later so-called Bourbon reforms (Walker, 2008; Pearce, 2015). These endeavors, however, generated different reactions among those colonial authorities and subjects affected. This panel explores colonial administrators and subjects’ responses to the Crown’s attempts to impose control and reform measures.

These responses reveal the Crown’s continuous interest and attempt to restructure different branches of the colonial administration in Spanish America and colonial subjects’ strategies to deal with them. Judith Mansilla’s work shows the audit to Lima’s royal treasury and its administrators halted diverse abusive practices in the late seventeenth century. James Almeida’s study examines the Crown’s program of “modernizing” Spanish American mints and its impact on Creole elites, who resisted the new changes between the 1720s and 1770s. Silvia Escanilla’s paper explores the transformations that Southern-Andean cacicazgos experienced because of the Crown’s administrative reforms imposed on them after the cycle of Andean rebellions of the late eighteenth century. Altogether, these papers demonstrate the dynamic interplay between the Crown’s reform attempts and colonial subjects’ responses to them.