These presentations reflect on how the local development of Spanish colonialism that on the surface can seem to diverge from the imaginings of royal legislation, was not a bug but a feature of the attempts by early modern Europeans to exploit and rule over the peoples of the Americas and Asia. Individually the speakers reflect on their own research interests to demonstrate how new methodologies and approaches to extant sources can help scholars read against this old framework of deficit thinking. They provide concrete alternatives to the shortcut approach that many scholars of so-called peripheral spaces have traditionally taken, by which, on the basis of vague royal legislation, scholars turn to the more detailed literature of Mexico and Peru to fill in the many documentary lacunae in their own spaces, instead of working with their different source bases to examine different kinds of questions.

By detailing the different ways in which colonial institutions developed in the Philippines, the Northern Andes, and the Orinoco, the presenters seek to highlight how profoundly local the institutional framework of Spanish empire really was and how a more capacious understanding of this diversity can open up new angles from which we can explore participation of diverse groups in empire. These presentations invite us to reflect on how local responses to local circumstances in low-resource and low-manpower environments were generative rather than derivative, and to consider that these dynamics were likely more common across the vast and heterogeneous empire than the experiences of imperial centers.