In June of 1739, what might have proven to be a festive early-summer afternoon celebrating the fiesta of Corpus Christi in Pátzcuaro (Mexico), instantaneously veered toward deadly combat when a fight broke out in the streets near a commonly used well in the San Augustín neighborhood, close by where the Corpus procession passed. The turn to violence occurred when two groups of men settled an apparently petty dispute with physical measures that ultimately claimed one participant's life. Two Indian nobles, don Juan de Vargas and his nephew, Santiago Valerio, and a Spaniard, Joseph Ruíz (alias Alvarez), composed one party. Two coyotes, Augustín Calvillo and Matías Martínez Serrillo, and a mulatto, Juan Joseph de los Santos, made up the other. The men knew one and other prior to the argument, though it is impossible to glean from the criminal record of the event whether any festering rivalry played into the dispute. Available evidence suggests that Vargas' refusal to accept a sip of charape (a type of pulque) from Ruíz triggered the incident. This rebuff represented an affront that drew Calvillo, Martínez, and Santos into the fray, siding against the native nobles. In the ensuing upheaval, Valerio sustained a fatal stomach wound.

Between 1722 and 1779, the Bourbon kings managed to achieve financial stability without broadening the tax base or borrowing on a large scale. The incorporation of Aragon's territories under the crown of Castile, the Bourbon administrative reforms, sustained population and economic growth during the first half of the eighteenth century, added to the silver coming from the Americas, explain the general increase in income within the existing fiscal constitution. The revenues extracted from the American possessions, in particular from New Spain, were essential in keeping the metropolitan budget balanced. However, from the 1790s onwards, constant international warfare made ordinary revenues collected in the Americas insufficient for financing deficit spending in Spain. To meet shortfalls, the crown implemented extraordinary measures including the collection of loans, donativos, ecclesiastical subsidies, and the enforcement of the Decreto de Consolidación de vales reales in 1804. These measures demonstrate that the Spanish crown increasingly relied on its imperial financial network to balance its budget, and simultaneously postponed the politically costly implementation of a thorough fiscal reform in the metropolis.

One night in April 1822, a slave snuck into Caracas' main plaza, and under cover of darkness, threw the feces of his entire household into the public well. A month later, a local magistrate appeared at the store of José Castellano and Manuel Gonzalez with a contingent of soldiers and arrested them for having ordered their slave to commit this heinous crime. From their jail cell, the two men asserted their innocence and insisted that the magistrate had behaved unacceptably: “Because we have never had any previous warning, because we have not previously been called to appear in court and also because there is no proof … [the magistrate] cannot have been authorised to commit the public insult that he has shamelessly and scandalously put upon our persons.” Their defense relied not only on questions of evidence but also on attacks against the magistrate's civility; they claimed that his actions had transgressed both proper legal and social behavior. This combination of legislative and non-legislative concerns was typical for complaints against officials from the colonial period, and we see it persist directly after independence. In the coming years, however, the formal responsibilities of government employees would change, as would the paradigm for complaints against them.

This article will argue that a seemingly trivial dispute between the Nicaraguan government and an American lumber company operating on Nicaragua's Mosquito Coast escalated to become a major source of tension between the U.S. State Department and Nicaragua, as well as a catalyst that drew U.S. banks into Nicaragua. Despite its significance, the convoluted story of this dispute has attracted little scholarly attention. The importance of the Emery claim was widely acknowledged at the time, however. Stories about it appeared in contemporary newspapers and magazines, and it became a topic worthy of discussion by a U.S. Senate hearing. The claim was also connected to José Santos Zelaya's resignation as president of Nicaragua in the autumn of 1909, a gesture that came shortly after he had agreed to settle the Emery claim.