The subject of this monograph is Spain's support system for a maritime periphery. As analyzed in Chapter 20, it is a flexible system which combines viceregal subsidies and Indian services in varying proportions within a changing total, the variations being functions of changes occurring over time in royal policies and resources, foreign threats and options, and economic opportunities. ...Since writing The King's Coffer, I have become increasingly conscious of Indian elites and of the multiple functions of lndian towns under Spanish rule as centers of indoctrination, defense outposts, labor enclaves, nodes in the provincial transportation network, units of agricultural production, and places of refuge. This interest has led me to a reexamination of the structure and operation of the system of viceregal subsidies, this time concentrating on the subsidies to the missions and missionaries, the chiefs, and the religious institutions of St. Augustine. Apologies ...Interdisciplinary scholarship is by nature homeless. For anthropologists and archaeologists, this study is likely to have too many events and particulars and too little site-specific information; for social historians, it will have too much material culture and too little analysis and the citations will be distracting. It careens from text to text too superficially for specialists in comparative literature; it has too many stories and too little data for sociologists. Apologists and assailants of Spain in America who search the book for ammunition will each accuse me of giving aid and comfort to the other. As one of the historical consultants for the St. Catherines Island project of the American Museum of Natural History, I have for several years interested myself in a particular group of Christian Guales who occupied the border town of Santa Catalina de la Frontera in 1680, tracking them forward and backward through the patchy documentary record. I have fitted the yield of this research into a nested set of pictures of (1)the province of Guale, (2) the colony of Florida, (3) the North American Southeast, and (4) the centers and seaways of the Spanish empire. The advantage of this approach is that it allows, as it were, several levels of magnification. For greater detail, one can switch lenses downward from Florida to Guale Province, to the migrating community of Santa Catalina, or even to the individual. Opting for larger scope, one can see the colony as a whole, or in increasingly larger contexts, the largest being that of all the early modem peripheries. I have dispensed with a glossary, choosing to define an unfamiliar term on the page where it first appears and list that in the index. In some cases I have retained a Spanish term for the sake of precision. The English word "Indian," for example, carries no information about hierarchy or gender. In Spanish, by contrast, native commoners or vassals were called either "indios" or "indias"; native rulers were known as "indios" and "indias principales,""seftores naturales,"or caciques and cacicas. In other cases, the English counterparts to Spanish terms have too many connotations. "Infidel," "pagan," and "heathen" are not equivalent to "in.fie!," which means no more than a non-Christian native. Ethnic labels I likewise avoid the terms "African," "African-American," and "black." The first two require a knowledge of origins that is seldom available, and the other is too imprecise for a society that recognized numerous color gradations in the "castas," including "negro," "pardo," "mulato," and "moreno." I use the general term "Spanish" or "espanol" for all those who lived in a Spanish manner and were accepted as such. The word "Spaniard" is reserved for an espanol born in Spain; ''floridano," for one born in Florida. Before the Bourbons came to the throne, Spanish Americans seem to have used "criollo" in two ways, to refer to their American-born black slaves or to make rude references to someone from another colony. The word "creole" has proven so convenient, however, that historians of the Hapsburg era have adopted it, and I am no exception. (Bushnell SS)