ABSTRACT
Early sixteenth-century Spanish conquests were so spectacular and created such an extensive new empire for the Habsburg dynasty that it is easy to forget that most of the western hemisphere continental land mass remained beyond the reach of Europeans until the eighteenth century. Erase the coastlines, and the map of European settlement in the Americas looks more like Indonesia or the Philippines than a solid continental territory. Meanwhile resistance continued along several frontiers into the nineteenth and even the twentieth centuries, punctuated by periods of truce regulated by treaties that implicitly or explicitly recognized the continuing sovereignty of indigenous polities.
