Machine derived contents note: 1. The Conquistadors and the Rewards of Conquest Bands of warriors in the Reconquest of Spain; 2. The Spanish Empire in the Indies: from Christendom to the System of Nation States; 3. The Institutions and Founding Ideas of the Spanish State in the Indies; 4. Trends in Colonial History and Changes in the Founding; 5. The Enlightenment, Enlightened Despotism and the Ideological Crisis in the Colonies; 6. The New World in Eschatological and Utopian Writings of the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries; 7. The Problem of Periodisation of Post-Columbian History