This chapter describes the market for high-level colonial offices in eighteenth-century Spanish America. It starts by providing an overview of the territorial and institutional organization of the Spanish Empire at the time as well as the positions that constituted the “supply”: their number, rank, and institutional attributes. The rest of the chapter then focuses on the determinants of demand through the analysis of office prices, buyer characteristics, and the profitability of certain positions versus others. Estimates show how, all else equal, positions with greater rank and power as well as those more profitable, drew higher prices on average. It also finds that individuals of higher social status or more connected to the Crown – of military, nobility, or Spanish origin – were heavily “subsidized” to occupy office vis-à-vis those lacking those traits. Altogether, this is consistent with office prices revealing important information about the expected returns of certain positions versus others.

Part I, “Hybrid Bureaucracy: How Race and Emergency Shaped the Organization of Colonial Rule,” comprises one chapter. It stipulates the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings for the organizing principles of hybrid bureaucracy to challenge the view that British colonial bureaucracy did not have a set of distinct institutional forms and theories of administration. It proposes that “looking over the shoulder of the bureaucrat” from the perspective of colonial officials provides a set of organizing principles of hybrid bureaucracy that were not in and of themselves, but rather served as sources of power. It generates a synthetic model of this type of bureaucracy to provide scaffolding for the analysis of how explicitly racialized practices and a perpetual state of emergency affect bureaucratic organization and practice.