Benito Arrevillaga was a postman in Guatemala. Its colonial-era audiencia extended from Chiapas to Costa Rica, and Arrevillaga was a long-distance correo who worked the long south-eastern route that ran from the highlands down Central America. On one such trip, in 1794, he fell ill between Guatemala City and San Salvador. Pressing on to San Miguel, he grew sicker; but determined to make it to Nicaragua, he carried the mail on foot for two more days before collapsing in El Viejo, about 25 miles from León. He barely had time to ‘prepare himself for death and receive the sacraments’ (p. 115). A senior official in Guatemala recommended that Arrevillaga's widow and four children be granted a small pension.

The Arrevillaga case does not play a major role in this dissertation-based monograph by Sylvia Sellers-García; it is merely an anecdote, buried in the fourth of the book's six chapters, recounted almost as briefly by Sellers-García as it is above. But it is one of dozens of moments in which she clearly and vividly reveals the ways in which a potentially dry topic, how documents moved around the Spanish American provinces, might be used to evoke a nexus of insights into how empire functioned; specifically, how its provinces were tied together by the flow of paperwork, and how those ties were perceived by the people who wrote, carried, read, and stored that paperwork.

This fascinating book succeeds on two levels. First, it is, despite the generality of its title, a regional study of highland Guatemala and its audiencia in the late-colonial period, with important attention to the early years of the independence era; most of the book's sources date from the 1770s through 1830s, and it is commendably well rooted in archival materials from the Archivo General de Centroamérica in Guatemala City and the Archivo General de Indias in Seville. Sellers-García does a fine job of conveying the nature of those sources (transparent summaries, pertinent quotes, full citations, and so on). She even makes a contribution to the study of independence, by showing how ‘perceptions of Guatemalan space’ (p. 141) evolved gradually in the late-eighteenth century, not as a result of the transition from empire to federation to republic, but anticipating it, even helping to make it possible. On all these grounds alone, the book should be compulsory reading for all scholars of colonial and nineteenth-century Central America. Likewise, it should also be of interest to all colonial Latin Americanists.

Second, the book succeeds as an exploration of the dynamic between the two material and conceptual categories that begin its title: documents and distance. Sellers-García is interested in how knowledge in Spain's imperial provinces was ‘created along routes’, ‘gathered radially’ (p. 19), organised on paper, shared, and preserved. Documents were generated and transported in order to ‘flatten’ and ‘overcome’ distance (pp. 25, 26), but they also reflected it and were born of it. The implications of this system of colonial knowledge production stretch all the way to the present, to us, because understanding the system ‘allows us different insights into all of the documents we use as colonial historians’ (p. 187). Her book's ‘central claim’, states Sellers-García, ‘is that spatial history matters to the social history of knowledge’ (p. 19); one might also view the book as an exploration of the dialectic between spatial history and the social history of knowledge. Colonial Central America makes for a good case study, because of the ‘spatial and temporal distances separating places in the Spanish Empire’ (p. 17), and because that empire so heavily fostered the creation and archiving of documentation. But the clarity of Sellers-García's arguments regarding these topics and their relevance to historical methodology afford them a universal applicability. It is a tribute to the stimulating way in which she has constructed her book that one cannot help but imagine ways to connect it to numerous other works of scholarship, from studies of archives in Peru and France to studies of roadbuilding and mapmaking in Mexico and India.