In his foreword to Negotiation within Domination, Brian Owensby asks how a relatively small number of Spaniards could assert dominion over such an extensive, diverse and populous region as New Spain, and do so for roughly 300 years. This collection of eight essays responds to Owensby's question by detailing the flexible and contingent nature of that dominion. Covering four distinct regions of New Spain – the northern frontier, Mexico City, Oaxaca and the southern gulf coast – and spanning the entire colonial era, these essays document various forms of native engagement with colonial rule, and the consequent remodelling of the nature of domination. Susan Kellogg's introduction sets the work within a historiography of recent decades that has begun the exploration of how the dominated came to shape the institutions of the imperial state, highlighting the frequent indigenous embrace of Spanish legal norms as a means to negotiate colonial rule. Colonial authorities, in the form of encomenderos, missionaries and royal representatives, were forced to adapt their goals and controls as different indigenous peoples challenged Spanish rule on terms specific to their own cultural perspectives.

Jovita Baber examines indigenous negotiation in Tlaxcala as the new colonial system was being forged during the first generation after the conquest. Quick to adopt Spanish legal tactics and rhetoric, in 1528 Tlaxcalan elites petitioned for and won status as free vassals of the crown, self-governing and exempt from being awarded as part of an encomienda. Then in 1535 Tlaxcala gained recognition as a city, giving it municipal authority over neighbouring pueblos. Such negotiations served the Tlaxcalan elite, who expanded Tlaxcalan authority over rival communities to beyond pre-Columbian limits. These negotiations also served the crown, which sought to preserve its own authority in the face of increasingly powerful encomenderos. Baber argues that such negotiations show that the crown relied on accepting native elites as allies against power-hungry conquistadors. Furthermore, these negotiations set precedent in the construction of Spanish colonial rule, leading the crown to encourage viceroys to recognise indigenous municipalities across the colonies, creating ‘a system of compromises – a system in which political institutions accommodated and often encouraged the continuity of local customs and traditions’ (p. 33).

The struggle between the crown and Spanish colonisers continues in Ethelia Ruiz Medrano's examination of the 1560s conspiracy by the encomenderos of central Mexico to revolt against the crown. In this early age of colonial development, Spanish authority was still a fluid project. Relationships among the representatives of Spanish authority, both religious and political, remained hotly contested. Friars denounced the actions of high-level colonial officials while Philip II sought to contain the power of encomenderos. Mexica nobles tried to retain what authority they could over their native subjects by choosing which representatives of Spanish authority to recognise. Ruiz Medrano argues that Mexica nobles sought to side with the encomenderos, seeking potential power in a state free of Iberian control. If the nature of indigenous obedience to colonial rule was fluid in central Mexico in the immediate wake of the conquest, it remained so two centuries later. Edward Osowski explores the dependence of Spanish authorities on native town councils and community leaders to mobilise resources for the annual Holy Week festival. The processions of Holy Week were clear manifestations of the triumph of Christianity over the native population, and essential demonstrations of colonial authority. Yet Spanish authorities were forced to preserve the authority of powerful indigenous communities and their leaders to organise native participation in the festival. Thus Holy Week processions were both acts of faithful obeisance and expressions of native autonomy.

Further south, Zapotec natives applied Spanish notions of legal justice as a tool to secure domination over rival native communities. María de los Angeles Romero Frizzi's study of indigenous deployment of Spanish law in the Sierra Zapoteca highlights the collision of ‘two distinct legal codes: that of the Spanish magistrate, with his ideas and image of the world, and that of the Indians, the two interlinked in a complicated, ever-changing relationship’ (p. 113). In this milieu of conflicting concepts of legality and power, indigenous communities that embraced the Spanish system of rule were able to assert greater authority over rival pueblos. Yanna Yannakakis explores how the Zapotec inflected their usage of Spanish law with traditional conceptions of legal legitimacy. Zapotec leaders challenged the state through legal proceedings, deploying the language and practice of indigenous custom, or costumbre, as an alternative model to state power, again forcing the imperial state to adapt colonial law to local conditions.

In his study of Bourbon-era efforts to pacify the northern border of the colony, Cuauhtémoc Velasco Ávila identifies how Spanish negotiations with the Apaches and Comanches necessarily had to be adapted to each group. These negotiations were characterised by internal conflict among the Spanish commanders, who variously favoured bellicose or political approaches to resolving the future of the northern frontier. Velasco Ávila challenges the idea that it was Bourbon militarisation that brought peace to the frontier, instead arguing that peace on the frontier was reliant on negotiated settlement with native peoples, and that the inconsistency of Spanish policy toward frontier peoples prolonged unstable relations in the regions of Texas and New Mexico.

The final study in the volume is José Manuel Cháves Gómez's account of the peregrinations of several Maya communities of south-western Yucatan along the perimeters of Spanish dominion. These groups, some of whom had earlier fled the depredations of Spanish officials or the scourge of disease outbreak, and others who had remained outside the radius of Spanish incursion, shaped colonial domination not through direct resistance to Spanish authority but through flight and eventual judicious acceptance of Catholic doctrine.

In all of the examples, negotiation as much as domination defined how Spanish colonial authorities were able to establish and maintain authority among a population that vastly exceeded their own. From the first generation of colonisation until the last decades of Bourbon presence in New Spain, the Spanish authority was evolving not merely to seek its own ends, but to do so within the limitations imposed by native people's efforts to preserve their own autonomy. Negotiation within Domination's most significant contribution is the degree to which it illustrates the multifarious ways in which negotiation shaped colonial New Spain. Negotiation was much more than a binary dialogue between natives and Spaniards; rather, it was a crowded and evolving conversation among numerous constituencies on both sides of the machinery of colonialism. ‘Colonial states and legal institutions did not exist as static monoliths,’ writes Yanna Yannakakis, ‘but rather emerged over time in dialectic with native litigation and political-legal culture’ (p. 138).