In the twilight years of the eighteenth century, Spanish authorities of church and state resolved that the original Franciscan missions of Texas had achieved the goal of their early foundation, namely conversion of indigenous cultures to an Hispano-European lifestyle. Cognizant that the mission as a frontier agency had gained souls for the Catholic faith and citizens for the empire, Hispanic officials initiated secularization of the Texas establishments with the longest tenure, beginning with the missions along the upper San Antonio River. Less than a generation later, in the transition from Spanish dominion to Mexican rule in the nineteenth century, the Franciscan institutions, woefully in a condition of material neglect, engendered widespread secular avarice as numerous applicants with political contact in municipal government energetically competed to obtain land grants among the former mission temporalities.

Muffled by the night and sobered by their unexpectedly serious task, Corregidor José Manrique y Guzmán and two squads of militia quietly approached the Jesuit college of Arequipa at four o'clock on the morning of September 17, 1767. Manrique had secretly gathered his scribe and the troops during the night after receiving an astounding royal decree from Viceroy Amat in Lima. The top-secret dispatch ordered Manrique to detain all Jesuits within the province of Arequipa in preparation for their expulsion from the Spanish empire. Similar orders had gone out to royal officials throughout Charles III's domains. In Arequipa Manrique found all but three of the local Jesuits housed within the college. He read them the royal edict, placed them under house arrest until provisions could be made for transporting them to Lima, ordered the detention of the three padres absent from the college, and confiscated all the Jesuits' properties.

With the acceptance of the Federal Constitution of 1853 by the province of Buenos Aires in 1862 and the assumption of the presidency of the Nation by Bartolomé Mitre, the main constitutional problem besetting the region since independence was, in theory at least, solved. The permanent location of the capital had not been settled, but a national government was a reality. Leaders who had brought about the downfall of Rosas, negotiated an end to full-scale civil war, and organized the outline of the patria grande now faced new challenges. The spirit of anarchy, the rule of force, provincial allegiances, and a widely scattered, largely illiterate population were awesome impediments to the creation of a modern nation state. The response to these problems by the politicians, economists, scholars, technocrats, artists, and soldiers of Argentina during the last forty years of the nineteenth century, working towards the goal of a unified, peaceful and cultivated nation, is an enthralling topic.

The British involvement with Argentina has a long and, at times, tumultous history. Dating as far back as the 18th century the Rio de la Plata basin held a great attraction for British merchants. England needed Spanish America as a source of bullion and an outlet for individual goods.

As early as the 1540s British vessels explored the coastlines, of Argentina. There already existed a considerable amount of trade between Brazil and England throughout the sixteenth century. The buccaneer William Hawkins, along with other Englishmen, was intent on expanding on this clandestine trade to other areas in the New World. Sometimes with the cooperation of the Spanish authorities, certain British merchants were able to maneuver themselves into the commercial life of these new colonies. By the eighteenth century the British had established numerous slave markets in Hispanic America including one in Buenos Aires.