Peninsulares And Creoles In The Spanish Americas

I think it’s important for the HIST 241 students to know that in the Spanish Americas there was a social pyramid in which peninsulares (Spanish from Spain) were at the top, and creoles (Spanish born in the Americas) were the ones to follow, and so on. This is structure was based on place of birth and how “pure” one’s blood. Those with “pure blood” didn’t have Muslim, Jewish, nor African or Indigenous ancestry. This is important to know to understand the tensions between peninsulares and creoles (299). In addition, around this time in the Spanish Americas, people were transitioning from Baroque Catholicism to Reform Catholicism in which people sought to have a more direct relationship with God and be more modest. Elites were mostly part of the

Reform movement and reformists believed that the baroque church had a misplaced focus that distracts one from God which is why it was easier to limit the church’s control in society (309).
Elliot writes, that then Lieutenant-Colonel George Washington's expedition against the French “ended in disaster at the hands of the Indians and the French” (292), but doesn’t really go into much depth as to why. So it got me to wonder why were the French victorious against the Americans? Following the same line of evidence, I was also wondering why the Indians allied with the French? If they, as well as the Americans, had taken their land away from them, where they promised that they were going to gain it back? Or did the French not mistreat them like the Americans and the Spaniards did? Finally, why were some of the West Indies islands, for instance Guadeloupe (294) of interest for both the British and the French?
I believe that Elliott should have better discussed why Spain felt the need to be allied with France. He wrote that Spain renewed a Family Compact with the French in the midst of the war between the British and the French (294). Yet, this intervention proved to be a disaster for the Spanish government. Does that mean that the Spanish government wasn’t aware of the British’s successful forces? And why did the Spanish government allied with the French and not the British?