The World of Colonial America

An Atlantic Handbook

Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Ignacio Gallup-Diaz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317662136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

The World of Colonial America: An Atlantic Handbook offers a comprehensive and in-depth survey of cutting-edge research into the communities, cultures, and colonies that comprised colonial America, with a focus on the processes through which communities were created, destroyed, and recreated that were at the heart of the Atlantic experience. With contributions written by leading scholars from a variety of viewpoints, the book explores key topics such as

-- The Spanish, French, and Dutch Atlantic empires

-- The role of the indigenous people, as imperial allies, trade partners, and opponents of expansion

-- Puritanism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and the role of religion in colonization

-- The importance of slavery in the development of the colonial economies

-- The evolution of core areas, and their relationship to frontier zones

-- The emergence of the English imperial state as a hegemonic world power after 1688

-- Regional developments in colonial North America.

Bringing together leading scholars in the field to explain the latest research on Colonial America and its place in the Atlantic World, this is an important reference for all advanced students, researchers, and professionals working in the field of early American history or the age of empires.

PART I

Spanish Empire; Spanish Influences

1

FROM MONARCHY TO EMPIRE

Ideologies, Institutions, and the Limits of Spanish Imperial Sovereignty, 1492–1700

Alexander Ponsen

The completion of the peninsular Reconquest in 1492, the expansion of Habsburg possessions across Europe, and the series of conquests in the Americas and Philippines gave rise to an increasingly messianic discourse lauding the exploits of the Spanish monarchy over the course of the sixteenth century. The enthusiastic fervor for Spanish imperium reached crescendo around 1581, when Philip II of Spain ascended the Portuguese throne, achieving the long sought reunification of the entire Iberian Peninsula for the first time since antiquity and bringing the two hemispheres of Iberian expansion together under his singular sovereignty. By adding Portuguese territories in Africa, Asia, and Brazil to his already sprawling possessions, Philip now looked out from his new Lisbon palace over what contemporary observers and modern historians alike have viewed as the world’s first global empire.

The Americas, unknown to Europe prior to the late fifteenth century, soon became a major center of gravity within Spain’s empire, providing enormous wealth, and endowing the metropolis with increased prestige. An array of authors, many under crown commission, sought to amplify Spain’s exploits and bestow them with providential meaning in an effort to galvanize support among Spaniards across the empire and impress upon rivals its unprecedented power. If the total population of the monarchy with its Castilian and Aragonese subjects stood at some 6 million in 1491, within half a century it seemed to have multiplied by almost ten times, adding roughly 50 million more with the incorporation of the former Aztec and Inca empires and several other Native American polities.¹

As we recognize the vast dimensions of Spain’s early modern imperium, however, it is also worth asking to what extent the crown actually exercised sovereignty over the territories and peoples it purported to rule. What are we to make of vague claims stressing the unprecedented power of the empire and its globality? Despite the formidable efforts of conquerors, missionaries, humanists, jurists, and theologians in giving physical and ideological meaning to the Spanish empire as it expanded, the process of extending imperial rule was constantly contested. A gaping divide existed between theory and practice, between the monarchs’ capacious claims and their ability to impose effective sovereignty over those claims. Distinct from the traditional portrayal of the empire as a domineering, centralized political unit exercising supreme control over vast swathes of uninterrupted territory and millions of colonial subjects, Spanish imperial rule was, in reality, highly fragmented and often indirect, especially beyond fortified enclaves.

In this chapter I examine the discourse developed to glorify and legitimize Spanish expansion, and the debates that expansion provoked. Exploring tensions between political theory, legal frameworks, and the practice of government, I analyze how large parts of the “New World” were integrated within Spain’s composite monarchy, and the enormous institutional and intellectual challenges this process presented. Finally, I assess how the monarchy attempted to rule the vast and varied territories over which it laid claim, the perisistence of indigenous forms of social, cultural, and political organization, and the generally diffuse nature of imperial power, including at the apex of Spain’s global hegemony in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Over two decades ago Jack Greene’s study, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History, subverted the idea of an absolutist, centralized structure of early modern European imperial rule.² Although his work focused on British America and the crown’s relationship to its European colonial subjects, the fundamental argument that imperial authority was decentralized and constantly renegotiated can also be applied fittingly to the territories over which Spain laid claim. In many ways, Greene’s work echoed that of European historians like António Manuel Hespanha and Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, who advanced related arguments for early modern Iberia and have, along with others like Víctor Tau Anzoátegui and Tamar Herzog, applied similar approaches in the Spanish American context as well.³ Fusing the fields of geography, law, and cultural history, Lauren Benton’s work has in its own way displayed how European and non-European empires alike sought to maintain order over diverse dominions through constant compromises between the imposition of top-down centralized forms of rule and the ceding of legal and political autonomy to local settler and indigenous groups within the larger structure of empire.⁴ In addition, the largely ethnohistorical scholarship of the “New Conquest History,” so termed and in part shaped by Matthew Restall, has emphasized the dynamism of Native peoples and the persistence of Indigenous social, cultural, and political forms during the long, complex process of encounter between Europeans and Native Americans.⁵ These contributions, among others, have added significant depth to our understanding of the porosity, fluctuation, and imprecision of imperial boundaries, of the limits of European domination, and of the diffusion of power inherent to early modern empires, including that of Spain.

It is worth clarifying at the outset my use of the terms “empire” and “sovereignty.” The Spanish Monarchy never officially defined itself as an “empire.” In Castilian dictionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “empire,” as a political unit, referred to the Roman Empire or its successor, the Holy Roman Empire. In strict semantic terms, the “Spanish Empire” never existed in its own day. Instead, contemporaries called that political unit, “the Spanish Monarchy,” or “the Catholic Monarchy.”⁶ In its general sense, the concept of “empire”—imperio in Castilian and imperium in Latin—meant simply “lordship” and “power,” “to reign,” and “to command,” and could be used with a geographical connotation to denote the territorial limits of a given realm. So although “empire” was not the official designation used to describe the multicontinental polity of early modern Spain, contemporaries did often use the term to convey the general vastness of Spanish monarchical power. And if we accept the capacious definition of empires proposed by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper as “large political units, expansionist or with a memory of power extended over space, polities that maintain distinction and hierarchy as they incorporate new peoples,” then the Spanish monarchy was without doubt “imperial.”⁷

The term “sovereign,” on the other hand, had long been used by Europeans among alternatives to “majesty,” “king,” “monarch,” and “lord,” to refer to rulers, including non-European ones, to denote the supreme power they held within their respective realms. In a report compiled shortly after the conquest of Mexico, a Spanish scribe wrote of Montezuma, for example, as having been “sovereign of that land.”⁸ But “sovereignty,” as a political concept, entered the European lexicon slowly, despite being first theorized by French jurist Jean Bodin in 1576.⁹ While sovereign power then as now was absolute in theory, it has rarely been absolute in practice.¹⁰ Including during the supposed height of European royal absolutism in the seventeenth century, crown power was often circumscribed and dependent on constant negotiations with elites and local interests over financial and military support to the crown, jurisdictional autonomy, and royal recognition of local custom and privilege.¹¹ As on the peninsula, the Spanish monarchs’ sovereignty was also diffuse in America, especially beyond the confines of colonial strongholds like Mexico City and Lima, and to some degree within them, as we will see.¹² And in many places crown rule was only partial or indirect, extended through alliances or fluid relations of vassalage with local Indigenous polities, or through missionaries acting as intermediaries at the vanguard in the expansion of the faith and Spanish civilization.¹³ Thus I use the term “sovereignty” primarily as an interpretive concept, which, importantly, reflects less an achieved reality than an ambition on the part of the monarchy to exercise full and indivisible rule in the territories it claimed to possess.

Peninsular Monarchy to Global Empire

As historians have long recognized, a combination of commercial and religious motives drove early Spanish expansion under Isabel and Ferdinand. In 1492, having completed the final phase of reconquista, the monarchs looked to new horizons and agreed to sponsor Columbus’ voyage west in the hope of forging new frontiers of trade and evangelization. In less than a century, as a result of the expeditions of Hernán Cortés in Mexico, Francisco Pizarro in Peru, and others elsewhere, the most populous parts of America had been invaded and claimed for the Spanish monarchy and many of its colonial centers had been founded, including Santo Domingo, Havana, Mexico City, and Lima.

Even before any Spaniard had knowledge of the “New World,” let alone set foot there, and before the Inter cætera bull of donation, Isabel and Ferdinand began laying the basic institutional and ideological foundations of their imperium over those distant lands and peoples. In the Capitulations of Santa Fe agreed upon with Columbus on April 30, 1492 the monarchs made explicit their intention to settle, govern, and exploit new lands to the west economically, and they provided a clear articulation of the religious political philosophy underpinning their claim as legitimate lords in the possessions they already ruled. They derived their sovereignty from God who, as “King over all Kings,” “governs and maintains them.”¹⁴ Kings serve as God’s “vice-regents” “set upon earth in the place of God to fulfill justice. So great is the authority of the power of kings, that all laws and rights are subject to their power, for they do not derive it from men, but from God, whose place they occupy in matters temporal.”¹⁵

Once news of Columbus’ “discovery” of Caribbean islands reached Europe, official legitimation followed swiftly. In May 1493 the Valencia-born Pope Alexander VI issued the Inter cætera bull, which claimed to legitimize Spain’s conquest of the Americas in the name of Christianization. The bull granted the “kings of Castile and León” and their “heirs and successors,” “forever, … full and free power, authority, and jurisdiction of every kind.”¹⁶ It linked Spain’s overseas expansion to “the honor of God himself and the spread of Christian rule,” and thereby endowed it with a sacred mission “to instruct the [native] inhabitants and residents in the Catholic faith and train them in good morals.”¹⁷ The Papal donation provided the first foundation of Spain’s claim to legitimate sovereignty in the New World, and imbued the enterprise with divine ideological meaning.

Celebration

By the second decade of the sixteenth century, authors across the monarchy were already developing a triumphalist discourse that hailed the exploits of the crown and conquistadors.¹⁸ Michel Foucault’s concept of a “discourse” serves well in assessing the wide range of texts on Spain’s early modern empire that furnished its ideological power.¹⁹ A discourse, in the Foucauldian sense, is a reflection of power relations, which when enacted by and through speaking and writing subjects comes to form a unified system of thought, language, and action that in turn legitimates power. This is not to say there was always a singular, self-conscious, official “Spanish ideology of empire,” however. Debates over the legitimacy of Spanish imperium were always polyphonic and contentious.²⁰ But even cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Atlantic Perspectives
• PART I: Spanish Empire; Spanish Influences
• PART II: Unfree Labor
• PART III: British Colonial Developments and the Fates of Indigenous Polities
• PART IV: Competition and Imperial Frontiers
• PART V: Revolutions
• Index