Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T08:38:29.328Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Institutional Framework of Colonial Spanish America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

John Lynch
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The colonial state

Spain asserted its presence in America through an array of institutions. Traditional historiography studied these in detail, describing colonial policy and American responses in terms of officials, tribunals, and laws. The agencies of empire were tangible achievements and evidence of the high quality of Spanish administration. They were even impressive numerically. Between crown and subject there were some twenty major institutions, while colonial officials were numbered in their thousands. The Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias (1681) was compiled from 400,000 royal cedulas, which it managed to reduce to a mere 6,400 laws.1 Thus the institutions were described, classified, and interpreted from evidence which lay in profusion in law codes, chronicles, and archives. Perhaps there was a tendency to confuse law with reality, but the standard of research was high and derecho indiano, as it was sometimes called, was the discipline which first established the professional study of Latin American history.

This stage of research was brought to an end by new interests and changing fashions in history, and by a growing concentration on social and economic aspects of colonial Spanish America. Institutional history lost prestige, as historians turned to the study of Indians, rural societies, regional markets, and various aspects of colonial production and exchange, forgetting perhaps that the creation of institutions was an integral part of social activity and their presence or absence a measure of political and economic priorities. More recently, institutional history has returned to favour, though it is now presented as a study of the colonial state.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 24 , Supplement S1 , March 1992 , pp. 69 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Haring, C. H., The Spanish Empire in America (New York, 1963), p. 105.Google Scholar

2 de la Peña, José F., Oligarquía y propiedad en Nueva España 1550–1624 (Mexico, 1983)Google Scholar, studies an early oligarchy in Mexico; Ferry, Robert J., The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Formation and Crisis 1567–1767 (Berkeley, Cal., 1991)Google Scholar, a later one in Caracas. Brading, D. A., The First America. The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492–1867 (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar identifies, among other things, the origins and growth of Creole identity.

3 Ramírez, Susan E., Provincial Patriarchs: Land Tenure and the Economics of Power in Colonial Peru (Albuquerque, NM, 1986).Google Scholar

4 Cole, Jeffrey A., The Potosi Mita 1573–1700. Compulsory Indian Labor in the Andes (Stanford, Cal., 1985), pp. 44, 123–130.Google Scholar

5 de Orsúa y Vela, Bartolomé Arzáns, Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí, (eds.) Hanke, Lewis and Mendoza, Gunnar (3 vols., Providence, RI, 1965), I, pp. 188–190Google Scholar; Cole, , The Potosi Mita, pp. 92–93, 126–130.Google Scholar

6 Arzáns, , Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí, 2, pp. 190–191Google Scholar; Villena, Guillermo Lohmann, ‘La memorable crisis monetaria de mediados del siglo XVII y sus repercusiones en el virreinato del Perú’, Anuario de Estudios Americanos, vol. 33 (1976), pp. 579–639Google Scholar; Bakewell, Peter, Silver and Entrepreneurship in Seventeenth-Century Potosi. The Life and Times of Antonio López de Quiroga (Albuquerque, NM, 1988), pp. 36–42Google Scholar; Glave, Luis Miguel, Trajinantes. Canminos indígenes en la sociedad colonial. Siglos XVI/XVII (Lima, 1989), pp. 182–191.Google Scholar

7 Phelan, John Leddy, The People and the King. The Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison, Wisc., 1978), pp. xviii, 7, 30, 82–84.Google Scholar

8 Kagan, Richard L., Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile 1500–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981), pp. 210–211Google Scholar; Thompson, I. A. A., ‘The Rule of Law in Early Modern Castile’, European History Quarterly, vol. 14 (1984), pp. 221–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Cebrián, Alfredo Moreno, ‘Venta y beneficios de los corregimientos peruanos’, Revista de Indias, vol. 36, nos. 143–144 (1976), pp. 213–246Google Scholar; Muro, Fernando, ‘El “beneficio” de oficios públicos en Indias’, Anuario de Estudios Americanos, vol. 35 (1978), pp. 1–67.Google Scholar

10 Andrien, Kenneth J., ‘The Sale of Fiscal Offices and the Decline of Royal Authority in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1633–1700’, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 62, no. 1 (1982), pp. 49–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the same author's Crisis and Decline: the Viceroyalty of Peru in the Seventeenth Century (Albuquerque, NM, 1985), p. 34Google Scholar, are the works which have most advanced this subject.

11 Glave, Luis Miguel and Remy, María Isabel, Estructura agraria y vida rural en una regiónandina: Ollantaytambo entre los siglos XVI y XIX (Cuzco, 1983), pp. 140–160Google Scholar; Glave, , Trajinantes, pp. 193–194.Google Scholar

12 Andrien, , Crisis and Decline, pp. 74–75.Google Scholar

13 Ibid., pp. 103–104, 115–116; Glave, , Trajinantes, pp. 193–194.Google Scholar

14 Cebrián, Alfredo Moreno, El corregidor de indios y la economía peruana en el siglo XVIII (Madrid, 1977), pp. 108–110.Google Scholar

15 de Velasco, José A. Manso, Relación y documentos de gobierno del virrey del Perú, José A. Manso de Velasco, conde de Superunda (1745–1761), (ed.) Cebrián, Alfredo Moreno (Madrid, 1983), pp. 285–286.Google Scholar

16 Burkholder, Mark A. and Chandler, D. S., From Impotence to Authority. The Spanish Crown and the American Audiencias (Columbia, Mo., 1977), p. 145.Google Scholar

17 For fuller treatment of the Bourbon programme see Lynch, John, Bourbon Spain 1700–1808 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 329–374.Google Scholar

18 Burkholder, and Chandler, , From Impotence to Authority, pp. 115–135.Google Scholar

19 Socolow, Susan Migden, The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769–1800: Amor al Real Servicio (Durham, NC, 1987), p. 132.Google Scholar

20 Kuethe, Allan J., Cuba, 1753–1815. Crown, Military, and Society (Knoxville, 1986), pp. 126–127.Google Scholar

21 Kuethe, Allan J., Military Reform and Society in New Granada, 1773–1808 (Gainesville, Florida, 1978), pp. 170–171, 180–181.Google Scholar

22 Fernández, Juan Marchena, Oficiales y soldados en el ejército de América (Seville, 1983), pp. 95–120.Google Scholar

23 Morineau, Michel, Incroyables gazettes et fabuleux métaux. Les retours des trésors américaines d'après les gazettes hollandaises (XVIe-XVIIIe stecles) (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 250, 262.Google Scholar

24 de la Paz, Príncipe, Memorias (BAE, 88–89, 2 vols., Madrid, 1956), vol. I, p. 416.Google Scholar