Focusing on the relation and conflict between imperial, colonial, and local levels, Chapter 1 lays out the historical context that gave rise to the collective freedom suit. It first traces the process of making law and policy according to the imperial state’s reform imperatives here directed at the privatization and revival of an extractive metal industry based on the once rich copper mines of El Cobre near Santiago de Cuba. Crucial to the production of artillery in the Crown’s arms industry, copper was at the time a strategic resource for the imperial state. But for the beneficiaries of the privatized mining estate, the most valuable resource were the former royal slaves who had long lived in quasi freedom as an unconventional pueblo in the mining jurisdiction. A growing demand for slaves in the colony led to the re-enslavement, removal, and sale of hundreds of cobreros, or natives of El Cobre, thereby upending former local customary practices. A denied offer for a collective self-purchase, or coartación, and land eventually led to a wrongful enslavement action in Madrid. The chapter shows the major impact of imperial Bourbon reforms and of global factors in this so-called hinterland region of empire.

Follows the American consuls as they begin to become cultural brokers linking Americans to remnants of the great Mediterranean empires as America begins to consider an imperialistic turn in the wake of the Monroe Doctrine.

A graph superimposes the growth–decline curves of major Late Rider Empires, from 1200 to 1800. This was a period of shift from horses to sails. West European feudalism indirectly led to respect for law and a curiosity revolution. Inciting exploration, the latter began to give rise to transoceanic empires, first of all Spanish. But at first, Mongol horsemen seized a record-size area, unsurpassed among land-borne empires. Up to 1750 all truly large empires except Spanish remained land bound: Manchu Qing, Russia, Ottoman, and Mughal. The burgeoning French, Portuguese, and British empires were still modest. Much of the Mongol hold meant sparsely populated superficial tribute area, but by conquering China the Mongol empire also became the world’s most populous. Later on, Ming, Mughal, and Qing shared this eminence. Nomad empires were a phenomenon that rose and ended with the Rider phase. The Inca and Aztec empires retraced from scratch the human self-domestication process that the Old World underwent thirty-five centuries earlier, but they still lacked metals and the wheel.

This chapter underscores the central arguments of this volume by emphasizing the need for a simultaneous analysis of multiple flows of forced migrations. Focusing on the 1790s, it first looks at the transportation of convicts, vagrants, and deserters from Peninsular Spain and the Northern African presidios to the garrisons and the military outposts of Spanish America. Then it examines the flows of war captives, refugees, and convicts that originated from the Haitian Revolution and spread out across the Spanish Caribbean. The concluding section reflects on continuities and discontinuities in the regimes of punitive relocations in the Spanish Empire in the Early Modern period and the nineteenth century. From this perspective, the chapter suggests the need for an integrated study of all punitive relocations and for the investigation of those processes whereby the “political” nature of punishment and the punished was construed or marginalized.

Economic historians have placed commercialization at the centre of Europe’s early modern capitalism, emphasizing the importance of domestic and international trade, shipbuilding and concomitant manufactures, the financial sector, and urbanization. As the Iberian polities extended geographically to Africa, Asia and the Americas during the early modern period, trade, whether domestic, international or colonial, had a critical effect upon economic development. However, the economic impact of colonial expansion was uneven across Iberia. Iberia commercial exchange associated with the overseas empires produced surprisingly few backward and forward linkages in the European national economies. The question this chapter seeks to address is thus to what extent and how Iberian trade, especially colonial trade, supported or hindered economic development in the early modern period.

On 19 March 1812, after much deliberation, the Spanish parliament, the Cortes, promulgated Spain’s first written constitution, the celebrated Constitution of Cádiz.1 Seen in the context of the Age of Revolutions, a time when political revolutions in the Thirteen Colonies, France, and Haiti were accompanied by written constitutions, the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz was not exactly at the vanguard of the Atlantic world. Nonetheless, the importance and peculiarity of this constitution lay not in the content or nature of the document but in who was involved in its design. The constitution of the United States of America, the many French constitutions during the revolutionary period, and the various Haitian constitutions written beginning in 1801 were primarily a product of one hemisphere or the other, but not both. In contrast, Spain’s Constitution of 1812 came about as a result of an imperial parliament with deputies representing the multiplicity of territories of Spain’s oceanic empire.

New Spain’s integration into the Pacific Basin played an important role in the viceroyalty’s political and social history. Interactions between the two become visible in descriptions of Spain’s distributive struggles. The conclusion argues that diverging notions of a deserving self and undeserving other produced by such disputes were strategic responses to a changing world in which the increasing mobility of people and goods created both opportunities and fierce competition over limited benefits and resources. Consideration of the ways in which these men and women engaged with the logic of assessment has resulted in a more variegated understanding of their views of the world, as well as their places within it, that acknowledges not only individual agendas but their divergent relationships to collectives as well. While Pacific and transpacific exchanges continued to have an impact on distributive struggles after 1640, the importance of the hierarchy of beneméritos, as it developed in the wake of the diminished conquest, once again altered discussions about worthiness and unworthiness and the ways in which people identified themselves and others.

With the expansion of Spanish activities into the Pacific Basin, New Spain increasingly became a global point of intersection for imperial, commercial, and religious networks. The mobility of persons and goods affected external perceptions of New Spain’s place in a globalizing world, as well as its residents’ self-perception. The Introduction observes that these transformations have typically been studied through the lens of a historiographic narrative about creolization. After reviewing debates about the use of the creole paradigm for the study of Spanish identities in the Indies, the chapter introduces the notion of the deserving self, which had emerged in the context of late medieval struggles over the distribution of royal favor, as an alternative framework for studying the interrelationship between movement and processes of identity-making and identification at this crossroad of transoceanic networks. Finally, it explains the link between various conceptualizations of a deserving self and the stories people recounted about the world and the desirability of global integration.

Some of the key themes in this book – reforms of the judiciary, the planned and gruesome spectacles of late eighteenth-century justice in the viceregal capital, and the monopoly that the government asserted over violence – rest upon the decisions made by the viceroys who ruled New Spain in the 1770s and 1780s. These men combined a huge number of tasks in their daily routine including ceremonies showing respect to the king and the Catholic Church, commanding the military, collecting taxes, supervising crown monopolies, ensuring an adequate food supply, managing the budget, overseeing mining, and increasing the revenues sent back to Spain. In this era, public health and urban beautification rose to the top of their lists of responsibilities. This chapter very briefly introduces the six viceroys who either feature as main characters or who just have bit parts throughout this book.

Known as enemies of all nations, pirates emerged out of a contest for New World resources and land amidst an increasingly lawless early modern Atlantic World. While Spanish treasure fleets faced attacks from brazen British privateers, such as Henry Morgan, piracy became commonplace by the start of the eighteenth century. Although some engaged in slaving and certainly embraced violence, many pirates established outlaw communities based on democratic ideals that would come to characterize the Enlightenment. By the Age of Revolution, instability and intermittent warfare allowed sea bandits such as the Laffite brothers to flourish once again during the War of American Independence and the Napoleonic Wars, especially in coastal enclaves like Louisiana and Texas and on smaller Caribbean islands such as Guadeloupe. The wars of independence in Spanish America likewise saw an upsurge in smuggling and privateering. As new nations began to curtail the licensing of these privateers, their numbers and significance waned by the 1830s.

This chapter establishes the reach of punitive relocation across a range of imperial contexts, from the late Middle Ages into the twentieth century. It employs a series of case studies from the European empires to stress its importance as a source of unfree labour and as a means of governing colonized populations. Sometimes, convicts and their descendants became settlers, and when they did not, they laid the ground for free migration or satisfied wider imperial ambitions by clearing land and building basic infrastructure. Sometimes, they were also able to work for their own profit. Of especial importance to the British Empire was the use of convicts to build naval infrastructure in the nineteenth-century stations of Bermuda and Gibraltar. All the convicts were men, and they were prohibited from settling, revealing the importance of a temporary, mobile labour force for bolstering naval power. This was quite different to practice in the Australian colonies. In all these penal sites, convicts resisted their fate in numerous ways. However, imperial administrations responded to it with brutal retribution and spectacular levels of violence, and this meant that though everyday forms of resistance impacted on working practices and productivity, rebellions, mutinies, and escapes usually failed.

This chapter documents the globally leading status of English and investigates reasons for this. It is argued that the layperson explanation that English is 'easy' to learn fails as an explanation and that 'classic' reasons brought forward by Crystal (2009), English having been available 'at the right time and the right place' as the language of British colonialism, industrialization and American dominance, is valid but insufficient. It is supplemented by wider perspectives on the process of colonization, the role of English in modernization and globalization, the importance of its ethnic neutrality in some countries, and its massive spread as 'New Englishes' especially in Asia and Africa. Historians' accounts are screened for a comparison of the developments of English versus Spanish in colonization, and it is shown that, while both nations successfully built empires around the globe, only the British replenished their colonies with large settler streams and thus produced copies of the homeland society in foreign lands and established permanent ties with them. Finally, the recent past has experienced an unparalleled 'transnational attraction' of English which has boosted its role.

In the utterly religious world of 16th-century Europe, the most important legal authority was power over consciences. At a time of confessional crisis, imperial theologians from Salamanca lent their assistance to the Counter-Reformation by employing the amalgam of a moral theology concentrating on individual confession and Roman legal principles they found in the works of Thomas Aquinas. These would offer the means to instruct Christians on what attitude to adopt towards the treatment of the indigenous population of the New World and what to think of the incessant wars between Christian princes and the expansion of a commercial ethic that was hard to fit with old moral theology.

The ‘extended Caribbean’ provides a trans-American framework for linking José Martí and José Rizal at the Atlantic and Pacific ends, geographic and temporal, of the Spanish Empire, marking one possible moment of Caribbean literature in transition. This essay focuses on how each of these artist-activists uses translation of Spanish and English, as two of the colonial languages of the Atlantic and Pacific empires, in order to reveal the parallels between the two figures and their respective nationalist struggles during the 1890s. Put another way, the essay explores how far we can stretch the ‘Caribbean’ to account for the trans-global anticolonial imagination in the disappearing Spanish Empire of this time.