The Political and Institutional History of Colonial Spanish

America
Alejandro Can eque*
University of Maryland
Abstract
This essay argues for a need to develop a new political history of colonial Spanish America in
order to bring up to date the old institutional history of the Spanish empire. In recent decades,
historians of colonial Spanish America have not shown much interest in the study of political and
institutional history. Originally, this constituted a welcome reaction against the previous emphasis
on the institutional and legal aspects of the Spanish empire. But one effect of this historiographical
development has been that, while our knowledge of the social history of colonial Spanish America
has progressed in an impressive way, our knowledge of the mechanisms of imperial rule has made
very little progress in the last 50 years. As a result, colonial historians have to rely on antiquated
or inadequate notions regarding the political and institutional nature of Spanish colonialism. How-
ever, the new political history of colonial Spanish America should not focus on the study of the
colonial state, but rather on the political culture of the Spanish empire.
When it comes to dening the political nature of the Spanish empire in America histori-
ans in the English-speaking world have usually taken a binary approach. The Spanish
empire is seen either as medieval and backward or as the harbinger of the modern state.
Perhaps no one has expressed the rst view in a more amboyant manner than the still
inuential Irving A. Leonard, who contended that, in America, Spain created a neo-
medieval regime which was already an anachronism.
1
In the view of other scholars,
however, the Spanish monarchy erected a modern state apparatus in colonial Spanish
America that pioneered new procedures of bureaucratic control, establishing a centralized
and rationalized model of governance. It pregured the Weberian model of legal domina-
tion that did not become predominant in the West until the nineteenth century. Thus,
the power of the colonial bureaucracy was, by the standards of the time, tight and ef-
cient. By imposing this heavy bureaucratic apparatus on society in order to avoid the
formation of dominant social groups, the colonial state had achieved a hegemonic role.
2
One of the reasons why this dichotomy still dominates the study of the Spanish empire
is that in recent decades most historians of colonial Spanish America have not shown an
excessive interest in the study of the colonial state or the politics of imperial rule. Origi-
nally, this constituted a welcome reaction against the previous emphasis on the institu-
tional and legal aspects of the Spanish dominion in America. Instead, the emphasis shifted
to the social and economic aspects of the local colonial societies, along with their ethnic
makeup. But one effect of this historiographical development has been that, while our
knowledge of the social structure of colonial Spanish America has progressed in an
impressive way, especially in regard to the subaltern groups of colonial society, our
knowledge of the mechanisms of imperial rule has made very little progress in the last
fty years. The end result has been that, whereas we now have a highly developed
and sophisticated understanding of the history of those formerly known as the people
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2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
without history (i.e., Indians, slaves, peasants, castas, women, etc.), many historians still
have to rely on rather antiquated views of the political and institutional structure of the
Spanish empire.
Rather revealing of this state of affairs is the fact that the books most often cited by
historians when they need to refer to some political aspect of the Spanish empire were all
published decades ago.
3
This is especially visible in many textbooks dealing with the his-
tory of colonial Latin America, although we can see it in many monographs as well. In
the case, for example, of one of the most widely used textbooks in North American uni-
versities, Mark Burkholder and Lyman Johnsons Colonial Latin America, the authors have
clearly made an effort to keep current on the literature regarding Spanish colonial admin-
istration and governance. However, in the most recent edition of this text (that of 2010),
the suggested bibliography included at the end of the chapter titled Ruling New World
Empires lists 29 works, but only four books published after 1995 deal directly with the
institutional or political history of the Spanish empire in America.
4
The majority of the
books in the bibliography are concerned with questions of religion or the Inquisition
(although the authors, correctly, included a discussion of the colonial church in that
chapter, my concern in this essay is only with the secular administration). While Burk-
holder and Johnson have tried to keep as current as the historiography allows them to do
so, the authors of the newest textbook on colonial Latin America do not even discuss the
colonial administration established by the Spaniards in the New World, all the emphasis
being on the social history of colonial Latin America.
5
As a result, any student trying to
learn colonial history with this text will never be able to get a sense of the signicance
that fundamental institutions of colonial rule such as the audiencia or the corregidor may
have had in the lives of colonial people (the index of the book does not even include
these two terms, nor does it include the terms viceroy or bishop, although, ironically, the
cover of the book depicts the ofcial entrance of a bishop-viceroy in the city of Potos ).
The text, however, dedicates an entire chapter to colonial religion, including an extensive
discussion of the role played by the Inquisition in colonial societies. This is no doubt a
reection of the current interest of colonial historians in questions of native conversion to
Christianity and local religious practice. It is illustrative of this interest the fact that while
a massive study of the gure of the colonial priest was published in 1996, no equivalent
exists in English for the corregidor, his secular counterpart.
6
Such being the current historiographical situation, the conclusion reached by Susan E.
Ram rez in a recent historiographical essay on the institutions of the Spanish American
empire in the Habsburg era comes as a surprise. Ram rez contends that the historiography
is still dominated by studies of the ruling elite and that historians need to focus on the
lives of the common people as they interacted with the institutions of colonial rule. It
will be only, she argues, by studying specic and seemingly unimportant individual cases
that we will be able to learn about the ways in which the people helped shape the insti-
tutions of the Habsburg colonial empire. In other words, historians need to move from
institutional to social history.
7
This seems a startling call for action since historians in the
English speaking world have long ago moved from institutional to social history. So
much so that it is almost impossible to nd a book dealing with the institutional history
of colonial Spanish America that has been published in the last twenty or thirty years.
Social history is exactly what a majority of colonial historians have been doing for the last
four decades. In this regard, countless studies on the relationship of the peoples of indige-
nous and African descent with the institutions of Spanish rule, both secular and ecclesias-
tical, have contributed to giving us a much more precise picture of how the common
people interacted with these institutions. In contrast, the historiography of colonial
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Spanish American governance hasnt developed much in the same period of time, which
is the reason why Ram rez had to rely on an older bibliography when writing her essay.
Of the forty-six titles that she included in the essays bibliography, twenty-seven were
published before 1985 and only ten were published after 1995.
Ram rez concludes her essay by citing Irene Silverblatts work on the Inquisition and
the people in both elite and non-elite sectors that were denounced before this tribunal as
a good example of the direction colonial historiography should take.
8
However, while
this work may be valuable as social history, it presents many problems as a work that
allegedly advances our understanding of the political history of Spanish colonialism, espe-
cially as regards the nature and governance of the Spanish empire. Silverblatts Modern
Inquisitions is a work that can be included in the modernist view of the Spanish empire,
albeit bringing it up to date through the insights of postcolonial theory. Silverblatt argues
that modern colonialisms governing principles are not to be found in nineteenth-century
European colonialism, but in the colonial empire created by Spain in the New World
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite the traditional image in the Anglo-
American world of Spanish colonialism as backward and medieval, the truth is,
Silverblatt asserts, that Spain was in the vanguard of the modern world, installing
cutting-edge bureaucracies in its colonies around the globe, and with that, decisively con-
tributing to the creation of the modern state. In that sense, there was no more modern
bureaucracy in the Hispanic world than the Inquisition. The irony here, according to
Silverblatt, is that this infamous institution, responsible to a large degree for the conven-
tional image of the Spanish transatlantic empire as primitive and oppressive, was, in fact,
part of the vanguard of the modern state, which is characterized by the production of
rational and efcient bureaucracies and modern technologies of control and social disci-
pline. Thus, through its practices, the Inquisition would have contributed to habituating
the inhabitants of the Spanish colonies to the structures of modern power, to the
bureaucratic ways and manners of modern political life.
9
Although this argument may satisfy historians of colonial Spanish America by making
their area of study more relevant to our present concerns, Silverblatts use of history as a
tool to understand and critique the present creates a generic and rather ahistorical colo-
nialism, located somewhere between 1492 and the 20th century. For one thing, Silverbl-
atts insistence on the importance of the Inquisition as a state-making institution can only
make sense if we impose our political categories upon the social and political actors of
colonial Spanish America and imperial Spain. The state and state making are categories
which are important to us but which were irrelevant to seventeenth-century Spanish rul-
ers. Using them obscures more than illuminates our understanding of the Spanish colonial
world. Thus, we need to ground the study of Spanish colonialism in the idea that we can
understand the workings of the system only if we make an attempt to understand it
according to its own principles and not to ours.
In the case of the Spanish empire, for example, the state-making paradigm has been
used to explain its failure, the failure being its supposed inability to fully establish a cen-
tralized and bureaucratic government; in other words, the inadequacy of the Spanish
monarchy lay in its incapacity to become a true state. This is the kind of idea that has
made historians such as John H. Coatsworth contend that the colonial state was effective
only in extracting resources, regulating economic activity and discouraging economic
growth. In everything else, the colonial state was extremely weak by European standards
of the time; it was just an empty Pandoras Box.
10
Speaking of the specic case of the
viceroyalty of Peru, Kenneth J. Andrien has similarly argued that, though the Spanish
government was able to create a powerful state apparatus in colonial Peru thanks to the
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reforms of viceroy Toledo in the 1560s, this was a passing phenomenon, as many of the
Toledan reforms were undermined by local interests, both Spanish and Andean. By the
mid-17th century, the colonial state had become weak, corrupt, and inefcient.
11
This
xation with the state is also probably one of the main reasons why so many historians
are so prone to emphasize the medieval aspects of colonial Latin America as a way to
explain its failure to modernize. Such a reasoning, however, has a serious aw. By
adopting a conceptualization of the political order that had not yet been formulated, it is
assessing the political system of the Spanish monarchy using assumptions and principles
that were not those on which it was built. In that regard, it attributes to the Spanish
monarchy deciencies that only make sense if they are seen from our present viewpoint.
The same can be said of those who argue that an institution like the Inquisition was in
the forefront of efforts to build the modern state. The only difference is that they attri-
bute to the Spanish empire modern qualities rather than medieval defects. To use the
term state, with all the characteristics commonly attributed to it, is evidently a projec-
tion of categories that belong to the political order of our time on the political formations
existing before the liberal revolution.
12
Among other reasons this is so because the polity
still revolved, to a great extent, around the idea of empire (understood in the medieval
sense as a Christian and universal monarchy), and the concept of nation-state was still
marginal in the political discourse of the time. In this regard, the consolidation of the so-
called national monarchies at the end of the fteenth century was not followed by the
disappearance of the notion of universal power that characterized the Middle Ages.
13
In addition, from its origins, the absolute monarchy that built the Spanish empire in
the New World was never a centralized system of government, with a bureaucracy which
faithfully followed the kings orders. Political power was dispersed into an array of rela-
tively autonomous centers (the courts of law, the municipal councils, the cathedral chap-
ters, the religious orders, the Inquisition, etc.) whose unity was maintained, more in a
symbolic than in an effective way, by reference to a single head. This dispersion corre-
sponded to the dispersion and relative autonomy of the vital functions and organs of the
human body, which served as the model for social and political organization; thus, the
political community was conceived of as a mystical body, the king being the head of
this body. Images like those of the mystical body or the body politic were not sim-
ply metaphors used to describe the state; they were images that provided an elementary
sense of a political community conceived in terms essentially different from that of the
state. These images suggest that individuals were neither solitary nor distinct, but existed
only as members of a body; that the hierarchical organization of the political community
was as natural and well ordered as that of a human body, which, in turn, was a reection
of the perfect ordering and harmony of the celestial bodies. This way of conceiving the
political community made impossible the existence of a completely centralized political
government a society in which all power was concentrated in the sovereign would be
as monstrous as a body which consisted only of a head. The function of the king was
not, therefore, to eliminate the autonomy of the members of the body politic but to rep-
resent, on the one hand, the unity of the political community and, on the other, to
maintain harmony among all its members. To accomplish this, the king was to guarantee
the rights and privileges of every member of the realm by administering justice, which
had traditionally been the main goal of political power.
14
All of these arguments can be applied to the Inquisition, an institution which was dri-
ven by the same ways of understanding the political community, and it used the same
methods as the rest of the institutions of colonial rule. In that sense, it was more medie-
val than modern. Silverblatt maintains that the Spanish Inquisition, despite its religious
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appearance, was a state institution, under the jurisdiction of the crown and not the pope
(as was the case with other tribunals of the Inquisition). However, the fact is that the
Spanish tribunal always claimed temporal and spiritual jurisdiction, because it represented
both pope and king. This duality was typical of the way in which power was conceived
of in the early modern period and very different from the monopoly of power on which
the modern state was built.
15
That the Spanish Inquisition was an institution driven by pre-modern notions of power
and legality can be easily appreciated in two of its most notorious activities: the celebra-
tion of spectacular autos-da-fe and the use of torture during the interrogation of suspects.
After Michel Foucault published Discipline and Punish in 1975, our view of penal practices
and torture in early modern Europe was radically altered. Foucaults work showed how
the brutal and physically destructive forms of punishment under the ancien regime were
transformed into the psychological reforms of the nineteenth-century prison. According
to Foucault, the theory of the absolute monarchy enabled power to be founded in the
physical existence of the sovereign, but not in continuous and permanent systems of sur-
veillance. That is why the authority of the absolute sovereign was based on spectacular
and discontinuous interventions of power, the most violent form of which was the
exemplary, because exceptional, punishment.
16
In this sense, the auto-da-fe can be
understood as one of those exemplary ceremonies of pre-modern Europe by
which power was manifested. In the colonial world, the liturgy of punishment through
which royal power was manifested also played its role, with public executions of
criminals and autos-da-fe taking place regularly.
17
Irene Silverblatt, however, wonders
that, if we are to believe Foucaults arguments, then the Inquisitions autos-da-fe do not
make any sense, as these spectacles do not t into our understanding of the tribunal as a
modern institution. She contends that the problem lies with Foucaults theories, as they
do not account adequately for the processes of change. He was never very clear about
when the shift from the spectacle of public punishment to a regime of surveillance took
place; as a consequence his theory is unable to account for an anachronism like the auto-
da-fe.
18
I think, however, that Foucaults arguments make perfect sense when applied to the
Inquisitions rituals. In fact, the anachronism lies in seeing the Inquisition as a modern tri-
bunal, instead of what it actually was: an institution of the ancien regime based on princi-
ples that differed fundamentally from those on which the modern disciplinary state
apparatus is based. Furthermore, although it is true that Foucault nds traces of the new
disciplinary regime starting in the 17th century, he is very clear as regards the moment
when the transformation of the system of punishment took place: in the late 18th and
the early 19th centuries. In this sense, the auto-da-fe was no anachronism but rather a
typical manifestation of power in the pre-modern era. As such it had many characteristics
in common with the rituals of public execution in that period (of course it was also a
quintessentially Spanish ritual in that in no other European country did the Inquisition
play such a prominent role).
The fact that there existed a close relationship between power and ritual in the early
modern Spanish world needs to be emphasized. It was precisely because the concept of
the impersonal state had not yet entered the political imagination that political rituals
played such an extraordinary role. The emergence of the modern concept of the state as
both a supreme and an impersonal form of authority brought the displacement of the
charismatic elements of political leadership and with it the belief that power is intimately
connected with display. The connection between the presence of majesty and the
exercise of power could not thus survive the transfer of public authority to the purely
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impersonal agency of the modern state. But in 16th- and 17th-century Spanish empire
this transfer had not yet occurred and thus the belief that authority is intimately con-
nected with public display was still very much alive.
19
It is precisely because the Inquisition was not driven by modern ideas of the state that
the ritual of the auto-da-fe occupied such a prominent role in the inquisitorial imagina-
tion. The same can be argued in relation to the question of torture. Referring to the
methods of the Inquisition, Silverblatt has argued that torture has played a role in the
development of modern institutions of government; bestowed with legitimacy by state
institutions, torture has been intrinsic to our civilization.
20
I think that this is, again, the
wrong argument for demonstrating the modernity of the Inquisition. As Michel Foucault
showed in Discipline and Punish, what characterizes the modern state is not the use of tor-
ture, but its absence. The punitive practices of the modern state no longer touch the body,
but instead aim at the soul. Modern civilization abolished torture and public punish-
ment because of the reduced need for those in power to control the body of the crimi-
nal. Power in the 19th and 20th centuries was exercised far less through physical
coercion than through carceral institutions. Furthermore, as Edward Peters has pointed
out, what differentiates the use of torture in the 17th century from its use in our modern
world is that the legal anthropology of the ancien regime presupposed a group of stub-
born, intractable criminals, capable of resisting pain to an extraordinary degree, requiring
pain to speak the truth, but invariably truthful when tortured. On the other hand, the
technology of torture in the twentieth century is in part the result of a new anthropology
and its auxiliary technology. It is not primarily the victims information, but the victim,
that torture needs to win or to reduce to powerlessness.
21
The use of torture by the Inquisition was part of the customary judicial practices of
pre-modern Europe. The system of proof required the use of torture. This system had
developed in the 13th century. When the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 abolished the
ordeals, the nonrational proofs of Germanic antiquity, it destroyed an entire system of
proof. The Roman-canon law of proof was the successor to the ordeals. In this system,
judicial discretion was eliminated, forbidding the judge to convict upon circumstantial
evidence. This had to be so in order to persuade men to accept the judgment of profes-
sional judges, instead of remitting the decision to God, as it was the case with the ordeal
system. Thus, the judge could only condemn a criminal upon the testimony of two eye-
witnesses or when the accused himself would admit his guilt. Confession therefore
became regina probationum (the queen of evidence).
22
As Edward Peters has noted, torture
was not a means of proof, but a means of obtaining a confession. Torture was used in
order to obtain, not a guilty plea, but a specic statement that contained details that only
the criminal could possibly know. Hence, the accused would be preached and implore to
make a confession. To this end he or she was often shown the instruments of torture
before they were used, in the hope that the accused would confess without having to be
tortured. In Peters opinion, compared to the older forms of procedure, the new inquis-
itorial process appeared far less repugnant to contemporaries than it may at rst seem to
us. It was certainly more professional.
23
By the 17th century, nevertheless, the Roman-canon law of proof was starting to lose its
force. A new system of proof, free judicial evaluation of the evidence, was developed in the
legal science and the legal practice, alongside the Roman-canon system. This development
liberated the law of Europe from its dependence on torture. Torture could be abolished in
the eighteenth century because the law of proof did not required it anymore.
24
The use of
torture by the Spanish Inquisition in the seventeenth century was not a sign of the advent
of the modern world, but, quite to the contrary, a thoroughly pre-modern penal procedure.
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To understand the use of torture by the Spanish Inquisition we need to look not to the
modern world but to the thirteenth century and Las Siete Partidas of King Alfonso X of
Castile, a legal compilation which was still very much in use in the seventeenth century and
in which judicial torture occupied a prominent place.
25
In conclusion, it is not more social but more political history that we need in order to
avoid erroneous interpretations of the nature of Spanish colonial and imperial power. It is,
of course, a kind of political history that has to be deeply informed by the insights of social
history, ethnohistory, and, above all, cultural history. This new political history needs to be
concerned not with the colonial state but with the political beliefs and practices that consti-
tuted the Spanish imperial system of rule.
26
It should draw its attention to the discourses
and symbolic practices that characterized political activity in the Spanish empire, investigat-
ing the role that images and languages, rituals and ceremonies played in shaping the colo-
nial polity. It also needs to be aware of the ways in which political ideas and practices
circulated around the Atlantic.
27
In other words, it has to be informed by an understanding
of the political culture that shaped the Spanish empire on both sides of the Atlantic.
28
Furthermore, the political history of colonial Spanish America needs to concern itself not
only with the formal aspects of colonial power, as the old institutional history used to do,
but with its informal aspects as well. This is important because, as has now been shown, pol-
itics and power in the early modern world were located, not in the state, but in an alterna-
tive model of political organization: the royal or princely court. The court model
dominated early modern societies and was, in many respects, signicantly different from the
state model. In this regard, the history of colonial Spanish America clearly lends itself to a
kind of study focused on the court, as the two viceregal courts established in Mexico and
Lima fullled almost exactly the same functions as the royal court located in Madrid. Like
the royal court, the viceregal court was based on a series of alternative mechanisms of legiti-
mation, organization, and the exercise of power, which fundamentally set the court system
apart from the political mechanisms of the state. One of those court mechanisms was the
creation and development of networks of patronage that dominated all political activity.
Patronage, clientelism, factions, brokerage, favoritism, nepotism, concepts that are usually
associated with corrupt state practices, were, in fact, constitutive of the political structures
of the ancien regime (including colonial Spanish America). As Giorgio Chittolini has noted,
if the state is understood to mean a power that functions in the name of abstract sover-
eignty and public interest, above any private purposes and forces, it is pointless to study a
state that never existed.
29
In that regard, patronage and clientelism should not be seen as
manifestations of an all-pervasive corruption but as part of a system of government in which
networks of personal loyalty and institutional lines of authority were interconnected, affect-
ing the very nature of political power. Although these networks of patronage were a funda-
mental mechanism in the operation of Spanish colonial power, we know very little about
them. Their systematic study will contribute to a fuller understanding of the political history
of colonial Spanish America.
30
Finally, another important area of research for political historians of colonial Spanish
America should be the study of the emergence of a new imperial ideology in Spain in
the eighteenth century and the extent to which this new ideology of empire changed the
traditional political culture of the Habsburg monarchy. This is important as studies of the
Spanish empire in the eighteenth century have almost exclusively emphasized issues of
the imperial political economy (above all, the meaning and historical signicance of free
trade between the metropolis and its transatlantic dominions), or the success or failure of
the many administrative reforms implemented by the new Bourbon dynasty.
31
One aspect
of this research should investigate the ways in which the new ideas affected traditional
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power relations among the different political units that constituted the metropolitan cen-
ter, something that has usually been ignored by historians of eighteenth-century Spain,
who have for the most part been concerned with either the success or the failure of the
Enlightenment in Spain, while ignoring the domestic effects of the new imperial ideolo-
gies. Another important aspect worth investigating is the degree to which the new ideas
of empire contributed to the alteration of the existing power relations in colonial Spanish
America. In that respect, these investigations should answer one fundamental question:
Was eighteenth-century Spanish imperialism essentially different from that of the two
previous centuries or, despite many reforms, did it continue, at its core, to be basically a
pre-modern form of colonialism? In other words, these new political histories should try
to elucidate the extent to which the Bourbon reforms signaled the emergence of a mod-
ern state based on new methods of disciplinary power, a kind of power that, by its very
nature, was colonizing in method.
Short Biography
Alejandro Caneque is an associate professor of History at the University of Maryland at
College Park. He is a specialist in the history of colonial Latin America, early modern
Spain, and the Spanish empire. He has researched and taught in the United Kingdom,
Mexico, Peru, Spain and the United States. His main area of research is the political and
religious cultures of the early modern Spanish world, with an emphasis on colonial Span-
ish America. He is the author of The Kings Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Vicere-
gal Power in Colonial Mexico (2004), a study of the Spanish colonial and imperial political
culture. He has also published in Colonial Latin American Review, The Americas, Historia
Mexicana, Revista de Indias, and Historica. He is currently working on a book-length study
of the culture of martyrdom that developed around the Spanish empire in the 16th and
17th centuries.
Notes
* Correspondence: Department of History, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, University of Maryland, College Park,
MD 20742, USA. E-mail: acaneque@umd.edu.
1
See Leonard, Baroque Times, pp. 10, 32, 35, 219, 220. Richard M. Morse is another author who has emphasized
the medieval aspects of colonial Spanish America. See his inuential article The Heritage of Colonial Latin Amer-
ica, in Hartz, (ed.), The Founding of New Societies, 12377. The most complete study of the medieval traits of colo-
nial Mexico can be found in Weckmann, La herencia medieval. Weckmann, however, does not present, at least
explicitly, this medieval heritage as an insurmountable obstacle for the modernization of Mexico.
2
See, for example, Lynch, Spain, 15161598, 21112; Phelan, The Kingdom of Quito, 32137; Gibson, Spain in
America, 9091. This notion can also be found among historians writing in Spanish. See, among others, Pietsch-
mann, El Estado, 16163; Semo, Historia del capitalismo en Mexico, 6570; Ots Capdequ , El Estado espanol en las
Indias, 4445.
3
The following are frequently and almost universally quoted by colonial historians: Haring, The Spanish Empire in
America; Parry, The Audiencia of New Galicia; Leonard, Baroque Times; Elliott, Imperial Spain; Phelan, The Kingdom of
Quito; Israel, Race, Class and Politics; Gongora, Studies; Burkholder and Chandler, From Impotence to Authority.
4
The four books published after 1995 are Alvarez de Toledo, Politics and Reform; Caneque, The Kings Living Image;
Cutter, The Legal Culture; Poole, Juan de Ovando.
5
Restall and Lane, Latin America in Colonial Times.
6
See Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred. For the gure of the corregidor, historians still have to rely on Lohmann
Villenas El corregidor de indios.
7
Ram rez, Institutions, 10623.
8
Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions.
9
Ibid, p. 93.
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10
Coatsworth, The Limits of Colonial Absolutism, 2541.
11
See his Spaniards, Andeans, and the Early Colonial State in Peru, in Andrien and Adorno (eds.), Transatlantic
Encounters, 12148.
12
Quentin Skinner has conclusively shown that the fundamental conceptual shift to a relatively impersonal idea of
the state rst took place in France and England, where it slowly began to take shape in the course of the 16th cen-
tury. But this new concept of the state was only discussed by the most sophisticated political theorists and even
among these it created considerable confusion. See the Conclusion in Skinner, The Foundations. Volume Two. For a
discussion of the meanings and uses of the word Estado in 16th- and 17th-century Spain, see Elliott, Richelieu and
Olivares, 4248; Lalinde, Abad a, Espana y la monarqu a universal, 10938; Clavero, Tantas personas como estados,
53105; Clavero, Razon de Estado, chap. 1.
13
See Yates, Astraea; Armitage, (ed.), Theories of Empire; Pagden, Lords of All the World; Muldoon, Empire and Order;
Pocock, States, Republics, and Empires.
14
Caneque, The Kings Living Image, 7577. For the argument that the Spanish empire was also scally decentral-
ized, see Irigoin and Grafe, Bargaining for Absolutism, 173209.
15
For a detailed explanation of the legal and administrative complexities of the Spanish Inquisition, see Lopez Vela,
Las estructuras; Bethencourt, La Inquisicion (There is an English translation: The Inquisition). For a discussion of
the notion of dual power see Caneque, The Kings Living Image, chap. 3.
16
Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Power Knowledge, 10405, 119.
17
For many instances of these public rituals of punishment, see Mart n de Guijo, Diario; Robles, Diario.
18
Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, p. 253, n. 21.
19
Skinner, The State. For an elaboration of this argument in the context of colonial Spanish America, see Cane-
que, The Kings Living Image, chap. 4.
20
Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, p. 75.
21
Peters, Torture, 16364. However, it is also true that, as Frederick Cooper has observed, modern European pow-
ers never seemed to have abandoned premodern forms of punishment in their colonial possessions. See Cooper,
Colonialism in Question, p. 143.
22
Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof, 67; Peters, Torture, p. 44.
23
Peters, Torture, 5051.
24
Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof, 1112. See also Silverman, Tortured Subjects.
25
Signicantly, a new edition of the Partidas, profusely commented upon by one of the most prestigious jurists of
the period, was published in Salamanca in the mid sixteenth century with the title of Las Siete Partidas del sabio Rey
don Alonso el Nono. In this edition, chapter XXX of the seventh Partida is entirely dedicated to the use of torture
(De los tormentos).
26
A good illustration of this kind of approach applied to the study of the administration of justice in colonial Span-
ish America is Herzogs La administracion como un fenomeno social. An excellent example of a work of ethnohistory
deeply informed by an understanding of the political culture of Spanish colonialism is Owensbys Empire of Law.
27
Some colonial historians have started to explore these topics. See, for example, Seed, Ceremonies of Possession;
Caneque, The Kings Living Image, Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals; Schrefer, The Art of Allegiance; Osorio,
Inventing Lima; Ramos, Identity, Ritual, and Power.
28
Historians of early modern Europe have developed in the last decades an extensive literature on the political culture
of the period which can be very useful to colonial historians interested in these matters. Among the most signicant
works are Adamson, (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe; Wilentz, (ed.), Rites of power; Feros, Sacred and Terrifying
Gazes; Jago, Taxation and Political Culture; Thompson, Crown and Cortes; Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England;
Arnade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots; Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV; Mettam, Power and Faction; Beik,
Absolutism and Society; Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe; Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice; Trexler, Public Life
in Renaissance Florence; Oestreich, Neostoicism; Prodi, The Papal Prince; Schneider, The Ceremonial City; Smith, No More
Language Games; Strong, Art and Power. Several works published in Spanish are also of relevance: Fernandez Albaladejo,
Fragmentos de Monarqu a; Hespanha, V speras del Leviatan; Hespanha, La gracia del derecho.
29
Chittolini, The Private, 3461.
30
A recent study that has started to explore this subject is Rosenmullers Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues. Early
modern historians have been studying the question of patronage and clientelism for many years. Some studies that
may be of relevance to colonial historians are Feros, Kingship and Favoritism; MacHardy, War, Religion and Court
Patronage; Biagioli, Galileo Courtier; Peck, Court Patronage; Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients.
31
The most prominent example of this approach is perhaps the Steins recent trilogy: Silver, Trade, and War; Apogee
of Empire; and Edge of Crisis. In the case of the rst volume, the arguments they make regarding the political nature
of the Habsburg empire are, for the most part, outmoded and rather antiquated.
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