History Compass April 2013

The Political and Institutional History of Colonial SpanishAmerica

Alejandro Caneque*University of Maryland

Abstract

This essay argues for a need to develop a new political history of colonial Spanish America inorder 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 andinstitutional history. Originally, this constituted a welcome reaction against the previous emphasison the institutional and legal aspects of the Spanish empire. But one effect of this historiographicaldevelopment has been that, while our knowledge of the social history of colonial Spanish Americahas progressed in an impressive way, our knowledge of the mechanisms of imperial rule has madevery little progress in the last 50 years. As a result, colonial historians have to rely on antiquatedor 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 thecolonial state, but rather on the political culture of the Spanish empire.

When it comes to defining the political nature of the Spanish empire in America histori-ans in the English-speaking world have usually taken a binary approach. The Spanishempire is seen either as medieval and backward or as the harbinger of the modern state.Perhaps no one has expressed the first view in a more flamboyant manner than the stillinfluential 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 SpanishAmerica that pioneered new procedures of bureaucratic control, establishing a centralizedand rationalized model of governance. It prefigured 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 effi-cient. By imposing this heavy bureaucratic apparatus on society in order to avoid theformation 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 empireis that in recent decades most historians of colonial Spanish America have not shown anexcessive 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 shiftedto the social and economic aspects of the local colonial societies, along with their ethnicmakeup. But one effect of this historiographical development has been that, while ourknowledge of the social structure of colonial Spanish America has progressed in animpressive way, especially in regard to the subaltern groups of colonial society, ourknowledge of the mechanisms of imperial rule has made very little progress in the lastfifty years. The end result has been that, whereas we now have a highly developedand sophisticated understanding of the history of those formerly known as ‘‘the people

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without history’’ (i.e., Indians, slaves, peasants, castas, women, etc.), many historians stillhave to rely on rather antiquated views of the political and institutional structure of theSpanish empire.

Rather revealing of this state of affairs is the fact that the books most often cited byhistorians when they need to refer to some political aspect of the Spanish empire were allpublished 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. Inthe case, for example, of one of the most widely used textbooks in North American uni-versities, Mark Burkholder and Lyman Johnson’s Colonial Latin America, the authors haveclearly 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 WorldEmpires’’ lists 29 works, but only four books published after 1995 deal directly with theinstitutional or political history of the Spanish empire in America.4 The majority of thebooks in the bibliography are concerned with questions of religion or the Inquisition(although the authors, correctly, included a discussion of the colonial church in thatchapter, 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 doso, the authors of the newest textbook on colonial Latin America do not even discuss thecolonial administration established by the Spaniards in the New World, all the emphasisbeing on the social history of colonial Latin America.5 As a result, any student trying tolearn colonial history with this text will never be able to get a sense of the significancethat fundamental institutions of colonial rule such as the audiencia or the corregidor mayhave had in the lives of colonial people (the index of the book does not even includethese two terms, nor does it include the terms viceroy or bishop, although, ironically, thecover of the book depicts the official entrance of a bishop-viceroy in the city of Potosı).The text, however, dedicates an entire chapter to colonial religion, including an extensivediscussion of the role played by the Inquisition in colonial societies. This is no doubt areflection of the current interest of colonial historians in questions of native conversion toChristianity and local religious practice. It is illustrative of this interest the fact that whilea massive study of the figure of the colonial priest was published in 1996, no equivalentexists in English for the corregidor, his secular counterpart.6

Such being the current historiographical situation, the conclusion reached by Susan E.Ramırez in a recent historiographical essay on the institutions of the Spanish Americanempire in the Habsburg era comes as a surprise. Ramırez contends that the historiographyis still dominated by studies of the ruling elite and that historians need to focus on thelives of the common people as they interacted with the institutions of colonial rule. Itwill be only, she argues, by studying specific and seemingly unimportant individual casesthat 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 ‘‘frominstitutional to social history.’’7 This seems a startling call for action since historians in theEnglish speaking world have long ago moved from institutional to social history. Somuch so that it is almost impossible to find a book dealing with the institutional historyof 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 lastfour 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 commonpeople interacted with these institutions. In contrast, the historiography of colonial

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Spanish American governance hasn’t developed much in the same period of time, whichis the reason why Ramırez had to rely on an older bibliography when writing her essay.Of the forty-six titles that she included in the essay’s bibliography, twenty-seven werepublished before 1985 and only ten were published after 1995.

Ramırez concludes her essay by citing Irene Silverblatt’s work on the Inquisition andthe people in both elite and non-elite sectors that were denounced before this tribunal asa good example of the direction colonial historiography should take.8 However, whilethis work may be valuable as social history, it presents many problems as a work thatallegedly advances our understanding of the political history of Spanish colonialism, espe-cially as regards the nature and governance of the Spanish empire. Silverblatt’s ModernInquisitions 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 arguesthat modern colonialism’s governing principles are not to be found in nineteenth-centuryEuropean colonialism, but in the colonial empire created by Spain in the New Worldin 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,’’ installingcutting-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 modernbureaucracy in the Hispanic world than the Inquisition. The irony here, according toSilverblatt, 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 ofrational and efficient bureaucracies and modern technologies of control and social disci-pline. Thus, through its practices, the Inquisition would have contributed to habituatingthe inhabitants of the Spanish colonies to ‘‘the structures of modern power, to thebureaucratic ways and manners of modern political life.’’9

Although this argument may satisfy historians of colonial Spanish America by makingtheir area of study more relevant to our present concerns, Silverblatt’s use of history as atool 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-att’s insistence on the importance of the Inquisition as a state-making institution can onlymake sense if we impose our political categories upon the social and political actors ofcolonial Spanish America and imperial Spain. The ‘state’ and ‘state making’ are categorieswhich 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 colonialworld. Thus, we need to ground the study of Spanish colonialism in the idea that we canunderstand the workings of the system only if we make an attempt to understand itaccording to its own principles and not to ours.

In the case of the Spanish empire, for example, the state-making paradigm has beenused 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 Spanishmonarchy lay in its incapacity to become a ‘true state.’ This is the kind of idea that hasmade historians such as John H. Coatsworth contend that the colonial state was effectiveonly in extracting resources, regulating economic activity and discouraging economicgrowth. In everything else, the colonial state was extremely weak by European standardsof the time; it was just ‘‘an empty Pandora’s Box.’’10 Speaking of the specific case of theviceroyalty of Peru, Kenneth J. Andrien has similarly argued that, though the Spanishgovernment 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 theToledan reforms were undermined by local interests, both Spanish and Andean. By themid-17th century, the colonial state had become weak, corrupt, and inefficient.11 Thisfixation with the state is also probably one of the main reasons why so many historiansare so prone to emphasize the ‘medieval’ aspects of colonial Latin America as a way toexplain its ‘failure’ to modernize. Such a reasoning, however, has a serious flaw. Byadopting a conceptualization of the political order that had not yet been formulated, it isassessing the political system of the Spanish monarchy using assumptions and principlesthat were not those on which it was built. In that regard, it attributes to the Spanishmonarchy deficiencies 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 inthe 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 theterm ‘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 formationsexisting before the liberal revolution.12 Among other reasons this is so because the politystill revolved, to a great extent, around the idea of empire (understood in the medievalsense as a Christian and universal monarchy), and the concept of ‘nation-state’ was stillmarginal in the political discourse of the time. In this regard, the consolidation of the so-called ‘national monarchies’ at the end of the fifteenth century was not followed by thedisappearance 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 inthe New World was never a centralized system of government, with a bureaucracy whichfaithfully followed the king’s 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 asymbolic 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 thehuman body, which served as the model for social and political organization; thus, thepolitical community was conceived of as a ‘‘mystical body,’’ the king being the head ofthis 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 elementarysense of a political community conceived in terms essentially different from that of thestate. These images suggest that individuals were neither solitary nor distinct, but existedonly as members of a body; that the hierarchical organization of the political communitywas as natural and well ordered as that of a human body, which, in turn, was a reflectionof the perfect ordering and harmony of the celestial bodies. This way of conceiving thepolitical community made impossible the existence of a completely centralized politicalgovernment – a society in which all power was concentrated in the sovereign would beas monstrous as a body which consisted only of a head. The function of the king wasnot, 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, tomaintain harmony among all its members. To accomplish this, the king was to guaranteethe rights and privileges of every member of the realm by administering justice, whichhad 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 samemethods 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



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 theSpanish tribunal always claimed temporal and spiritual jurisdiction, because it representedboth pope and king. This duality was typical of the way in which power was conceivedof in the early modern period and very different from the monopoly of power on whichthe modern state was built.15

That the Spanish Inquisition was an institution driven by pre-modern notions of powerand 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 practicesand torture in early modern Europe was radically altered. Foucault’s work showed howthe brutal and physically destructive forms of punishment under the ancien regime weretransformed into the psychological reforms of the nineteenth-century prison. Accordingto Foucault, the theory of the absolute monarchy enabled power to be founded in thephysical 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 ‘‘spectacularand 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 beunderstood as one of those exemplary ceremonies of pre-modern Europe bywhich power was manifested. In the colonial world, the ‘‘liturgy of punishment’’ throughwhich royal power was manifested also played its role, with public executions ofcriminals and autos-da-fe taking place regularly.17 Irene Silverblatt, however, wondersthat, if we are to believe Foucault’s arguments, then the Inquisition’s autos-da-fe do notmake any sense, as these spectacles do not fit into our understanding of the tribunal as amodern institution. She contends that the problem lies with Foucault’s theories, as theydo not account adequately for the processes of change. He was never very clear aboutwhen the shift from the spectacle of public punishment to a regime of surveillance tookplace; as a consequence his theory is unable to account for an anachronism like the auto-da-fe.18

I think, however, that Foucault’s arguments make perfect sense when applied to theInquisition’s 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 stateapparatus is based. Furthermore, although it is true that Foucault finds traces of the newdisciplinary regime starting in the 17th century, he is very clear as regards the momentwhen the transformation of the system of punishment took place: in the late 18th andthe early 19th centuries. In this sense, the auto-da-fe was no anachronism but rather atypical manifestation of power in the pre-modern era. As such it had many characteristicsin common with the rituals of public execution in that period (of course it was also aquintessentially Spanish ritual in that in no other European country did the Inquisitionplay such a prominent role).

The fact that there existed a close relationship between power and ritual in the earlymodern Spanish world needs to be emphasized. It was precisely because the concept ofthe impersonal state had not yet entered the political imagination that political ritualsplayed such an extraordinary role. The emergence of the modern concept of the state asboth a supreme and an impersonal form of authority brought the displacement of thecharismatic elements of political leadership and with it the belief that power is intimatelyconnected with display. The connection between the presence of majesty and theexercise of power could not thus survive the transfer of public authority to the purely



impersonal agency of the modern state. But in 16th- and 17th-century Spanish empirethis 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 thatthe 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 themethods of the Inquisition, Silverblatt has argued that torture has played a role in thedevelopment of modern institutions of government; bestowed with legitimacy by stateinstitutions, torture has been intrinsic to our civilization.20 I think that this is, again, thewrong argument for demonstrating the modernity of the Inquisition. As Michel Foucaultshowed 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 physicalcoercion than through ‘‘carceral’’ institutions. Furthermore, as Edward Peters has pointedout, what differentiates the use of torture in the 17th century from its use in our modernworld 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, requiringpain to speak the truth, but invariably truthful when tortured.’’ On the other hand, thetechnology of torture in the twentieth century is in part the result of a new anthropologyand its auxiliary technology. It is not primarily the victim’s 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 ofpre-modern Europe. The system of proof required the use of torture. This system haddeveloped in the 13th century. When the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 abolished theordeals, the nonrational proofs of Germanic antiquity, it destroyed an entire system ofproof. 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 circumstantialevidence. 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 ordealsystem. 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 thereforebecame regina probationum (the queen of evidence).22 As Edward Peters has noted, torturewas not a means of proof, but a means of obtaining a confession. Torture was used inorder to obtain, not a guilty plea, but a specific statement that contained details that onlythe criminal could possibly know. Hence, the accused would be preached and implore tomake a confession. To this end he or she was often shown the instruments of torturebefore they were used, in the hope that the accused would confess without having to betortured. 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 first seem tous. It was certainly more professional.’’23

By the 17th century, nevertheless, the Roman-canon law of proof was starting to lose itsforce. A new system of proof, free judicial evaluation of the evidence, was developed in thelegal science and the legal practice, alongside the Roman-canon system. This developmentliberated the law of Europe from its dependence on torture. Torture could be abolished inthe eighteenth century because the law of proof did not required it anymore.24 The use oftorture by the Spanish Inquisition in the seventeenth century was not a sign of the adventof the modern world, but, quite to the contrary, a thoroughly pre-modern penal procedure.



To understand the use of torture by the Spanish Inquisition we need to look not to themodern world but to the thirteenth century and Las Siete Partidas of King Alfonso X ofCastile, a legal compilation which was still very much in use in the seventeenth century andin which judicial torture occupied a prominent place.25

In conclusion, it is not more social but more political history that we need in order toavoid 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 socialhistory, ethnohistory, and, above all, cultural history. This new political history needs to beconcerned 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 discoursesand 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 practicescirculated around the Atlantic.27 In other words, it has to be informed by an understandingof 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 notonly 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 modeldominated early modern societies and was, in many respects, significantly different from thestate model. In this regard, the history of colonial Spanish America clearly lends itself to akind of study focused on the court, as the two viceregal courts established in Mexico andLima fulfilled almost exactly the same functions as the royal court located in Madrid. Likethe 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 systemapart from the political mechanisms of the state. One of those court mechanisms was thecreation and development of networks of patronage that dominated all political activity.Patronage, clientelism, factions, brokerage, favoritism, nepotism, concepts that are usuallyassociated with corrupt state practices, were, in fact, constitutive of the political structuresof 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 astate that never existed.29 In that regard, patronage and clientelism should not be seen asmanifestations of an all-pervasive corruption but as part of a system of government in whichnetworks 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 aboutthem. Their systematic study will contribute to a fuller understanding of the political historyof colonial Spanish America.30

Finally, another important area of research for political historians of colonial SpanishAmerica should be the study of the emergence of a new imperial ideology in Spain inthe eighteenth century and the extent to which this new ideology of empire changed thetraditional political culture of the Habsburg monarchy. This is important as studies of theSpanish empire in the eighteenth century have almost exclusively emphasized issues ofthe imperial political economy (above all, the meaning and historical significance of freetrade between the metropolis and its transatlantic dominions), or the success or failure ofthe many administrative reforms implemented by the new Bourbon dynasty.31 One aspectof this research should investigate the ways in which the new ideas affected traditional



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 theEnlightenment 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 ideasof empire contributed to the alteration of the existing power relations in colonial SpanishAmerica. In that respect, these investigations should answer one fundamental question:Was eighteenth-century Spanish imperialism essentially different from that of the twoprevious 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 tryto 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 verynature, was colonizing in method.

Short Biography

Alejandro Caneque is an associate professor of History at the University of Maryland atCollege Park. He is a specialist in the history of colonial Latin America, early modernSpain, 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 andreligious cultures of the early modern Spanish world, with an emphasis on colonial Span-ish America. He is the author of The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Vicere-gal Power in Colonial Mexico (2004), a study of the Spanish colonial and imperial politicalculture. He has also published in Colonial Latin American Review, The Americas, HistoriaMexicana, Revista de Indias, and Historica. He is currently working on a book-length studyof the culture of martyrdom that developed around the Spanish empire in the 16th and17th centuries.

Notes

* Correspondence: Department of History, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, University of Maryland, College Park,MD 20742, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

1 See Leonard, Baroque Times, pp. 10, 32, 35, 219, 220. Richard M. Morse is another author who has emphasizedthe ‘medieval’ aspects of colonial Spanish America. See his influential article ‘The Heritage of Colonial Latin Amer-ica’, in Hartz, (ed.), The Founding of New Societies, 123–77. 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 leastexplicitly, this ‘medieval heritage’ as an insurmountable obstacle for the modernization of Mexico.2 See, for example, Lynch, Spain, 1516–1598, 211–12; Phelan, The Kingdom of Quito, 321–37; Gibson, Spain inAmerica, 90–91. This notion can also be found among historians writing in Spanish. See, among others, Pietsch-mann, El Estado, 161–63; Semo, Historia del capitalismo en Mexico, 65–70; Ots Capdequı, El Estado espanol en lasIndias, 44–45.3 The following are frequently and almost universally quoted by colonial historians: Haring, The Spanish Empire inAmerica; Parry, The Audiencia of New Galicia; Leonard, Baroque Times; Elliott, Imperial Spain; Phelan, The Kingdom ofQuito; 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 King’s 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 figure of the corregidor, historians still have to rely on LohmannVillena’s El corregidor de indios.7 Ramırez, ‘Institutions’, 106–23.8 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions.9 Ibid, p. 93.



10 Coatsworth, ‘The Limits of Colonial Absolutism’, 25–41.11 See his ‘Spaniards, Andeans, and the Early Colonial State in Peru’, in Andrien and Adorno (eds.), TransatlanticEncounters, 121–48.12 Quentin Skinner has conclusively shown that the fundamental conceptual shift to a relatively impersonal idea ofthe state first 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 evenamong these it created considerable confusion. See the Conclusion in Skinner, The Foundations. Volume Two. For adiscussion of the meanings and uses of the word Estado in 16th- and 17th-century Spain, see Elliott, Richelieu andOlivares, 42–48; Lalinde, Abadıa, ‘Espana y la monarquıa universal’, 109–38; Clavero, Tantas personas como estados,53–105; 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 King’s Living Image, 75–77. For the argument that the Spanish empire was also fiscally decentral-ized, see Irigoin and Grafe, ‘Bargaining for Absolutism’, 173–209.15 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 ofthe notion of dual power see Caneque, The King’s Living Image, chap. 3.16 Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Power ⁄ Knowledge, 104–05, 119.17 For many instances of these public rituals of punishment, see Martın 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 King’s Living Image, chap. 4.20 Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions, p. 75.21 Peters, Torture, 163–64. 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, 6–7; Peters, Torture, p. 44.23 Peters, Torture, 50–51.24 Langbein, Torture and the Law of Proof, 11–12. See also Silverman, Tortured Subjects.25 Significantly, a new edition of the Partidas, profusely commented upon by one of the most prestigious jurists ofthe period, was published in Salamanca in the mid sixteenth century with the title of Las Siete Partidas del sabio Reydon 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 Herzog’s La administracion como un fenomeno social. An excellent example of a work of ethnohistorydeeply informed by an understanding of the political culture of Spanish colonialism is Owensby’s Empire of Law.27 Some colonial historians have started to explore these topics. See, for example, Seed, Ceremonies of Possession;Caneque, The King’s Living Image, Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals; Schreffler, 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 cultureof the period which can be very useful to colonial historians interested in these matters. Among the most significantworks are Adamson, (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe; Wilentz, (ed.), Rites of power; Feros, ‘Sacred and TerrifyingGazes’; 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 Lifein Renaissance Florence; Oestreich, Neostoicism; Prodi, The Papal Prince; Schneider, The Ceremonial City; Smith, ‘No MoreLanguage Games’; Strong, Art and Power. Several works published in Spanish are also of relevance: Fernandez Albaladejo,Fragmentos de Monarquıa; Hespanha, Vısperas del Leviatan; Hespanha, La gracia del derecho.29 Chittolini, ‘The ‘Private’, 34–61.30 A recent study that has started to explore this subject is Rosenmuller’s Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues. Earlymodern historians have been studying the question of patronage and clientelism for many years. Some studies thatmay be of relevance to colonial historians are Feros, Kingship and Favoritism; MacHardy, War, Religion and CourtPatronage; 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; Apogeeof Empire; and Edge of Crisis. In the case of the first volume, the arguments they make regarding the political natureof the Habsburg empire are, for the most part, outmoded and rather antiquated.

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