Civil Disorders and Popular Protests in Late Colonial New Granada

Abstract

H TISTORIANS of colonial Spanish America have long recognized that Bourbon policies designed to rebuild and intensify Spain's political and economic control over its colonies generated tensions at many levels in colonial society. At times these tensions were openly and violently revealed in large-scale insurrections that merged the agitations of disparate groups into direct conflict with the royal authorities. The most striking instances of such mass rebellion occurred toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and have often been regarded as precursors of the movements for independence. These were the Comuneros' rebellion of New Granada in 1781, the rebellion of Tupac Amaru, which convulsed Peru and Upper Peru in 1780-82, and the Hidalgo revolt, which initiated the Mexican insurgency in i8io-ii. It is becoming increasingly apparent, however, that these extraordinary moments of mass mobilization formed part of a broader pattern of riot and rebellion in late colonial Spanish America. Recent studies have suggested that, among the Indian peasant communities of central Mexico and the central and southern Andes, rebellion was an endemic and recurrent feature of social life, and was probably increasing in frequency during the latter half of the eighteenth century. ' The phenomenon of rebellion in late colonial Spanish America is of interest for many reasons, not least of which is that it offers a iieans of investigating the behavior, ideas, and attitudes of those groups in colonial society that stood outside the small and exclusive circles of the economic