Colonial New Granada

Abstract

In the 1530s, the Spanish conquistador Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada coined the term “New Kingdom of Granada” to talk about the highlands of the northern Andes inhabited by native peoples he and his fellow explorers called the moscas—a term the conquerors adapted from the term these indigenous groups used for “people” or “humans,” but also because they abounded like “flies,” moscas in Spanish. From then on, the term New Kingdom of Granada had a volatile and dynamic existence. In political terms, the New Kingdom of Granada revolved around the Audiencia de Santafé, a political entity in charge of justice administration that reported directly to the Council of the Indies. It wove together diverse ethnic groups from different geographic areas, from the Amazon to the Andes, from the Pacific to the Caribbean, and from the Isthmus of Panama to the Orinoquia, including an Andean region divided into three ranges, each with its own characteristics. The Jesuit missions of the Amazonia differed from the slave, gold-mining coasts of the Pacific, and from the agrarian Andean economies. On the Caribbean coast, Cartagena stood out as one of the largest slave-trading hubs in the Atlantic, yet one with an economic framework atypical in the Caribbean, where plantations were not predominant, and home to one of the largest populations of “free men of all colors” (libres de todos los colores) in the Americas. The province of Popayán, with a remarkably diverse jurisdiction that covered a vast region from the Amazon to the Pacific coast, including the Andean groups that marked the northern boundary of the Inca Empire, oscillated between the royal courts of Santafé and Quito. In the 18th century, the imperial administration created the Viceroyalty of New Granada to give administrative unity to the area, and reformed the fiscal and administrative scheme, detonating a wide range of political reactions from a variety of social groups. In all, New Granada should not be understood as a cogent “region” with a coherent and cohesive cultural, economic, or political system, but as an effort to create a unified imperial scale of governance out of a diverse set of peoples and landscapes.