Margins of documents, center of power: a case study on the Consejo de Indias’ annotated paperwork and the construction of legality in an imperial archive

Abstract

This article focuses on a set of reports sent from the Spanish overseas territories in the New World to the Consejo de Indias (Council of the Indies) in Spain. Special attention will be paid to the annotations that appear in the margins of the documents, since they bring light to the activities that were taken over by a wide array of the Consejo’s officials in order to treat the information that came from America. We will demonstrate that such activities—classifying, summarizing, but also linking documents to one another across time and space—were at the core of the process of decision-making in the Spanish monarchy. The main challenge of this research, however, is that most of the marginal annotations were anonymous, and that not all of them were written by the same person, nor did they have the same functions. In order to overcome those obstacles, we will combine a visual, paleographic, and textual study of the sources aimed at exploring the links between the overseas reports, the marginal annotations and the royal decrees to which they had given rise. In doing so, we will highlight the paradoxical nature of the archive which, through its classifying process, gives access to a wide range of documents and, at the same time, separates them from one another and even tends to erase the connections that used to exist between them. Examining the margins of the documents will thus enable us to better understand the relationship between archival techniques, political communication and the development of imperial legality in the Spanish monarchy.