Abstract

AbstractFor a half-century, the historiography on Spanish Habsburg rule suggested that the crown envisioned Indies society as best divided into two segregated sociolegal groups: the republic of the Spaniards and the republic of the Indians. This model was popularized by the eminent mid twentieth century Swedish historian Magnus Mörner and has since become a foundational concept in the field. However, using extensive archival evidence, this article suggests that the Mörner Thesis of the Two Republics is flawed. Historicizing sixteenth-century uses of the concept of the republic, it finds that contemporaries conceived of a complex social order in which many political communities such as municipalities and groups of petitioners could overlap within larger meta-republics, such as the Indies republic and the Christian faith-republic. It then turns to subjects’ uses of the two republics, noting that this conceptual duality appeared rarely in the petitions of Spanish officials, commoners, Indians, Afro-descendants, and mestizos, and was also rare in royal and viceregal legislation. Moreover, this binary most often served to suggest Spaniards’ and Indians’ common ground. The article then reflects on other approaches to understanding the Indies’ Spanish-Indian binary, the place of non-Spanish, non-Indian vassals within republic-thinking, and the staggering complexity of Indies laws, categories, and social interactions.

Highlights

  • I n the early 1600s, a number of printed treatises and manuscripts theorized about a major legal and social dichotomy within the Spanish Empire: the republics of Spaniards and Indians.[1]

  • Englishman was drawing from the 1614 Historia y viage del mundo by the priest Pedro Ordoñez de Zevallos, who observed after having traveled through Peru that the republic of the Spaniards governed itself separately from the “second republic [which] is of the Indians,” each “very contrary” to the other.[3]

  • There was only one moment—albeit a very important one—in which the king and the Council of the Indies explicitly endorsed the existence of two republics in their internal paperwork

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Summary

THE REPUBLICS IN LEGISLATION

There was only one moment—albeit a very important one—in which the king and the Council of the Indies explicitly endorsed the existence of two republics in their internal paperwork. Encinas began his work in the year of president Ovando’s death, and 21 years later produced a mammoth four-volume book, of which the council distributed 500 copies to peninsular and Indies officials.[130] Only two of its entries mentioned the two republics. These were the 1573 ordinance on new conquests, and a 1574 decree to the Mexican viceroy concerning Indian work in the mines (both discussed above). The monarchy, far from pressing this division as Mörner suggested, was almost entirely indifferent and passive in its development

BEYOND THE TWO REPUBLICS
CONCLUSIONS

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