Warfare in Spanish America

Abstract

In the same way that it is possible to understand warfare as organized violence with political ends, it is also useful to think of it as a particular condition of a society: a set of radically transforming experiences of individuals and communities; an unpredictable and chaotic process that defines identities and produces new forms of common life; and the creative space of a particular culture marked by different types of relationships between the members of a community. As can be seen from several historiographical traditions, there is a direct relationship between warfare and the process of state building: the state makes war and war makes the state. The regime established in America from the end of the 15th century to the 19th century can be explained by this relationship between institutional construction and the practice of violence. Like any empire of its time, the Spanish monarchy founded its authority, part of its legitimacy, its fiscal and administrative organization, its bureaucracy, its control systems, and its trade opportunities on the ground of warfare, and with these characteristics informed the slow and problematic processes of conquest, colonization, and subjection of the New World. Approaching Spanish America through both warfare and the military offers two major advantages: on the one hand, learning the history of its institutional, social, political, economic, and cultural development, and on the other, identifying the prolific historiography that has studied it. This bibliographical selection expresses both fields: the history of warfare in Spanish America and its changing historiography. The characteristics, pretensions, contradictions, and flaws of the Spanish institutional framework that for three centuries expanded from the Caribbean and came to dominate immense regions of North, Central, and South America until it entered into crisis and collapsed, leading to the emergence of national states, can be understood from its capacity to mobilize economic and human resources for warfare. Likewise, these very diverse armed forces involved in such processes were historical expressions of the societies that produced them. The studies in this bibliography express the historical complexity of Spanish America from the perspective of organization and experience of warfare. Although the sections are thematic, as far as possible the selection seeks to include in each case the broad spectrum of the three centuries of colonial domination; the sections referring to War Experiences do evolve with a more chronological criterion from conquests to independences and the emergence of national states.