Spanish Colonial Research Articles

The Western Design Revised: Death, Dissent, and Discontent on the Gloucester, 1654–1656

AbstractIn December 1654 a large naval force departed from Portsmouth and sailed across the Atlantic. Its goal was to expand the English Commonwealth in the Caribbean at the expense of Spanish colonies. The Gloucester, a third-rate frigate recently constructed as part of Oliver Cromwell's ambitious shipbuilding programme, was one of the largest and most heavily armed warships of the expedition. Combining analysis of courts martial accounts, inventories, journals, letters, sailing instructions, and wills, this article argues for the Gloucester's importance as a case study and microcosm for understanding the economic, political, religious, and social problems that the navy and wider Protectorate faced. It revises traditional historiography about the topic that has underestimated the significance of the naval context to the Western Design. Crucial to this new history is that the extreme hardships and religious divisions created tensions that targeted the leadership of Admiral William Goodsonn. Of particular importance in this narrative is Benjamin Blake, captain of the Gloucester, who clashed with Goodsonn over key policies. By focusing on the Gloucester and exploring its crew's experiences, this article shows that the English navy was a restricted and internally conflicted force when operating at the peripheries of the state network.

Establishing Colonial Rule in a Frontier Encomienda: Chile’s Copiapó Valley under Francisco de Aguirre and His Kin, 1549–1580

AbstractThis article explores how Francisco de Aguirre used the Copiapó Valley encomienda to negotiate political power during the transition from conquest to colonial rule in northern Chile. Simultaneously, we analyze the circumstances of how a native society was incorporated into the Spanish Empire after a decade of fighting and resistance on the fringes of the empire. The strategic use of the fear of native rebellions to close the road from Peru to Chile gave Aguirre enough power to negotiate an important political position, which in the future would clash with the colonial authorities. Copiapó Valley’s peripheral location in the southernmost Atacama Desert constituted a political gray zone for the colonial administration. This space contributed to consolidating power for Aguirre and enabled locals some negotiation power within the possibilities afforded by the colonial system.

유럽의 아메리카 식민 지배 과정에서 나타난 원주민 관련 법제 연구

In the 15th century, the Spanish Empire had settled in America and dominated the indigenous peoples of Latin America. The some of the region showed that these native were even expropriated after the domination. The Spanish Empire recognized this situation and started to think of how to manage these people who were rulled. At that time, the empire tried to establish law and discipline for recognition of the indigenous people the legislaition was on purpose to protect the human right for them. In spite of the effort to legistlate the laws in the mainland, however, the adaptation of the laws was another problem. This law can not function as not only protection but the ladder for escaping the life of socially underprivileged. According to this, the present study will introduce the discussion of the indigenous people and legislated spainsh laws from 16th century when the Spanish Empire had been in the business of colonization. Furthermore, we thought the turning point of thoguthful recognition on the native is the ‘Valladolid debate’. Through this debate, this study found out the relationship between the Spain and Latin America and treatment of them at that time. The thing is to analyze the 『Recopilación de Leyes de las Indias』 which was merged in 1680 and to reflect on how that law was applid to them. This study would provide the direction to understand what endeavors the Spanish empire did to recognize the race during the period of colonization.

The Evangelical Church as an Extirpator of Idolatry in the Water Festival in the Andes of Peru

The research focuses on the Water Festival (Yarqa Aspiy), an ancient event in the Peruvian Andes, and which, as an Inca activity, survived the extirpation of idolatries by the Spanish colonization. The objective is to determine the importance of ancestral rituals in the communal work of this festival that, by merging with those of the Catholic religion, survives to this day. The participant-observation methodology in the Ccarhuaccoco community allowed us to investigate the details of this ancestral communal activity with its Andean rituals. It is concluded that this activity of Inca origin is in the process of extinction due to the growth of the Evangelical Church, which eradicates idolatry in its community practice. Additionally, thanks to religious tolerance, freedom of belief, and the necessary coexistence of water with the community, the festivity is maintained, although with variations in its ritual.

Liberal constitution, civic enlightenment, and colonies: Jeremy Bentham on the Spanish empire

ABSTRACT Between April 1820 and April 1822, stimulated by the restoration of the Cádiz Constitution, Bentham devoted himself to writing a number of works on the constitutional reform and colonial rule of Spain, which have been sources of a scholarly debate over Bentham's views on colony. By examining those works, this essay aims to supplement the scholarly debate by drawing attention to a thesis that Bentham developed in his criticism and evaluation of the Cádiz Constitution: a thesis concerning the irreconcilable incompatibilities of liberal constitution and colonisation. I focus on Bentham's critical analyses of the Constitution, and indicate that Spain's colonial rule of Ultramaria not only intensified the weaknesses of the Constitution, but also rendered its merits useless, if not harmful, to the public in both hemispheres. Moreover, I explore the tension that Bentham detected between liberal constitutionalism and colonialism. I maintain that, in Bentham's observation, the civil rights granted by the Cádiz Constitution to the Ultramarians stood to facilitate the enlightenment of citizens and the formation of civil society. As a consequence, the delusion of the Spanish ruling few would be exposed, and the Ultramarians’ discontent with exploitation by such foreign rulers would sow the seeds of disobedience and resistance.

Age, Origin and Functional Study of the Prevalent LDLR Mutation Causing Familial Hypercholesterolaemia in Gran Canaria.

The p.(Tyr400_Phe402del) mutation in the LDL receptor (LDLR) gene is the most frequent cause of familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) in Gran Canaria. The aim of this study was to determine the age and origin of this prevalent founder mutation and to explore its functional consequences. For this purpose, we obtained the haplotypic information of 14 microsatellite loci surrounding the mutation in one homozygous individual and 11 unrelated heterozygous family trios. Eight different mutation carrier haplotypes were identified, which were estimated to originate from a common ancestral haplotype 387 (110-1572) years ago. This estimation suggests that this mutation happened after the Spanish colonisation of the Canary Islands, which took place during the fifteenth century. Comprehensive functional studies of this mutation showed that the expressed LDL receptor was retained in the endoplasmic reticulum, preventing its migration to the cell surface, thus allowing us to classify this LDLR mutation as a class 2a, defective, pathogenic variant.

Plant use and peasant politics under Inka and Spanish rule at Ollantaytambo, Peru

In the Andes, successive waves of Inka and Spanish imperialism reshaped local ecologies and transformed agricultural practices between the 14th and 17th centuries. As the Inka (ca. 1450–1532CE) consolidated control over the region they co-opted existing resources, directed the development of new farmland, and imposed new labor obligations on Andean people. In turn, Spanish colonizers (1533-1824CE) introduced foreign flora and fauna, created new tributary regimes, and reorganized agricultural production around forcibly resettled communities and Spanish-owned haciendas (agrarian estates). In this paper, we explore how agricultural workers managed this extended period of upheaval through analysis of botanical data from recent excavations at the site of Simapuqio-Muyupata, in Peru’s Cusco region. We track how agriculturalists living at the site altered patterns of plant use—and, by extension agricultural practice—across the period of Inka and Spanish Colonial governance. These farmers remained reliant on a similar suite of cultivated plants under both political regimes, but shifted practices of land management to conserve labor when confronted with the structural conditions of servitude to Spanish landlords. By altering agricultural practices, these agriculturalists re-shaped the agroecological context in which they lived and worked to ensure survival in the face of political upheaval.

Information and the government of the composite polities of the Renaissance world (c. 1350–1650)

ABSTRACTThis special issue uses information as a lens through which to examine the operation of the Renaissance world’s composite polities and political unions, such as the Venetian thalassocracy or the Spanish Empire. To date, late-medieval and early modern scholarship has mostly neglected the role of information in ruling those polities. Yet information was crucial, for it allowed authorities to know what was happening in their dominions and colonies and thus shaped their policies and interactions with local political societies. The authors of this special issue suggest that a focus on information can help us fully understand how composite polities operated, whether on a regional, Mediterranean or global scale. This introductory essay examines the historiographical debate about late-medieval and early modern composite polities and unions and discusses how and to what extent communication strategies, record-keeping practices and data accumulation can be used to understand how authorities relied on information to exercise their rule over their various dominions. It also discusses this approach in relation to this special issue’s six case studies and other examples of pre-modern composite polities.

Bisayan studies

ABSTRACT This essay briefly introduces Bisayan studies as a field of academic research, with a focus on literature and history. It outlines the designation of the Visayas as a distinct region by Spanish colonizers, despite linguistic diversity, and the development over the following centuries of a collective regional identity. It describes a shift in scholarly interests towards local culture and history in the 1970s that saw the creation of regional study centres in the Philippines. Finally, it provides a survey of the current state of the field, suggesting future avenues for research.

Lesser kestrels of the same colony do not overwinter together.

Migratory connectivity describes the linkage between breeding and nonbreeding sites, having major ecological implications in birds: 1 season influence the success of an individual or a population in the following season. Most studies on migratory connectivity have used large-scale approaches, often considering regional populations, but fine-scale studies are also necessary to understand colony connectivity. The lesser kestrel Falco naumanni, an insectivorous migratory raptor which form colonies during the breeding period, was considered to have strong connectivity based on regional populations. However, no small-scale studies on migratory connectivity have been conducted. Therefore, we GPS (Global Positioning System)-tracked 40 adult lesser kestrels from 15 different Spanish breeding colonies, estimating the overlap index between home ranges and the distance between their centroids. It was found that lesser kestrels from the same breeding colony placed their nonbreeding areas at 347 ± 281 km (mean ± standard deviation) away from each other (range = 23-990), and their home ranges overlapped by 38.4 ± 23.6%. No differences between intra-colony and inter-colony metrics were found, which suggests that lesser kestrels from the same breeding cluster do not overwinter together, but they spread out and mixed independently of the colony belonging throughout the nonbreeding range of the species. Ultimately, this study highlights the importance of performing connectivity studies using fine-scale approaches.

Debating friendship in seventeenth-century Lima, 1678–1681

ABSTRACT Given its performative functions and polysemic nature, friendship was constantly debated within the multiple political and legal sites of the Spanish Empire. This article focuses on the case of the Conde de Castellar, the viceroy of Peru (1674–1678), who was removed from office after being accused of excessive distribution of offices to his favors. The conde’s case demonstrates that friendship was both a widely accepted aspect of political life and a useful category in delegitimizing opponents. This essay focuses especially on the conflict over the conde’s social relationships and their amical character (1678–1681) as he was accused of manipulating witnesses and judges to help him escape his end-of-tenure judicial review with little punishment. Exploring manuscript records held at the Archivo General de Indias, this study reconstructs the practices and meanings of friendship with the goal of depicting the processes by which personal friendships were transformed into social and legal facts.

Emotional connection and ease of learning the Spanish language among young adult Chavacano speakers

Chavacano was the product of early Spanish colonization. It was able to adapt to the dynamic of the Philippine culture for centuries. Then, it later became a separate language spoken mostly in Cavite and Zamboanga Peninsula. This study was exploratory research that contextualize the ease of learning Spanish language based on linguistic, cultural, and emotional domains. Eight students who are native Chavacano speakers in Zamboanga City were interviewed for the study. The findings indicated that the close resemblance of lexical and phonological components of Chavacano to Spanish influenced the learning of the native speakers. Cognates played an essential role in cognition and interpreting basic words from Spanish to simpler ideas in Chavacano. Cognition guessing was determined to be a major contributor to language learning for orthographies. For native Chavacano speakers, cognition guessing was a mechanism for language learning in Spanish where learners happened to deduce the meaning of a word by comparing it to a language they know. Additionally, social-cultural relatedness between Chavacano and Spanish mediated the learning in certain manner. Learners were able to emotionally relate themselves to the culture of their target language which in turn influenced language transfer. Such mechanism was firstly observed in learning the second language but later also applied in bilingualism and foreign languages. This study established theoretical connection of ease of learning the Spanish language through phonology, lexical similarities, and its sociocultural resemblance to Chavacano.

“Made by the Son of a Black”: José Campeche as Artist and Free Person of Color in Late Eighteenth-Century Puerto Rico

In response to the absence of a critical discussion of race within his historiography, this essay focuses on José Campeche (1751–1809) as an artist of African descent and argues that the socially and culturally inscribed constructs of race and Campeche’s lived experiences of them in late eighteenth-century Puerto Rico shaped and informed his participation in the arts. Campeche lived both as an artist and as a free man of color within a racialized colonial society, and as such, inquiries regarding how race affected Campeche’s life and artistic practice, and particularly how his immersion in the community of free people of color in San Juan possibly impacted the manner in which he was trained and worked, allow for a more comprehensive understanding of his art production. Using comparable examples of African descendant artists and artisans active in other colonial centers, such as Mexico City and Havana, this article elucidates connections between Campeche’s socioracial reality, his artistic career, and his work through an examination of the relationship between race and art making in Puerto Rico, the broader Caribbean region, and the greater Spanish Empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This analysis of Campeche’s career and work prompts new questions about the artist that have not been asked in previous scholarship, such as how the structures of race would have defined his position and interactions within colonial society and also how his complex multiracial identity may have allowed him access to the different kinds of artistic exposure, training, and opportunities he likely had in San Juan.

Realistas, patriotas y mestizos

The South American wars of independence were rich in social contradictions, politicization of the masses and new players emerging during the Spanish Empire’s crisis on the continent. By adopting a regional perspective that decentralizes and democratizes knowledge relative to state-centered nationalistic historiography, researchers can analyze episodes and discover historical players previously absent from state-of-the-art research. This paper traces a specific case related to the right to profits from Tarapacá guano during the 1815 patriot invasion of the district of Tarapacá and the River Plate offensive in neighboring Upper Peru. Based on unpublished primary sources and pertinent bibliographic discussion, the authors argue that socio-ethnic factors, interests and new conceptions about the use of regional resources drove a sector of South American society to support the Patriot cause temporarily. Thus, the political, economic and social conflict surrounding guano constitutes new background for the transformation of South American colonial society at the dawn of the 19th century and the imminent emergence of the republican order in southern Peru.

Architecture and the Self-fashioning of the Imperial Image

A review of: Laura Fernández-González, Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire, Pittsburgh: Penn State Press, 2021, 176 pages, ISBN 978-0-271-08724-5. This is a review of the publication by Laura Fernández-González, Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire (2021). Through a detailed analysis of buildings and building regulation, the architecture of archives, festivals and celebratory frescoes, the author shows the complexity and diversity of the architecture of the Spanish empire. The book is a refreshing study on the self-fashioning of Philip II and the role of architecture in the construction of the Spanish Empire.

How to Finance a Counter-Reformation Saint: the Alms for the Canonisation of Isidore Agricola and Ferdinand III, 1592–1688

The paths to sainthood of the cults of Isidore Agricola and Ferdinand III exhibit a unique phenomenon of collaboration across the Spanish empire for the canonisation of multiple Counter-Reformation saints. An analysis of their financial records may reveal a network of alliances that could account for the overwhelming number of Iberian saints canonised in the seventeenth century. The role of Spanish America in the construction of a renewed imperial identity is also examined, demonstrating that it capitalised on the urgency of these devotions to advance its own cults while arguing for the centrality of their territories to the expansion of Catholicism.

Verwandtschaft ohne Diagramm?

Tree diagrams have dominated the visual diagrammatic representation of kinship since the late fifteenth century. Such diagrams were often part of proofs of ancestry in late medieval and early modern Europe. But especially in the Spanish Empire existed proofs of ancestry that lacked diagrams altogether. This paper explores what reasons, circumstances and processes can be argued for the fact that certain proofs got along without any diagrammatic visualization of ancestry. Furthermore, it tries to explain what makes it necessary to represent ancestry visually through diagrams. Finally, by showing alternative ways of representing descent, it aims to question the western diagram as a logical and natural model of visualizing kinship.

Letters and economic routes in the Spanish empire in the 18th century with GIS

The postal service was one of the main channels through which letters, goods and actors circulated via fixed maritime and land routes, which favoured the circulation of postal communication between the most influential Spanish-American centres. This paper will examine the spatial organisation of maritime mail between Spain and America after the creation of the Maritime Post in 1764, as well as overland mail in the viceroyalty of New Granada, especially the Cartagena de Indias - Santa Fe de Bogotá route. It is based principally on the document Reglamento Provisional del Correo Marítimo de España a sus Indias Occidentales of 1764 for maritime mail. And the handwritten report of the commissioner José Antonio de Pando, which he produced around 1774. Both documents contain detailed information on postal routes, which have been reconstructed using a geographic information system (GIS). Through the use of GIS, a dynamic visualization of postal routes which made up the circulation of information, goods and agents in the 18th century is made possible.

Ch'ixi Epistemology and The Potosí Principle in the 21st Century

Abstract The author focuses on the project exhibition, “The Potosí Principle,” curated by Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer, and Andreas Siekmann Initially installed in Madrid in 2010 and then traveling to Berlin and La Paz, the show cut across the institutionally defined and often rigorously guarded boundaries between curatorial practice, aesthetic expression, and scholarly research to explore global capitalism's dynamics from the perspective of the Spanish colonial empire and its distinctive imagery. However, despite the exhibition's creative installation techniques and revisionist history, it generated a considerable scandal when a self-organized group of La Paz-based artists and scholars committed to anticolonial practices accused the curators of continuing the logic through which the modern West has represented others. The author argues that this criticism parallels the often-fraught negotiations between artists, curators, and curated cultures at the boundary zones between art frameworks.

Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America by Marcia D. Nichols, and: Baptism through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire ed. by Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren (review)

Fixing Women: The Birth of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Britain and America by Marcia D. Nichols, and: Baptism through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire ed. by Martha Few, Zeb Tortorici, and Adam Warren (review)