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Section I
Case-Studies
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1 Spanish âColoniesâ: A Term Forged in the Hispanic-Anglosphere
Graciela Iglesias-Rogers and JosĂ© Brownrigg-Gleeson MartĂnez
In the middle of complex discussions surrounding Brexit in 2019, the use of the term âcolonyâ in a draft regulation approved by the Council of the European Union to allude to Gibraltar caused much heated debate in London, Madrid and Brussels.1 British officials rejected the label arguing that it was âcompletely inappropriateâ language to describe the British dominion over which Spain has been claiming sovereignty since 1713.2 A similar remark was made over 200 years earlier by the Spanish authorities with the decree of 22 January 1809 that famously stated that the American dominions were neither âcolonias o Factorias, como las de otras Naciones, sino una parte esencial integral de la MonarquĂa Españolaâ3 (neither colonies nor feitorias, as those of other nations, but an essential and integral part of the Spanish Monarchy). The statement sat on solid ground. The legal codes of the Spanish Monarchy never employed the term âcoloniasâ (colonies) to refer to its overseas dominions, and the absence from the Spanish juridical lexicon had wider implications. The aim of our work is not to revive the controversy sparked in 1948 by Ricardo Levene who, based on that assumption, sought to eradicate from the history books the term âcolonialâ when used in reference to anything relating to the period of Spanish rule in the Americas.4 The objective here is to trace the way and to establish the extent to which the word âcoloniesâ came to be applied to the Hispanic context through increased entanglement with the British and Irish world. We suggest that this lodging took place in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries with a shift in meaning within the Anglophone world and by formulations of the Hispanic world produced in Ireland, where its own âcolonialâ status and designation had long been the subject of protracted disputes and debates. The chapter also offers a glimpse into a one-size-fits-all understanding of how global polities operated that was prevalent at the time in the British Isles.
It seems important to start from making it clear that the term âcolonyâ was adopted early on in the process of English overseas expansion to identify territories administrated by Europeans who had been granted charters by the English (later the British) crown that conferred certain specific liberties to establish ad hoc institutions and to practice non-established religions while keeping a satellite-style relationship with Britain. Used interchangeably with the softer horticulturally evocative term of âplantationâ, from the late seventeenth century, the English word began to imply a level of dependency. This interpretation was alien to the Roman term from which it had originally been borrowed which referred to any new settlement established outside the original political community and that, as Annick LempĂ©riĂšre has rightly pointed out, gave us the word colonos and colonize which meant âfirst of all to settle; a migration and the establishment of a community that involved taking possession of territory but not the domination over other peopleâ.5 In an English context, the subaltern condition was in relation to both the Crown and to what began to be referred as the mother country: mainly England.6 We know from the work of historians of the Anglo-American independence that by the mid-to-late eighteenth century, it became an expression that reflected the troubled British experience of the management of overseas territories and that it was heavily charged with notions of systemic unfairness.7
In the Hispanic world, although not unknown, the term was uncommon. It is difficult to find it in publications and even in correspondence. An advance search of the word âcoloniasâ covering the period 1750â1800 in the online portal of the Spanish archives (PARES) produced only 78 results out of the hundreds of thousands of records currently available through this facility which offers access to catalogues and digitalized material of the Archivo General de Indias, the Archivo HistĂłrico Nacional among many other repositories â and the results were invariably within phrases referring to foreign dominions, at times explicitly as in the phrase âcolonias extranjerasâ and also specifically (e.g. âcolonias inglesasâ, âcolonias holandesasâ, and âcolonias del Norte de AmĂ©ricaâ in reference to the United States).8 Although digital resources are yet to offer a comprehensive account of all archival holdings, what it seems certain from this survey is that during the second half of the eighteenth century the term âcoloniasâ was not used routinely, not even by officials in Madrid as it has been recently suggested,9 but rather rarely. Instead, the terms that can be seen used routinely in a global Hispanic context are territorios (territories), dominios (domains), the latter combined in a variety of phrases such as dominos de ultramar (overseas domains) and dominios americanos (American domains), and more frequently, provincias (provinces).10
This is not to say that the term had not begun to get some traction in select circles of the Spanish administration from around the mid-eighteenth century, particularly among proyectistas who promoted a view of the Crownâs dominions akin to property that needed to be placed under the subordination of the metropolis and locked in a relationship characterized by the pre-eminence of structures of unfree labour, displacement, expropriation and extraction.11 In the period following the advent of the second Reglamento del Comercio libre in 1778, the incorporation of New Spain into the comercio libre and the onset of the French Revolution, an anonymous commentator in CĂĄdiz stated in no uncertain terms that ânuestras Yndias son colonias, que deben ser dependientes de la MetrĂłpoliâ (our Indies are colonies that must be dependent to the Metropolis), whereas a member of the ayuntamiento of Seville expressed his satisfaction at seeing all but dismantled the monopoly â âthat destroying vice of our Spain which has kept our colonies in misery for over two and a half centuriesâ.12 A few years later, Francisco Arango y Parreño also made repeated reference to the âcoloniesâ in his well-known Discurso for the development of commercial agriculture in Cuba (1793)13 and Rafael AntĂșnez y Acevedo, a jurist with a long trajectory in mercantile law defended the commercial system in place until 1765 even carrying the word in its title.14 There is also evidence that the term was used occasionally in private correspondence (never in public) by some high officials of the crown in the Americas, particularly those who were in contact with other European polities who used the term to entail a degree of dependency.15
Notwithstanding these cases, the reluctance to apply the term to the Spanish dominions is likewise noteworthy. For instance, JosĂ© del Campillo y CossĂo was careful to avoid the concept in his Nuevo sistema de gobierno econĂłmico para la AmĂ©rica penned in 1743, but not published until 1789. The same can be said of Bernardo Wardâs Proyecto econĂłmico (written in 1762, but published in 1779) which relying heavily on the manuscripts of Campillo and other authors, clearly set the case of the Spanish dominions as distinct from those of the British and French colonies. In his view, the Spanish Monarchy âen AmĂ©rica tiene una posesiĂłn, que consiste, no en Islas y Colonias, sino en Reynos, e Imperios vastĂsimos [âŠ]â (in America has possessions which consist, not of Isles and Colonies, but of extensive Kingdoms and Empires [âŠ]).16 Moreover, the instances where the usage of âcoloniasâ is documented stem for the most part from the higher echelons of the bureaucratic elite, making it difficult, as other scholars have pointed out, to determine the extent of its use among the lower echelons of the administration both in Europe and overseas. The repeated citation of single-case instances recorded in secondary sources has not contributed greatly to clarify the situation.17
The state of affairs, in any case, appears to have barely changed in the early 1800s (at least when it comes to written records) even after the introduction in July 1808 of Napoleonâs Bayonne Statute when for the first time a clear binary demarcation was established between Spanish dominions located in Europe on one side and American and Asian (Africa was largely overlooked) on the other side, as proclaimed in its title: the Constitution of the Spains (the traditional plural form of Españas was kept, but now only for Spanish Europe) and the Indies (non-European territories).18 Crucially, the first draft of the charter had transferred to the Spanish sphere the long-established French legal use of the term âcoloniesâ for its own overseas empire.19 The text drawn by Napoleon was revised by an unelected General Deputation of Spaniards, and it was during that process that the transfer was successfully resisted by a Catalan merchant with extensive interests in the south of Spanish America, JosĂ© RamĂłn MilĂĄ de la Roca and by the man that the Napoleonic regime had designated as representative of the River Plate, the Montevideo-born NicolĂĄs de Herrera.20 Both men praised the text for proclaiming the principle of equality of American and peninsular Spaniards within a Catholic monarchy, but they urged a series of amen...
