Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 by Ross Richard J.; Ross Richard J.;

Author:Ross, Richard J.; Ross, Richard J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2013-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

“So Many Kings in the Indies”

The author of the Nuevo sistema was hardly alone in regarding the future of Spanish imperial rule in the New World with anxiety. In 1749 two Spanish naval officers, Jorge Juan y Santacilia and Antonio Ulloa, who had spent nearly a decade in the northern Andes between 1735 and 1745, presented a document called Noticias secretas de América to secretary of state Marqués de Ensenada. Though Juan and Ulloa were accompanying La Condamine’s scientific expedition, Ensenada had commissioned the two officers to write a “secret report” on the state of affairs in Peru, with special attention to problems of imperial governance.73

Juan’s and Ulloa’s reflections were withering.74 They chronicled the unrelenting greed of Spaniards in the Andean highlands, which had led to the “unhappiness” of the natives. From the “disorder of the curates,” the “extorsion of the corregidores,” and the “bad treatment” to which they were subject, indigenous people effectively lived in “slavery.” Criollos referred constantly to the Indians’ “incapacity to govern themselves,” though the Incan past demonstrated this to be a false view, concluded Juan and Ulloa. The truth was that the Indians could not fulfill their role as proper tributaries because they lacked justice. Those who governed Peru thought of justice as “risible and purely ideal, without utility in the republic.” Such people almost did not “recognize themselves as vassals since each thinks of himself as a [small] sovereign” subject only to his “own will,” thereby undermining the common good.75

The Noticias secretas make clear that Juan and Ulloa still thought of indigenous people in terms of their reciprocal relationship to the king, their entitlement to justice, and their shared commitment to the common good. The problems of America boiled down to the fact that criollos, Spaniards, mestizos (mixed-race people), and even some Indians thought of themselves first as interest-seeking individuals. Juan and Ulloa conveyed their dismay sarcastically:

Peru displays to the eyes of those who govern it [certain great attractions]; with the flattering trickery of despotic authority, Peru offers the greatest scope of action, figured in the great ostentation of power; with the magnet of precious metals, it whets desire and greed; and so attractive are such people that it charms, captivates and applauds those who do not deserve it. In these three circumstances consists all of the poison which oppresses and kills good government in those kingdoms.76

Divergent political premises aside, both the Noticias secretas and the Nuevo sistema revealed a fretful uncertainty regarding Spain’s colonial dominance in light of its increasingly tenuous position in Europe’s inter-imperial system. In both documents, the treatment and role of the indigenous people lay at the center of diagnoses and proposed reforms. This was no less true of the Representación verdadera y exclamación and Breve y compendiosa satisfacción of 1749, though the vision animating them bespeaks a profoundly different understanding of the problem faced by indigenous people—and solutions to it.77

The Representación verdadera y exclamación (True Representation and Exclamation) takes biblical form—with chapter five of the Book of Jeremiah and the last chapter of the Lamentations as backdrop.

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