After the conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru, Spanish dominance in the Americas was maintained through a combination of “soft” and “hard” power: a mixture of armed coercion and an elaborate legal-administrative apparatus which ensured that tension rarely escalated into full-blown conflict. The sturdiness of Spain’s empire may also be attributed to other significant factors, including epidemiology (differential immunity), topography, and the avoidance of certain types of military engagement, all of which tended to intersect with or reinforce the deployment of “soft” and “hard” power. There were at least three broad threats to Spain’s dominance: external enemies, particularly rival European states covetous of the economic advantages Spain obtained from its New World dominions; unsubdued Amerindians on the fringes of Spanish settlement, who clung to their autonomy and effectively controlled vast swathes of territory through to the end of the colonial period; and an internal, heterogeneous group from all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, from wealthy, privileged merchants to mistreated African slaves. At some point or other from 1521 until 1808, an internal challenge to Spanish dominance emerged from every sector of colonial society. Whether by design or felicitous coincidence, external and internal threats to Spanish dominance were rarely coterminous, which may help to explain the empire’s resilience and longevity.

Chapter 2 explores the early history of colonial rule in the New Kingdom of Granada, and of the priests and officials first tasked with introducing Christianity to its Indigenous peoples. This involves unravelling a series of powerful assumptions entrenched in the historiography that insist on the efficacy of colonial power. Instead, the chapter shows that the ability of colonial officials, missionaries, and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic to effect change on the ground remained fleeting, contingent, and inconstant. To do so, it explores the participatory nature of the royal administration and judiciary, both at an imperial and a local level, and its reliance on petitioners, supplicants and rescript; reassesses the role of the legislative projects of local officials, whose efficacy is so often taken for granted; and tests the real impact of these institutions and their claims on the lives of Indigenous people through a careful re-reading of all surviving records of early visitations, showing that for decades colonial control remained an illusion and that in practice power remained far from the hands of colonial officials in the New Kingdom.

A number of philosophical doctrines developed as responses to some mainstream views of the Iberian colonial period (roughly, from the late 1500s to the early 1800s). Chapter 1 of this book looks closely at four such doctrines whose central themes concerning Latin America can be traced to that period. It first examines the ideas of three Spanish thinkers, Bartolomé de las Casas (1474-1566), Francisco de Vitoria (1486-1546), and José de Acosta (ca. 1539-1600). The chapter demonstrates that Las Casas and Vitoria were set to determine the moral status of the Spanish conquest, and developed novel doctrines of practical ethics and political philosophy. Acosta raised empiricist objections to Scholasticism in epistemology and philosophy of science. Pressured by the new physical and social realities of the Americas, these three thinkers were among the early challengers of Thomism as interpreted in the Spanish world during the sixteenth century. But the chapter also examines what Edmundo O’Gorman (Mexican, 1906-1995) argued more recently against the myth of Columbus’ “discovery” of America. Clearly, the end of the colonial period was far from marking the end of reflection on philosophically interesting aspects of the Iberian expansion.

This chapter offers a brief overview of the multiple transformationsthe island went through with the rise and fall of the colonial economy in the sixteenth century, as it cycled through gold extraction, and then the expansion of African slavery with the establishment of sugar plantations, all the while exploiting indigenous labor. After the decline of the sugar economy, ginger and cattle ranching followed as the most important economic activities in the last two decades of the century. The chapter ends with a description of the city of Santo Domingo as the social and political center of the colony.

The question of rights for non-Christians emerged out of a theocratic papalist conception of world order during the medieval crusades typified by the canon lawyer Sinibaldo Fieschi (later Pope Innocent IV). It then informed the dominant and ambivalent legal view of Christian-infidel relations in Latin Christendom represented in very different ways by both Innocent IV and his creative commentator, Polish jurist Paulus Vladimiri. This chapter considers the political translation of Innocent’s canon legal opinion on Christian-infidel relations to support the Iberian cause of missionary war in spreading the faith through Crown and Empire across the Atlantic. Theocratic world order, as articulated by Spanish royal jurists and conquistadors like Juan López de Palacios Rubios and Hernán Cortés, chiefly rested its justification for European expansion on the right of punishing infidels for their violation of natural law, the sin of idolatry above all. Infidels had dominium, in principle, but Europeans could claim superior jurisdiction over them when they presented obstacles to the spreading of religion and civilization.