The Political Economic Governance of the Spanish Empire - Dr Julia McClure

At the end of the fifteenth century Western Europeans breached their Atlantic seal and initiated a new era of global expansion. They were driven, in part, by the competition for commodities, especially spices and precious metals, and the desire to circumvent Muslim traders of goods from the East Indies. When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they encountered a part of the world that previously they had not known existed, a so-called ‘New World’, and this raised ontological and moral questions about who the Indigenous people were and how they should be treated. It is well known that the arrival of Europeans in the Americas resulted in the often-violent appropriation of the resources and labour of Indigenous people. It is less well known how these acts of appropriation were embedded within systems of moral-political economic governance. These systems of moral-political economic governance formed the deep structures of empire and have had long lasting effects on the contours of global inequality. Imperial subjects also navigated the complexity of the political economic structures of governance to find opportunities for resistance.

Resources

Codex Kingsborough, British Museum https://www.britishmuseum.org/collect...
New Laws of the Indies https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1...
Laws of Burgos https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2012/12/the...
Indigenous Slavery in the Atlantic https://oxfordre.com/latinamericanhis...
Aztec world https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/
The Valladolid Debate BBC Radio 4, In Our Time https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...
Christopher Columbus: life of the week, History Extra Podcast https://www.historyextra.com/membersh...

Questions for Discussion

1. What impact did the political economic structures of taxation have on the development of the Spanish Empire?
2. What strategies did people have for resisting imperial taxations?
3. What were the legacies of imperial taxation regimes?

This lecture is part of the Connected Sociologies module on Empires and Colonialism. Read more and download lesson plans here: https://thesociologicalreview.org/pro...