Decentralization and the Creation of Imperial Subjects in the Spanish Empire

Scholars no longer view the Spanish Crown as highly centralized authority that imposed its will on cowed subjects; rather, they have demonstrated how frequently the Crown regularly relied on a decentralized notions of power exercised through an array of proxies. This mechanism for the extension of authority became increasingly important with the expansion of the Spanish Empire and is vividly evident in the documentation of the Spanish Crown's scheme to send the poorest of northern Spain's peasantry to colonize Patagonia between 1778 and 1783. In this interesting case, we see how the when the Crown found itself unable to secure contested territories in the Rio de la Plata, it turned not to the bureaucracy or the military to act as its imperial proxies, but to poor Spanish peasants. During those five years, it recruited more than 2000 poor, rural men, women, and children to leave their homes and permanently settle in the Rio de la Plata, where their presence would protect Spanish territory from foreign incursions and bring Spanish ways of life and forms of power to these peripheral areas. A fascinating by-product of this devolution of authority was the impact of this scheme on the peasants themselves. They quickly learned how to engage both bureaucratic and political hierarchies for their own needs. In this paper, I will discuss how ideas of decentralization and negotiation worked to transform these peasants into vigorous political actors and conscientious agents of empire.