Early Modern Slavery, Race, and Governance: Beyond Labor, Capital, and Ideology

Drawing research on slavery in colonial Quito, this paper insists that slavery was far more than a labor system governed by pragmatic rule of law.  It argues that the colonial north Andean Audiencia of Quito allows us to see slavery for what it was—a foundational governing motif of Castilian colonialism and imperial rule.  In dialogue with scholarship on law and society, political economy, and postcolonial theory, this essay uses the case of slavery in the north Andes to argue that slavery was an instrumental mode of conquest, possession, differentiation, and governance for early modern Castile. Here, slavery did not drive the colonial economy, and few enslaved Africans were brought to the region over the course of the colonial era.  Still, they and the legal apparatus of slavery mattered in ways that concerns regarding numbers and labor outputs often obscure.  Whereas most studies treat slavery as only an economic feature (in the form of extracted labor) and largely incidental to the development of the two republics, or Politica Indiana, this essay insists that the regimes of power that slavery occasioned in the north Andes were elemental to the development of colonial society, sovereignty, and governing norms.  It explores slavery as one among a series of regimes of governing practices that constituted Europe, Europeanness, and non-Europeanness in colonial collectivities of territory, corporeality, culture, politics and religion.