Imperial Cohesion and Ethnic Difference: Basques in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic

This paper explores the Spanish Crown’s increasing reliance on Basques throughout the early modern period, and reveals how the imperial project gave rise to a sense of ethnic difference among Basques, even as the monarchs’ sought to override difference and create unity between groups. I address how the monarchs depended on Basques to fell the oak trees, forge the iron, build the ships, irrigate the mines and handle the bureaucracy that conquered the New World. Basques made up only a small percentage of peninsulars to emigrate to the New World, but their skill in mining, shipbuilding, and sailing were indispensible. Moreover, the terms of the Basque Country’s allegiance to the Crown guaranteed universal nobility to all residents of the Basque Country, opening the door for Basques in imperial administration.

At the same time, Basques were persecuted and seen as “other” by most groups. For example, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, a group of wealthy Basques were violently driven out of the mining town of Potosí by a band of Castilians, Extremadurans, and mestizos. I maintain that far from losing their distinct culture and community, Basque migration to the New World and increased contact with other groups heightened Basques’ sense of difference and led to an ethnic understanding of Basqueness that had previously not existed. Even as Basques came to occupy a central role in the Spanish Atlantic, they developed a minority mentality.

Reconciling these two extremes, of Basques being at once central and marginalized, presents a unique opportunity to understand the transregional, transoceanic, and multi-ethnic connections that constituted the Spanish Empire. This study moves beyond an area or national study of Basques and instead places Basques at the center of a web of simultaneous difference and integration that I argue was characteristic and necessary to the Empire.