Revisiting the Encomienda from the New Kingdom of Granada

This paper revisits the development of the encomienda as an empire-making institution in the 16th-century New Kingdom of Granada. It reconstructs disputes and debates between Indigenous peoples, encomenderos, friars, and imperial officials over the meaning of this institution, to shed light their aspirations, struggles, and conflicts, and look at atypical cases to address the institution’s diversity and the possibilities of action it allowed for settlers and Indigenous peoples. In response to recent historiography that equates the encomienda to slavery, I argue that the encomienda as an institution was dependent on Indigenous political and economic organization and, in this sense, it was radically different from chattel slavery. In this sense, I offer an ethnographic look at the many forms of encomienda that emerged in this area, showing how it created different social, economic, and even juridical forms of interaction between Spaniards and Indigenous peoples. I will conclude that the study of the encomienda as an early modern empire-making institution needs to be decentered from the models of chattel slavery and settler colonialism.