Abstract

GARCIA PEREZ, Rafael D. Revisiting the America's Colonial Status under the Spanish Monarchy. Rev. hist. derecho [online]. 2017, n.53. ISSN 1853-1784.

In 1951 Ricardo Levene denied in a well-known book the colonial condition of the Indies. Since then, historiography has not failed to reflect on the legal status of the American territories within the Spanish monarchy. The study of the legal doctrine and the institutional structure of the monarchy in its different levels shows both the limitation of the "accessory union" to explain the place occupied by America within the monarchy and the insufficiency of the "colonial paradigm" to understand this same problem. Its clarification demands to take into account both the peculiarity of the plural structure of the Old Regime societies and the changes that the government of America experienced during the modern age within the framework of a jurisdictional paradigm of power that the colonial discourse of the eighteenth century failed to suppress. In this sense, the concept "colony", with its dense semantic load, is not fully adequate to understand historically the legal status of the Indies within the Spanish Monarchy.

Keywords : Colony; Province; Accessory union - Bourbon reforms - Colonial paradigm  -  Council of Indies.

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