However, political and legal questions were not the primary challenge posed by subjugating the Amerindians. Instead, it was the more existential questions regarding the ontology of the Other – with, of course, determinant (geo)polit-ical and legal effects – that proved most problematic, destroying and creating in roughly equal measure. This was a problem that touched on all aspects of Native American being, including fundamentally their ‘cultures’. The various challenges that this presented to the European colonialists are the subject of this section.
To better understand the ontological separation of Europe as a discrete sociocultural entity, we must trace a specific challenge found in the colonial confrontation against which these ideologies were created: the resistance of indigenous communities in the Americas. As Silvia Federici argues, the debates among Spanish jurists that took place in the mid-16th century over the onto-logical status of Amerindians (and therefore also ‘Europeans’) ‘would have been unthinkable without an ideological campaign representing the latter as animals and demons’.65 Travel literature was embellished with bestial, diabolical and nonhuman imagery (cyclops, troglodytes, pygmies, people with tails, giants) as a way of sharpening the differences of local populations from Europeans.66 In this period, cannibalism, polygamy, devil worship, sodomy and bestiality became European obsessions, since they ‘seemed a perversion of the law of nature’.67 The ontological separation of Europeans from Amerindians at the heart of the ideological innovations of sovereignty (more on this below), European identity and Eurocentrism was therefore based on a prior attempt to demonise the local populations of the Americas.
The spur for this demonisation was the conditions of crisis that emerged within the pre-1550 structure of the colonial plunder economy.68 Up until then, appropriation was based on the encomienda – a legal framework which enabled colonialists to siphon off surpluses via tribute systems that were already in place among the local ruling class (albeit at higher rates of exploitation). The encomienda was a unique – indeed, perhaps historically singular – hybrid mode of organising and controlling the production process which combined features of feudal, tributary, Amerindian, slave and (in a later period) capitalist forms of exploitation, labour and property relations.69 In the first instance, the feudal institutions that the Spaniards brought with them were superimposed and grafted onto existing indigenous social relations of production, leading to a combination of feudal and Amerindian modes of production.70 Indeed, signifi-cant features of indigenous social structures ‘remained substantially intact for at least the first several decades of Spanish rule and persisted in modified form for the duration of the colonial period’.71
Production in the lands of the Aztec Empire of later Mexico, for example, was characterised by the tributary mode, in which the direct producers retained access to the means of production and formal vestiges of kin-based, ‘communal’
social relations persisted, while indigenous elites extracted surpluses from these producers through ‘extra-economic’ means. The Spanish Crown saw no reason to fundamentally disturb these indigenous relations of production, as they served the monarchy’s aim ‘to prevent the unruly conquers of Mexico from enhancing their own power by gaining direct control over land and other key resources’. Nor could the Crown ‘completely ignore the wishes of those who had risked their lives in a military campaign that had so spectacularly extended Spanish sovereignty’.72
So while the Spaniard monarchy initially intended to import their own feudal institutions to the American colonies, they ended up making use of extant indigenous productive relations, social institutions and power structures, while limiting the autonomy of the Spanish colonial ‘warrior-merchants’. A new overseas feudal nobility could not be tolerated by the growing royal absolutism of the Spanish state because, ‘left to themselves’, Spanish merchants would have given ‘verbal homage but little else to the Crown’.73 Indeed, as Eric Wolf notes, it had been the ‘initial intention of the Crown to deny the incoming conquerors any direct control of land and of Indian hands to work it’. This was because it wanted to ‘inhibit the development of an independent class of tributary over-lords in the Indies, and thus insisted at first on granting the services of native Americans only on its own terms’.74
The compromise forged out of these competing interests between Crown and conquistadors was the encomienda. To prevent the development of any independent class of feudal aristocrats or ‘tributary overlords’ in the colonies, the Crown issued temporary grants of trusteeship: the encomienda. This was a form of señorío (or manor) comprised of towns, villages and other populated areas held in the royal domain that the Crown granted to deserving persons or corporations for a specified period of time.75 The recipient of an encomienda was allowed to extract a stipulated amount of tribute – whether in the form of goods, money or personal services – from the Amerindian labouring inhabi-tants who, after 1542, were proclaimed legally ‘free’.76 In return, encomienderos were required to protect, ‘civilise’ and Christianise those Amerindians working their lands. Crucially, however, the Crown’s granting of an encomienda did not
‘bestow on the encomiendero (trustee) rights over Indian land or unlimited rights to Indian services’, as these ‘rights the Crown reserved to itself’.77 In other words, the commendation of an encomienda did not convey a property title to its temporary trustee.78
In these ways, the Spanish monarchy sought to separate encomienderos as much as possible from both claims to the land and, through the interposition of royal officials, their subject Amerindian workers – a goal further achieved
through the abolition of Amerindian slavery in 1542.79 To these ends, the monarchy also permitted – and in many ways sought to cultivate – the existence of an indigenous noble class of elites (the caciques), who continued to exercise considerable power at the local level. Caciques concurrently borrowed from established customs, and exploited their ‘new sanctioned positions as interme-diaries in colonial government’ by organising production, extracting tributes and transferring surpluses to the encomiendero.80 In some colonial regions, such as Rio de la Plata, conquering Spaniards formed marriage alliances with the existing Guarani elite while making use of ‘Guarani modes of labour control in the mini-state organization of the region’. When the encomienda was finally introduced there in 1556, the ‘system simply accepted the existing arrangements using an encomiendero class of mixed Spanish-Guarani origin’.81 While indig-enous peasants formally retained direct control over the land they tilled, the encomienda system combined existing practices of surplus-appropriation with the introduction of new forms of coerced labour and semi-servile productive relations.
In separating encomienderos from direct control and ownership over their allotted land and labourers, the Spanish Crown established what some scholars have described as a ‘post-feudal’ mode of production,82 which not only retained some of the pre-colonial Amerindian tributary structures but created entirely new quasi-tributary relations of production (see also Chapters 4 and 8). However, with the rapid decimation of the indigenous populations through war, disease, illness, over-exploitation, and peasant flight and resistance, the Spanish monarchy turned to replacing their dwindling labour supplies with the importation of slave labourers from West Africa.83 The result was a dizzying array of different labour regimes, relations of exploitation, property relations, and productive organi-sational forms all operating along increasingly racialised lines: African slaves, Amerindian serfs, quasi-tributary Spanish overlords, indigenous noble elites, and mestizos and white masters who owned lands and mines. Such peculiar combinations of non-capitalist productive relations were further distinguished by their (later) market-driven imperatives as they increasingly became oriented towards and integrated into international trading markets and circuits of capital, while nonetheless remaining governed by pre-capitalist ‘laws of motion’.84 The persistently crisis-prone nature of the encomienda system, with its continual exhaustion of labour-power and resulting labour shortages, proved particularly problematic for the reproduction of Spanish colonial rule. Within the limits of this extant system of surplus extraction, the Spanish found they were unable to meet an array of economic requirements – not least, the growing indebtedness of both the Spanish Crown and individual colonisers.85 The Spanish monarchy thus sought to obtain greater control over land and people.
People were considered especially crucial, since the obrajes (manufactures for the international market) and the silver and gold mines which stuffed the
Spanish Crown’s coffers with American precious metal required steady supplies of labour.
Establishing control over production and strengthening the grip of colonial rule was primarily enacted by ‘declaring war’ on Amerindian cultures.86 This included mass executions, tortures and displacement of the existing population under the charges of diabolism, which were enforced through the destruction of indigenous worship practices. Temples and idols of old deities were destroyed.87 Previous rites and rituals including songs, dances, painting, sculpture, astrology, and writing were banned. Any Amerindians found continuing such practices were hunted, imprisoned, tortured and killed by colonial authorities under charges of devil worship.88
These strategies served not only to attack indigenous cultures in the name of Christianity and colonial tutelage, but also to remove people from land, subju-gate them, destroy their autonomy and tear apart their communal relations.
It was, in short, a ‘strategy of enclosure … of land, bodies or social relations’89 resulting in greater subordination and exploitation of the local population by the Spanish colonists. Quotas of labour were increased, and regulation of surplus extraction was taken from local chiefs and placed under the watch of Crown representatives.90 New labour regulations were supplemented by a resettlement programme (reducciones) intended to move rural populations into villages where they could be better controlled.91 Women were most negatively affected by these changes, as they were denied access to land and water rights that had previously been communal. New regulations banned them from freedom of movement independent of men, and demanded that women either become wives or be classified as maids, thus redefining them as the property of men, while denying mechanisms through which they could assert their autonomy.92
Such ravages to the local population’s existing mode of life meant Spanish attempts at subjugation were met with resistance. Indigenous anticolonial movements rejected the sort of communication and collaboration demanded by the Spanish, seeking instead to reassert their own local cultures.93 In some areas, such as the Sierra Zapoteca, rebellions were led by caciques who revived the culture of ‘old gods’ in order to encourage the youth to take up arms in a violent struggle for their liberation.94 People of the Taki-Onqoy movement claimed bodily possession of Huachi gods as a way of cleansing themselves of Christian conversions, and prophesised a millenarian upheaval that would destroy the Spanish in a wave of pestilence and floods.95 They rejected Spanish customs – clothing, religion, tributes and labour services – and sought to resur-rect local gods. The eschatological emphasis on the sources of communal rights such as land and water suggests that the Taki-Onquy expressed much more than other-worldly aspirations. The resonance of the Taki-Onqoy message throughout Amerindian communities, and the waves of direct and passive resistance, threatened Spanish control over their rural and urban possessions.96
In other cases, migrations escaping the widespread human desolation produced by colonialism drew on precolonial millenarian discourses as their source of legitimation. Many groups resisted by taking flight to the hills, where colonial rule was more difficult to impose, in order to continue the practice of precolonial traditions.97 The Tupi-Guarani in Amazonia, for example, described their journey as a migration to a ‘Land without Evil’.98 In many cases, resistance was articulated not by already exiting elites among the local population, but by carais or caraibas: spiritual leaders who operated on the margins of existing social structures. In a context where local elites often exploited pre-existing hier-archies to conspire with colonialists against their populations, many resistance movements therefore also challenged existing local elites and hierarchies.99 In this respect, women often became the chief protagonists of resistance against Spanish rule, having been disproportionately affected by colonisation.
Female resistance was articulated culturally by refusing to submit to colonial rules governing marriage and the baptism of children. In instances of collective flight, women sought to reorganise communities along the lines of precolonial customs, taking on the mantle of spiritual leadership – previously the preserve of men. Pan-Andean movements based on the revival of indigenous culture were often led by women.100 Because women constituted both representatives of the old cultures, and the backbone of resistance to colonial rule, the Spanish again turned to a culturally motivated form of subjugation based on accusa-tions of diabolism. Charges of witchcraft were used to subjugate women and redefine their position in society, establishing a new system of patriarchy that undergirded colonial rule and exploitation.101
It becomes apparent that the push and pull of colonial subjugation – and indigenous resistance to it – was articulated primarily through cultural differ-ence. In the first instance, it provided the moral and legal basis through which colonialism could be justified: the Spanish were rational, moral, universal, advanced and thus sovereign; the Amerindians were irrational, backward, and so exempted from sovereign agency. For these reasons, Amerindians were obliged to adopt universal – that is, Spanish – ways of life. But, moreover, the definition of Amerindians in ‘state of nature’ terms was driven by the compulsion among the Spanish ruling class to exert greater control over indigenous communities, especially since Amerindian attempts to reassert their own culture constituted a fundamental attack on the reproduction of Spanish colonialism. Cultural differ-ence became a threat, something to be violently negated by colonial rule. Where colonialists could not make indigenous communities conform to the ‘universal’
standards set by the Spanish, they were defined as diabolical or irrational. Colo-nialists were thus able to exclude ‘women and men in the colonies from the social contract implicit in the wage and “free labour”’ economy,102 and in the process naturalise the exploitation of colonial labour based on ‘unfree’ methods.
The exclusion of indigenous populations from this ‘social contract’ – an
exclusion that went right to the heart of colonial rule – helps us understand the compulsion felt among Spanish jurists to make a cultural distinction between themselves and the Amerindians based on the ‘state of nature’. The culture wars waged in the Americas were therefore constitutive of altogether new and unique relations of patriarchy, class, and later white supremacy, that would be formative of capitalist social relations in both the ‘periphery’ and ‘core’.
In this context, the associated ‘state of nature’ discourse was not an empirical observation, or an innocent thought experiment. It was rather a colonial(ist) construct born out of the culture wars waged – and ultimately won – by Spanish colonialists against the Amerindians in the name of colonial exploitation.
A line of continuity can thus be drawn from the comparative work of Spanish colonialists, through Enlightenment and imperial conceptions of stadial devel-opment, to current practices of imperialism. In each, cultural, political and economic differences in so-called ‘backward’ countries have been presented as
‘absences’, with a particular emphasis on lacking or ‘failed’ structures of polit-ical and economic governance. The concomitant exclusion of indigenous people from the ‘social contract’ and the perceived inability of ‘backward’ countries to govern has in turn been central to legitimising external rule over them – a practice that continues to this day.103 In its more belligerent manifestations, the perceived absence of proper governance structures has served to validate military interventions under the rubric of ‘just wars’.
Hence, the capacity for and battle over sociopolitical organisation and self-government – that is, statehood and sovereignty – constitutes a key compo-nent of the ‘standard of civilization’.104 The ideological, institutional and legal structures of territorialised state sovereignty that would come to be seen as a hallmark of capitalist modernity in Europe were in fact forged in the (racialised and gendered) crucible of the colonial Atlantic.105 Only after these institutional and ideological innovations came to prove their efficacy as a particular form of (bio)political rule and control did such organisational ‘advances’ then radiate back to the European imperial metropole.106 We now turn to examine the theoretical debates and historical processes involved in this often overlooked colonial dimension in the making of the territorialised sovereign states system in Europe.