Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America
Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America
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Overview
Author Biography: Tamar Herzog is associate professor in the department of history at the University of Chicago.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300129830 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 634 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Defining Nations
IMMIGRANTS AND CITIZENS IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN AND SPANISH AMERICABy TAMAR HERZOG
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2003 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-300-09253-9
Chapter One
IntroductionThe construction of a community of natives of the kingdoms of Spain, one that in the early nineteenth century would be defined as the "Spanish community," is at the center of this book. I argue that this community emerged as a result of the establishment of a distinction between immigrants who were willing to integrate themselves into the community and take on both the rights and duties of membership, and those who were not. In the Middle Ages, this distinction applied only to immigrants. In the early modern period, however, it became instrumental in defining the status of people already living in the community. The distinction between "good" and "bad" immigrants was first elaborated in Castilian localities, where it found expression in the term vecino, designating people who were entitled to certain rights as long as they complied with certain duties. It was then applied to the kingdom of Castile as a whole. In the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this distinction served to define the natives (naturales) of the kingdom, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it also defined a Spanish community, including natives of all Spanish kingdoms first in Spanish America and then in Spain itself. This distinction explained how Spaniards and Spanish citizens were defined in the first Spanish constitution (1812) and how European Spaniards were distinguished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from Spanish Americans by a Creole discourse that affirmed the uniqueness of those inhabiting the New World. The distinction between "good" and "bad" immigrants was also applied to people of different ethnicities, races, religions, or vassalage. It justified the rejection of converso Jews, the persecution of the Gypsies, the exclusion of individuals of African descent, and on the contrary, the welcoming to Spain of foreign vassals and foreign Catholics. Distinguishing good from bad immigrants involved defining good and bad and determining who had the authority to decide these issues. It was in this realm, of believing or not the good intentions of migrants and making their integration easier or harder, that most debates took place.
In order to illuminate these questions, I trace the evolution of vecindad and naturaleza as categories of belonging in early modern Castile, Spain, and Spanish America mainly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I identify the relation between these categories, the theories explaining them, and the communities created as a result of these distinctions. I argue that the classification of people as good or bad was a byproduct of the need to decide who could enjoy rights and who could be forced to comply with duties. This was the crucial issue. The decision constituted people as bearers of rights at the same time it defined them as members of a community. In a period that predates the elaboration of formal definitions of nationals and citizens (categories that generally arise at the end of the eighteenth century or the nineteenth century), belonging to these communities and enjoying these rights constituted the main mechanism by which citizens and Spaniards were distinguished from foreigners.
These claims differ from those supported by most contemporary scholarship. Historians who studied early modern communities in the past consistently engaged in debates that were largely modeled according to present-day perceptions. Anderson, Hobsbawm, and Greenfeld affirmed the legal and politically constructed or even imagined character of nations; Armstrong, Anthony Smith, and Hastings argued instead that nations were naturally created as a result of linguistic or ethnic commonalties. For the first, nations were a modern phenomenon, a byproduct of the emergence of modern states and modern means of communication; for the second, they existed in the Middle Ages and they preceded and were independent of the state. The conceptual difference between "constructed communities" and "natural communities" was also helpful to other historians who instituted a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Godechot, Brading, and Viroli classified patriotism as a natural identity, emerging among people who knew one another and who lived within the boundaries of small communities. They identified nationalism, on the contrary, with a larger social and geographical unit where collective identities were indeed willfully invented. Whereas patriotism was a product of the past, nationalism was a modern invention. The first was based on "community" (gemeinschaft), the second on "association" (gesellschaft). Since most people living in early modern Europe felt attached to a local community, an abstract "national" identity could emerge only when this local attachment disappeared, indeed, once the modern state came into being. In spite of recent criticism by such scholars as Peter Sahlins and Jose Maria Portillo Valdes, this analysis still presents both nation and state formation as antagonistic processes. They confronted an expansionist and artificial state with "natural" and older peripheral bodies who resisted the penetration of the state. After their defeat, older and natural communities were replaced by a sense of belonging to a wider, unified, artificial, national society.
The literature on the development of early modern categories of belonging largely supports this narrative linking state and nation and affirming that both were contemporaneous and both emerged as a result of confrontation between state organs and local communities. Historians of Europe affirm that during the early modern period the distinction between being of one country or the other depended on subjection to a sovereign power. Although horizontal ties, integration, and acceptance were important in determining the way individuals were actually treated, all treatment that differed from formal legal categories based on subjection was interpreted as a simple proof for the dissociation between law and its application and between legal and social categories. Whereas the community of subjects was constructed through vertical ties, horizontal ties defined a citizenship regime in local communities. This regime had no direct bearing on the construction of either state or nation. Local citizenship existed only in a few privileged municipalities and included only a minority of men. By the eighteenth century, local status was indicated by largely honorary titles that were often associated with duties (to be avoided) rather than with rights (to be obtained). In some cases, such as Spain, local citizenship was a widespread status, yet it bore no relationship to the classification of people as Spaniards or foreigners. In short, in early modern Europe two community levels coincided: the local community and the community of subjects. According to most research, each of these communities operated on a different level and had its own implications as well as criteria. Because the local experience was either irrelevant or unfit for the construction of states and nations, modern citizenship could be viewed (and reconstructed) only through the lens of antiquity. For precisely the same reason, even historians who did look at the relation between local communities and central authorities could pursue their research with little attention to the ways participation in local communities defined membership in the larger units that eventually became states or nations. And, although the state was often perceived as a city (republic), this did not imply that actual practices in local communities were applied to the realm of the state.
I believe that the insistence on distinct community levels and the focus on subjection result from the way historians have reconstructed the past. Most research has centered either on local communities or on national structures, either on law and doctrine or on social practices. The assumption was that early modern communities were fundamentally similar to our own. Historians studied communities with the aim of affirming that they were national or not, artificial or not, state generated or not. This method reduced communities to legal definitions, which depended on a dichotomy between a law of birth (that ascribed individuals to a community by virtue of birth in a given territory) and descent (that classified individuals in accordance to their genealogy). People participating in the debates about the natural or constructed nature of nations viewed communities as ensembles whose membership could be reconstructed and defined conclusively. They gathered that the identification of people as insiders or outsiders was stable rather than contingent, and they assumed the transhistorical nature of identity politics. They also supposed that answering the question of who was a member of the community and who was not was important to contemporaries a priori and irrespective of conjuncture and circumstances, and that individuals and local and state authorities invested time and energy in the identification of people and in establishing their rights. If we consider that early modern communities were profoundly different from our own, then answering the questions currently asked by historians, and engaging in the above-mentioned debates, is both impossible and unnecessary. Instead of asking when the current structures emerged, we need to ask what kinds of communities existed in the past, how people belonging to them perceived their participation in them, and how they argued in favor of excluding or including others. This task is especially important given the nature of the primary sources at our disposal. Most historians considered letters of citizenship and naturalization as the only method by which individuals could obtain classification as insiders or outsiders. Yet, unlike today, early modern categories of belonging were not embodied in legal definitions or in acts of authority. Instead they were generated by the ability to use rights or to be forced to comply with duties. The question was never who was a Spaniard, who was a Frenchman, or who was a citizen of a local community. At stake was always the question of who could enjoy a specific right or be obliged to perform a certain duty. Under such a system, the use of rights of citizens and natives implied the claim that one was a citizen or a native, and the silence of those allowing it (both the authorities and other individuals) implied consent. This meant that most people acted as citizens and as natives and were allowed to do so without their status ever being questioned or affirmed. Indeed, by enacting the role of citizen or native they created a public image that they were citizens or natives, and this image in turn allowed them to become citizens or natives. The ability to act as citizens or natives and thus become citizens or natives without any formal declarations explains why citizen lists in European cities were short in comparison to the actual number of people who identified or acted as citizens. It also explains how the majority of natives were in fact natives without formal declarations or the elaboration of lists. Indeed, under such a system, the issuing of formal declarations of citizenship or nativeness, such as those embodied in letters of citizenship and letters of naturalization, was the exception and not the rule. Formal declarations were issued only in a small minority of cases, in which a conflict either occurred or was imminent, or in which the authorities wished to grant status to people whose circumstances did not allow them to make a legitimate claim to membership. In these cases, the authorities used the letters as both instruments and proofs of their sovereignty. The letters enabled the municipal authorities or the king to disregard normal procedures and to intervene by constituting as citizens or natives people who were not, or by aiding others whose status was questioned. It should therefore not surprise us that, as historians have affirmed, most letters of naturalization were granted to wealthy people who were interested in obtaining a certain right. Far from being the only foreigners acting, or wishing to act, as natives, as other scholars have assumed, wealthy people simply tended to encounter opposition where other people did not. They therefore invested the effort and resources needed to secure an official recognition that other foreigners found unnecessary. And, since the question of who was worthy of which treatment could be pursued in certain moments and abandoned in others, and since it could become meaningful under certain circumstances, or be completely irrelevant in others, the status of certain people could be consensual at one moment and questioned at others. This is why people who had lived in a community for twenty, thirty, or even forty years without their status being an issue suddenly had to prove they were citizens or natives.
Since the documents at our disposal describe the exceptions, not the rule, in each case we must ask ourselves why status was questioned and what agents and interests were involved. Yet, first and foremost, we must ask what happened in other cases, indeed, in most cases, where consensus reigned. Moving beyond existing documentation will, as a rule, enable us to avoid overemphasizing the importance of formal procedures and state structures and to discover the power of implicit social categorizations and ongoing social negotiations in the creation and definition of early modern communities. This move will demonstrate that, rather than a status leading to entitlement to rights, as would be the case with citizenship and even nationhood today, belonging to a local community or the community of the kingdom in the early modern period was a process. As Margaret Sommers has noted, this process was contingent upon and constituted by networks of relationships and political idioms. It generated citizenship rather than administered it. If we wish to comprehend early modern communities, we must analyze local actions and everyday interactions that classified people, allowing some to enjoy the benefits of the community while excluding others. We need to abandon the quest for "identity" and examine instead processes of "identification," that is, the processes through which people claimed to be or were identified as members of the community. This will enable us to look at the history of state and nation formation in Europe by linking immigration policies to the construction of communities and by arguing that the exercise of rights, rather than legal enactments or official declarations, defined the boundaries of early modern communities.
In this book I look at these questions by analyzing the case of Spain and Spanish America and trace the evolution of two categories of rights: vecindad (which denoted the rights of citizens) and naturaleza (which captured the relationship people had with the community of the kingdom).
Continues...
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