Republics of instability: The dominion over Indians and Africans and the royal sovereignty in the Americas (1542-1549)

Abstract

Between 1542 and 1549, the Crowns of Castile and Portugal had developed a new political framework for the colonization of the West Indies and Brazil. The article analyzes the measures taken, showing that the specificity of royal sovereignty over the Americas was constituted by the establishment of an apparatus of government and by the definition of the king as legitimator and mediator of the relations of domination over the indigenous peoples, and the African slave trade was an important element for this construction. The article updates the analysis of the Leyes Nuevas and the regimento of Tomé de Sousa inserting them in the current debates and reflections of historiography: the new political history; the connected history; and the idea of ??complementarity between the policy for the indigenous people and the African slave trade associated with the construction of the royal authority. The article suggests some conclusions: the different practices of the Crowns of Castile and Portugal and their dynastic alliance established a unified field of Ibero-Atlantic colonization experiments; overseas expansion was an essential element in the construction of the modern notion of sovereignty, and the dominion over non-Christian populations was one of its explanatory keys; slavery, seigneurial forms of domination and the limitations of the political status and freedom of Indians increased the confusion between public and private in American societies, characterizing them as republics of instability, marked by a radical distance between the representation and characterization of the political authority and the practices of domination by colonial agents.

Keywords: sovereignty, policy for the indigenous people, African slave trade, domination practices, republics of instability.