All great empires depend on their bureaucracies; but few can have been so totally bureaucratic, from top to bottom, so given to the recording of everything, as that of Spain. Over all hung the shadows of the notary and the priest, more immediate figures than the King; no entrada was without its notary, few if any without its priest. ‘One day in 1544 two shoemakers … had an impressive document drawn up devoted to nothing more than their arrival in Lima’; for a brief, a very brief, spell the Crown sought to ban lawyers from Peru, but ‘Reality soon repealed the law’.^[69] And it was not the first Viceroy but the lawyer la Gasca who reduced Gonzalo Pizarro's recalcitrant satrapy to its allegiance. In the seventeenth century the famous Recopilacion de leyes de las Indias managed to reduce over 11,000 laws, drawn from about 400,000 cédulas, to around 6400.^[70]

The Crown of Castile, under God (a limitation taken seriously), was absolute in the Indies, and in theory very little indeed could happen without the specific approval of the Crown through its Council of the Indies, a body which naturally soon became notorious for procrastination. A classic, if extreme, case of bureaucratic delay is afforded by the University of Chile, as we have seen a late starter. The first letter to Spain on this subject was in 1602, but that century was not propitious. With better, Bourbon, times, a proposal was made to the Cabildo of Santiago in December 1713 and referred to the Council of the Indies for twenty years of correspondence. The Council approved in 1736 and in 1738 issued a decree which arrived in Santiago in 1740, but owing to lack of funds the University was not formally inaugurated until 1747, and courses started in July 1756:^[71] 154 years betwixt the first motion and the acting; truly, if no empire has been vaster, none has been more slow.

At the apex of the hierarchy in the Indies were the Viceroys. The Viceroy was also Captain-General over his immediate province; the subordinate Captains-General of the outer provinces, however, became ‘more and more regarded as little Viceroys.’ These were the executive heads; but the most important other officers were directly appointed by the Crown and could correspond directly with it: whence divided counsels. Even the routine activities of the Viceroys were subject to the minute detail of the all but uncountable royal ordinances, many of them ad hoc. This over-centralisation was of course mitigated by local- 83 -circumstance, ‘the unconscious influences of the widely varying nature in the different provinces … events and forces [which] rarely rose above the Madrid horizon’.^[72] It was also mitigated by the time it took to communicate with Spain; an able and enterprising man could get away with a good deal ‘in anticipation of sanction’, to borrow a phrase from another great imperial bureaucracy, that of the British Raj. If the royal commands were too hopelessly unsuited to the situation, they could be accepted with the respectful formula obedezco pero no cumplo—‘I obey, but do not comply’ (or rather ‘fulfil’), in effect a referral back, an informal decentralising device.^[73] In the sixteenth century and after the Bourbon reforms in the eighteenth, many of the Viceroys were remarkably able men; but in the interim, probably most were mediocrities, taking away with them when they went home a good deal, and ‘leaving little behind but their portraits’ in the museums. Where so much depended on the interpretation of a mass of often conflicting and half-forgotten regulations, there was room for much assistance to favourites or for financial consideration; the main check was the residencia or open post-mortem on an incumbency, but that could often be swamped in contradictory detail or otherwise fixed.

The main territorial sub-divisions were styled the Audiencias, each of which generally corresponded to a Captain-Generalcy. The Audiencia itself was in effect the provincial supreme court and an advisory council to the Viceroy or Captain-General; it had also the important task of carrying on government during accidental vacancies of the chief executive post. The Viceroyalty of New Spain, established in 1535, included the Audiencias or Captain-Generalcies of New Galicia, Mexico, Guatemala, the West Indies, Venezuela, and Panama, until in 1567 the last was definitively attached to Peru, for which it was of course the vital link with Seville. After some administrative vicissitudes New Granada, based on Bogota, became an independent Captain-Generalcy in 1563 and under the Bourbons (1739) a Viceroyalty, taking over Panama. Although the Vice-royalty of Peru was founded nine years after that of New Spain (1544), it became the superior office, the apex of a colonial career; under the Viceroy at Lima were Peru itself, Quito, Charcas (the nucleus of Bolivia), and the outlying and definitely inferior Audiencias or Presidencies of Chile and Buenos Aires. In 1776, however, the last of the Viceroyalties, Buenos Aires, was set up, and included Charcas: a belated recognition of the significance of the La Plata-Potosi routeway.^[74] There were of course changes in the administrative layout from time to time, but these are the general lineaments, which alone concern us.

Municipal traditions in Spain had always been strong and—as we have seen with Balboa, Cortes, Pedrarias, Pizarro, Valdivia—the formal establishment of a municipality was among the first priorities of the successful conquistador: it gave him a quasi-legitimacy and a power base. At first these little towns were virtually self-governing, but this did not last for long: the patronage was too useful, and the Crown too suspicious of local privilege. From 1528 royal life- 84 -nominees constituted the cabildo or town council of Mexico, and only in a few cases, mostly on the frontiers, did an elective element survive—Quito, Santiago de Chile, turbulent Potosi, isolated Buenos Aires. In common with most offices, membership of the cabildo was open to purchase, and with commissions (also purchasable) in the later militias, this provided the principal opportunity for Creoles, the locally-born Spaniards, to hold office, since many posts, and practically all of importance, were reserved for Peninsulares. Moreover, in times of emergency a cabildo abierto or ‘open council’ might be convened; this was not open to all, only to invitees, but was obviously subject to local pressure. As a centre for mobilising Creole opinion and action, the cabildo abierto was one of the most effective agencies in the opening struggles for Independence.

By 1574 there were said to be something over 150,000 Spaniards in the Indies, probably an overestimate; of these only some 6000 were encomenderos.^[75] Basically life was oriented around two or three hundred ‘towns’, from great cities like Mexico, Lima, and Potosi, with total populations numbered in scores of thousands and with thousands of Spaniards, to wretched little ports and bush hamlets, where a few poverty-stricken vecinos held sway over a few score Indians. The real towns were nearly all built to a rectangular grid—laid down in royal ordinances—with central plazas and alamedas or main boulevards;^[76] and the more substantial had splendid baroque buildings, especially churches and monasteries. The Church itself was the most active builder, as well as practically the only purveyor of educational and hospital services, which ranged from the miserable to institutions of high standard.

The Church was in important respects an arm of the State; it was obviously at once the protector, to the extent possible, of the Indians, and the main instrument by which they were subsumed into the new hybrid culture and kept safe for the Establishment. The Inquisition was less rigorous than in Spain; it was most active in Lima, where Portuguese New Christians and crypto-Jews infiltrated from La Plata and were important in commercial life.^[77] Spanish culture in the Indies was more lively and diversified than might be expected; books were not only freely imported, in very large numbers, but exempt from all but one of the taxes levied on other imports. It is true that in 1531, 1543, 1575, and 1680 ‘books of romance, vain and profane stories such as that of Amadis' were prohibited imports; but it is believed that most of the first edition of Don Quixote in 1605 was—not inappropriately!—shipped direct to the Indies. Even books on the papal Index Librorum Prohibitorum found their way thither in the eighteenth century.^[78]

Economically, all this activity was organised on the strictest mercantilist lines: the raison d’être of the Indies was to provide a continual stream of bullion to Spain, and to receive Spanish manufactures. With few exceptions (such as Huancavelica mercury, an essential factor in silver production), the State left economic activity in private hands, but subjected it to minute and often self-stultifying regulation.- 85 -The system has been called, picturesquely, a gigantic Common Market, in which ‘The defence of the consumer was the sole law’.^[79] This view seems difficult to defend in view of the activity of the Consulado or chamber of commerce of Seville, whose powerful influence was persistently exerted for the material interests of a small ring of merchants; it was responsible, for example, for the legal suppression in 1631–4 of the very lively and valuable trade between New Spain and Peru.^[80]

The driving-belt of the whole immense system was the corporate activity of the Casa de Contratacion in Seville, which will be a significant theme in Chapters 7 and 8. The Casa was originally intended to be a royal monopoly trading in spices, on the Portuguese model; but ‘ni llegan especias ni hay contratación’—it received no spices and it had no trade.^[81] It became a government agency which organised the flotas and galeones of the Carrera de Indias; collected duties and taxes and the revenues remitted by colonial treasurers; trained and licensed pilots; kept up-to-date the official master-chart or padron real; ensured (or tried to) that ships were adequately manned and provisioned, and seaworthy; acted as a court for commercial cases and shipboard crimes; ran the postal services and the avisos or despatch boats for the Indies.^[82] A unique institution, it was not only remarkably comprehensive but in many ways remarkably competent; and yet it was the main component in a top-heavy structure of over-regulation which ended up crushing itself by its own weight; a standing invitation to corruption and the contraband trade which sapped not only the wealth but the actual power of the Empire.

It was certainly an extraordinary achievement to cover, so swiftly, such enormous and enormously diversified realms with a net of law and common administrative practice. Clumsy, inordinately time-consuming, a fine culture for the bacteria of corruption, crammed with tensions and frictions, this extraordinary bureaucracy was for three centuries the stout skeleton of one of the most astonishing empires the world has ever seen. In the seventeenth century, with Spain itself, it was grievously afflicted with a Parkinsonian creeping paralysis; yet it was largely revitalised by the Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century. One must agree with Ramos that the mere maintenance of this gigantic edifice, some of whose components were founded merely on their own ‘functional apparatus’, was almost a miracle, considering the distances, the terrain and climate, and the diverse environments, linked with Seville by shipping routes which in times of war were often worse than tenuous.^[83]

The Pacific littorals of Nueva España and Peru were the bases by which, in the half-century succeeding the half-century of the Conquista, the Ocean was turned into virtually a Spanish lake. Mexico was the middle term of a highly organised commerce which spanned both Oceans, from Macao and Manila via Acapulco and Vera Cruz to Seville; Peru not only the financial heart of the system, but the base for the probes in depth by Mendaña and Quiros, the essential first steps through which- 86 -

To this oceanic endeavour we now turn.