The Conceptual History of Independence and

the Colonial Question in Spanish America

Francisco A. Ortega

I. INTRODUCTION

The idea that Spanish American countries experienced and were burdened
by the legacy of Spanish colonialism was well accepted for most of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The movements for political indepen-
dence at the beginning of the nineteenth century were viewed as the result
of social and economic pressures and the struggle of oppressed nations
against the tyranny of the metropolis. However, over the last two decades
we have witnessed a “Copernican revolution.”1 Much of the recent histori-
ography views the collapse of the Hispanic order as the result of the politi-
cal and legal crisis brought about by the Napoleonic invasion and the illegal
abdications in Bayonne in March 1808. As a consequence, if colonial and
post-colonial theories and categories were previously accepted by historians
of all stripes, now they have been brought under scrutiny and many schol-
ars challenge their analytical pertinence. The following pages deploy a con-
ceptual approach in order to sketch the historiographical and theoretical
grounds and consequences of this paradigm shift.

1
The expression is Antonio Annino’s in Silencios y disputas en la historia de hispanoamér-
ica (Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia, 2014), 9.

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II. PARADIGM SHIFTS

As political tensions flared up in Spanish America in the aftermath of the

political crisis caused by Napoleon’s invasion of Spain, republican patriots
employed two seldom used words to characterize relations between the
metropole and its American provinces: colonia and colonial. Spanish Amer-
ican constitutional delegates in Bayonne in 1808 rejected the use of colonia,
colony, to designate Spanish American provinces. The editors of Cartage-
na’s newspaper El Argos Americano (1810) recommended abolishing the
laws that had been sanctioned “under the more rigorous system when these
countries were colonial outposts.” They denounced the decadence in which
Spanish Americans lived “under the old colonial system” due to the contin-
ued neglect of local rights. The old system was “strictly colonial, which is
the same as saying despotic, oppressive and hostile to reason; three hundred
years of gloom and wretchedness have put Spanish America in a pitiful
state.”2 The word colonial harnessed and expanded the frustration accumu-
lated by local elites during the late eighteenth century’s administrative and
socio-economic transformations and furnished Spanish speakers with the
semantic means to navigate the political crisis unleashed by Napoleon’s
invasion in 1808.
In the post-revolutionary nineteenth century, political elites used the
term colonial to describe phenomena, customs, attitudes, and values that
they viewed to be the result of Spanish domination. Colombian diplomat
and politician Juan Garcı́a del Rı́o identified in 1828 the three centuries of
Spanish monarchical rule in America as despotic, characterized by igno-
rance and abject political submission. According to him, the colonial regime
was unjust and odious, wherein “wolves devoured us” and it left a legacy
of egotism leading to a complete disregard for all things of public interest.3
Such a view was further elaborated by liberal Franco- and Anglophilic
reformers in the mid-nineteenth century. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the
influential Argentinian author of Facundo, Civilization and Barbarism
(1848), identified two dire threats to the continent: its savage nature and its
colonial legacies. If American savagery justified the aggressive swagger of
European civilization, Spanish colonial policies had been insensitive to the
clamors of industry and civilization. Thus, colonial traditions and legacies

2
In “Reflexiones sobre nuestro estado,” El Argos Americano, no. 4, October 8, 1810,
17–18.
3
Juan Garcı́a del Rı́o, Meditaciones colombianas (Bogotá: Biblioteca Popular de Cultura
Colombiana, 1945), 100–101.

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 Ortega ✦ Conceptual History of Independence and the Colonial Question

were brutal and ignorant.4 Gradually, the meaning of colonial moved away
from a merely evaluative term into a central feature of a local philosophy
of development and progress.
By the end of the nineteenth century, patriotic historiography defined
the colonial in opposition to the modern and European, casting a time gap
whereby Spanish Americans were young nations lagging in time. And by
the mid-twentieth century, the term, together with colonialism, sharpened
the historical analysis of social relations in Latin America with purpose and
determination. It is worth noting that except for few authors—such as José
Carlos Mariátegui—its generalized usage did not address the process of
marginalization and subalternization of non-elite, indigenous, and black
populations. In other words, colonial critique did not question the inevita-
bility or beneficence of European culture. Europe constituted a civilizatory
necessity and the colonial legacy remained its hindrance.
Sergio Bagú’s Economia de la sociedad colonial (1949) represented a
turning point in the regional elaboration of colony and the colonial. Bagú
challenged the standing idea that the productive character of Spanish
America was feudal or pre-capitalist. Instead he posited that Spanish Amer-
ican primary resources fueled the global economy during the early Euro-
pean expansion, drawing the region into a subordinate position in the cycle
of commercial capitalism and making possible the initiation of industrial
capitalism a couple centuries later.5 A subsequent generation of social
analysts—Raul Prebisch, Ruy Mauro Marini, André Gunder Frank, and
others—expanded on Bagú’s insight, developing dependency theory and
describing the peripheral role of the region within the contemporary world
capitalist system.
In 1976, social historian Enrique Tandeter noted the need to rethink
“the social formation’s colonial character” that was specific to the three
centuries of Spanish domination.6 For Tandeter, historical analysis suffered
from uncritically adopting analytical models based on English and French
imperial expansions and proposed to “fashion for each social formation
the corresponding theoretical object” (155). More specifically, Tandeter
proposed to “develop the category of colonial exploitation as a key to man-
ufacturing the appropriate concepts for the understanding of American

4
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, trans. Kathleen
Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 31, 36.
5
Sergio Bagú, Economı́a de la sociedad colonial: Ensayo de historia comparada de
América Latina (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1992), 85–111.
6
Enrique Tandeter, “Sobre el análisis de la dominación colonial,” Desarrollo Económico
16 (1976): 155.

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colonial social formations during the epoch of primitive accumulation”

(156). Tandeter’s plea emerged on the threshold of a new kind of history,
which elucidated the economic and social forces that defined the conflictive
nature of early American societies and their insertion in the world economy
since the sixteenth century. During the following decades historians
revealed the contours of the colonial relationship: the insertion, through
conquest and subjugation, of American people and territories in an emerg-
ing global economic system; the extraction of primary goods, mainly gold
and silver, as the basis for the relationship with Europe; the forced reorgani-
zation of indigenous societies and creation of an American domestic market
subordinated to the mining economy; the pervasiveness of the reparti-
miento, mita, slavery, and other forms of coerced labor as the established
modes of participating in the world economy by Native Americans and
African slaves; the existence of trade monopoly and tax structures as forms
of economic pressure, which sought to produce a flow of assets from the
colonies to the metropolis; the Church as a form of social control; and,
later during the eighteenth century, a number of administrative, fiscal, and
military reforms seeking to optimize the profitability of the colonies accord-
ing to new geopolitical conditions.
These scholars brought to light a number of tensions that transformed
American societies by the early nineteenth century: the cohering of local
elites whose particular interests gradually Americanized the imperial econ-
omy and pushed at least some productive sectors of the economy in the
direction of increased autonomy from Spain; the growing financial pressure
of a bankrupt empire involved in delicate international scenarios, pressure
which was resented with vehemence by American elites; the penetration of
the administrative apparatus by patronage networks that remained more
faithful to local interests than to imperial ones; the rapid growth of mestizo
populations and the concomitant rise of a popular culture whose symbols—
for example, the Virgin of Guadalupe—were deeply rooted in America; the
waves of popular uprisings throughout the eighteenth century against the
reforms implemented by the Crown; the arrival of new political languages
that enabled the elite to develop a critique of relations with the metropolis;
and many other factors, all of which seemed to shed definitive light on the
final causes for the wars of independence.
By the final decade of the twentieth century this new historiographical
revolution introduced a corrective to the usual perception of politics as
instrumental, a mere resource available to elites to achieve their coveted
economic and social goals. Scholars now sought to explore the conceptual
universe of the period in order to understand collective and individual

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 Ortega ✦ Conceptual History of Independence and the Colonial Question

actions and their social significance. They developed a new political history
that sought to interpret “past social and political conflicts . . . in terms of
their contemporary conceptual boundaries, and the self-understanding
on the part of past speakers and writers of their own language use.”7 Care-
ful analysis of the practices, representations, and symbolic content of the
pre-revolutionary period underscored the crass anachronism of calling col-
onies the American provinces of the Spanish monarchy.8 Spanish American
territories participated in forms of political communities that differed
greatly and preceded the emergence of contemporary colonial relations.
They also studied the political crisis that shattered the monarchy between
1808 and 1825 and challenged the centrality of the above-mentioned social
processes as objective, causal factors of independence. The monarchy had
been a stable, orderly, and cohesive community that had remained unchal-
lenged for centuries.
For Annick Lempérière, pre-eminent historian of pre-Independence
Mexico, the existence of a colonial framework is questionable. She notes
that when Europeans first arrived in America the term colonia designated,
following ancient Roman conventions, settlements established outside the
original political community. Colonos were the citizens of empire, and to
colonize, writes Lempérière, meant “first of all to settle; a migration and
the establishment of a community that involved taking possession of terri-
tory but not the domination over other people.”9 A look at early definitions

7
Reinhardt Koselleck’s formulation can be taken as exemplary. See Futures Past: On the
Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press,
2004), 80. For Koselleck a concept is at once an index of socio-political struggles and a
factor in those struggles. Similar formulae can be found in Quentin Skinner and many
other contemporary intellectual and political historians.
8
Already in 1992 Annino had indicated that a history of the word colony would illumi-
nate the political conditions of legitimacy in the Americas for the period of 1810–1825.
See “Las paradojas ocultas del Quinto Centenario” in Annino, Silencios y disputas, 54.
The essay was originally published in Memorias de la Academia Mexicana de la Historia
35 (1992): 5–32.
9
Annick Lempérière, “La ‘cuestión colonial,’ ” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, Débats,
February 8, 2005, accessed September 30, 2017, DOI: 10.4000/nuevomundo.437. A
slightly revised version was published as Annick Lempérière, “El paradigma colonial en
la historiografı́a latinoamericanista,” Istor: Revista de Historia Internacional 5, no. 19
(2004): 107–28, at 114. In what follows, I quote from this revised, print version and the
page number will be included in the main text within parentheses. The current debate
picks up—though with significant variants—an ancient formal juridical dispute as to
whether the Indies were provinces or colonies. See Ricardo Levene, Las Indias no eran
colonias (Buenos Aires: Espasa-Calpe, 1951); Mario Góngora, Estudios sobre la historia
colonial de hispanoamérica (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1998); Bernardino Bravo
Lira, “Hispaniarum et Indiarum Rex. Monarquı́a múltiple y articulación estatal de His-
panoamérica y Filipinas. Contrastes entre formas estatales de expansión europea y las
formas imperiales coloniales,” in XI Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Historia del

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2018

of the word colony seems to confirm Lempérière’s argument. According to

the Diccionario de Autoridades (the Spanish Royal Academy’s first pub-
lished dictionary of 1729), the term colonia meant “population or tract of
land peopled by foreigners brought from the Capital City or from else-
where,” a definition which virtually repeated Sebastián de Covarrubias’s
1611 dictionary and Saint Isidore’s Etymologiae (ca. 630; re-edited ten
times in the sixteenth century) and points to a long-term semantic sta-
bility.10
This view of colonies as extensions of the European matrix facilitated
the evolution of an institutional and legal system in which the American
territories were recognized as integral parts of the Crown of Castile. In
1519 Charles I incorporated the newly conquered territories into the King-
dom of Castile and their separation or alienation was expressly forbidden.11
It is noteworthy that the term colonia was not employed in the Spanish
legal codes to designate the Indies. The American territories became prov-
inces which, in the language of the period, were perfect political communi-
ties. Furthermore, political historians have noted that for over three
hundred years, most sectors of society, ranging from white Creoles to castes
and indigenous groups, shared in monarchical, Catholic, corporativist, and
pactist ideals. Consequently, Spanish American societies displayed a strong
sense of belonging that was neither imposed by the Crown nor the result of
Spanish military strength.
For Lempérière the fragmentation of the Iberian empire after 1810 was
a consequence of the political crisis caused by the Napoleonic invasion of
Spain in 1808. The vacatio regis (the royal abdications of Bayonne) created
an unprecedented problem of legitimacy that could only be solved by the
reversion of sovereignty to local municipalities throughout the monarchy.
The fact that, as François-Xavier Guerra noted in 1992, both sides of the
Atlantic reacted identically to the threat by patriotically swearing allegiance
to the King, indicates that more than national struggles against a colonial
empire, Spanish American independence happened as the unintended con-
sequence of the political crisis that wrecked the Monarchy in 1808.12 At no

Derecho Indiano: Buenos Aires, 4 al 9 de septiembre de 1995, actas y estudios 3 (Buenos

Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho Indiano, 1997). For a context
to these debates, see Vı́ctor Tau Anzoátegui, “Las Indias ¿provincias, reinos o colonias?
A propósito del planteo de Zorraquı́n Becú,” Revista de Historia del Derecho 28 (2000):
77–137.
10
Diccionario de Autoridades (Madrid: Imprenta de Francisco del Hierro, 1729), s.v.
“colonia.”
11
The veto was reproduced in the official Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las
Indias (1681). 3 vols. Madrid: Consejo de la Hispanidad, 1943.
12
François-Xavier Guerra, Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones

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 Ortega ✦ Conceptual History of Independence and the Colonial Question

time during the initial aftermath of the Napoleonic invasion did Creoles, or
any other social group, represent themselves as engaging in a struggle for
national liberation. The pervasive civil wars—what traditional historiogra-
phy calls the wars of national independence—were nothing more than the
dispute over political power on both sides of the Atlantic in scenarios where
a new political logic developed inexorably. Hence, in Guerra’s and Lempér-
ière’s view, colonial conditions did not lead to the break with Spain.
For Lempérière “the central point . . . is that at that moment of Inde-
pendence and well into the nineteenth century, the words ‘colonia’ and
‘colonial’ had no ideological content” (115). The analysis of the monarchy
as colonial domination is an independence-period myth: “Creole patriots
[writes Lempérière] disowned their past as colonizers and settlers to take
up the condition of being ‘colonized’ ” and promoted a negative assessment
of the Hispanic monarchy (110). Furthermore, this ideological twist fueled
the emergence of nineteenth-century liberal Creole nationalism and pro-
pelled “national historiographies . . . into ‘colonialism’ . . . with which the
‘colonial question’ went straight in the field of ideology and politics” (108).
The contemporary appeal to colonial and post-colonial theories is more the
result of past nationalistic ideologies than a scientific descriptor of the pre-
Independence period and its aftermath. In short, historians and social scien-
tists who appeal to the concept of colonia and to the category of colonial
reproduce non-critical, mechanic, tendentious, and reified language.13

III. HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DILEMMAS AND

THEORETICAL CHALLENGES

As evidenced in this summary, historical analysis of the independence

period and its aftermath is presently dominated by two clearly delimited
and somewhat hostile narratives: on the one hand, a social and economic
history that insists on the extractive nature of colonial economic relations
and the instrumentalization of political relations and, on the other, a politi-
cal history that insists on the social stability and sense of belonging that

hispánicas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 149–76; see also, Guerra,
“La ruptura originaria, mutaciones, debates y mitos,” in Visiones y revisiones de la inde-
pendencia americana, ed. Izaskún Alvárez Cuartero and Julio Sánchez Gómez (Sala-
manca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca, 2005). Lampérière’s argument brings
to light a premise already present in Francois Guerra’s work.
13
Lempérière, “El paradigma colonial,” 107.

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characterized the pre-independence monarchical order. Social and eco-

nomic historians continue to explore the processes that sustained and pro-
duced relations of subordination, marginalization, and exploitation since
the arrival of Europeans to the Americas. They do not shy away from—
though that does not mean they uncritically embrace—the insights and cog-
itations carried out by colonial, post-colonial, and subaltern scholars from
other regions of the world.14 For the most part, though, Tandeter’s plea to
theorize the specificity of the region’s colonial character remains unfulfilled.
For their part, the new political history maintains a salutary insistence
on the conceptual specificity of local histories by recovering the political
universe of the period. Such insistence has significantly advanced our
understanding of the region’s political transformation and opened for re-
examination nineteenth-century histories of national construction. And
though they recognize the asymmetry of power relations in the Americas,
they forthrightly disallow the appeal to the colonial framework and theory.
At the center of their dispute lies the colonial question.15
Recent public debates evinced an inability of the parties to engage with
the other side’s substantive issues and to transcend sterile polemics.16 The
stalemate is false because the analytical categories used by social historians
function on a different explanatory register than the conceptual elabora-
tions recovered by conceptual historians. The former employ theoretically
based categories; the latter, historically bound concepts. Describing the past
according to the conceptual limits of the period does not preclude the
recourse to non-contemporary analytical categories (such as gender or,
allegedly in this case, colonial); it merely insists on maintaining a constant
probing relation between historically bound concepts and theoretically
based categories.17 Koselleck’s view of the interdependence and non-
reducibility of social and conceptual histories stands as an open invitation

14
See Josep M. Fradera, Gobernar colonias (Barcelona: Ediciones Penı́nsula, 1999) and
Fradera, La nación imperial: Derechos, representación y ciudadanı́a en los imperios de
Gran Bretaña, Francia, España y Estados Unidos (Barcelona: Edhasa 2015).
15
Admittedly, it is not the only issue of substance implicated in the debate. Two other
basic categories of contemporary social and political analysis are persistently bound up
with it: the modern and the nation. See Tomás Pérez Viejo, Elegı́a criolla: Una reinterpret-
ación de las guerras de independencia hispanoamericanas (Mexico City: Tusquets Edi-
tores, 2010).
16
See the position papers compiled in the dossier “Debate en torno al colonialismo,”
Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos, August 2, 2005, accessed October 15, 2015, https://
nuevomundo.revues.org/203colonial.
17
See Koselleck, “On the Need for Theory in the Discipline of History,” in The Practice
of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Cultural Memory in the Pres-
ent, ed. Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al., (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2002), 1–19. I have addressed the relation between concepts and

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 Ortega ✦ Conceptual History of Independence and the Colonial Question

to bridge the impasse.18 Thus, it is time we move beyond exclusivist inter-

pretative claims into a supplementary reading of the region’s rich and com-
plex history.
These inimical narratives find elements of convergence in three arenas.
The first arena of convergence appears when we realize that the new politi-
cal history carried out a historiographical revolution because—in addition
to insisting on recuperating the self-understanding and conceptual means
by which contemporaries identified, assessed, and addressed their quandar-
ies—it promoted a new approach to the intellectual life of politics. Briefly
put, it proposed addressing the cultural universe of politics by drifting away
from the study of pure ideas, values, or norms and focusing on the speech
acts that endowed them with localized social purpose and meaning. In other
words, investigating the potency and distinctiveness of a concept—say
colonia—in a given society—say the Spanish monarchy—requires identify-
ing the social agents who adopted the term, their social experiences, their
institutional and social adscriptions, the institutional means to mobilize the
concept, their horizons of expectations, the conceptual innovations carried
out in order to respond to specific challenges, and the interlocutors with
whom these agents engage in polemics in order to advance their own inter-
ests. It is as much an intellectual history of social processes as a social his-
tory of language in action.
Such dual perspective considerably qualifies Lempérière’s argument
about the term colonia not being a fundamental socio-political concept of
the period. If we take concepts, as Koselleck does, to be those inescapable
words that become the objects of dispute between socially differentiated
agents who invest these words with their own definitions in order to legiti-
mate and advance their interests,19 then one can ascertain—as new studies
reveal—that colony was not a post-independence ideological construct.20
Rather, by mid-eighteenth century, as other European powers had begun
to acquire significant overseas possessions and Bourbon reforms sought to

categories in “De conceptos y categorı́as: El caso de colonia,” Revista Ariadna histórica:

Lenguajes, conceptos, metáforas (forthcoming).
18
Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History,” in Futures Past, 75–92.
19
For Koselleck a word becomes a concept “only when the entirety of meaning and expe-
rience within a sociopolitical context within which and for which a word is used can be
condensed into one word.” See Koselleck, Futures Past, 85.
20
See Francisco A. Ortega Martı́nez, “Ni nación ni parte integral: ‘Colonia’ de vocablo a
concepto en el siglo XVIII iberoamericano,” Prismas: Revista de historia intelectual 15
(2011): 11–30 and “Entre ‘constitución’ y ‘colonia,’ el estatuto ambiguo de las Indias
en la monarquı́a hispánica,” in Conceptos fundamentales de la cultura polı́tica de la
Independencia (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2012), 61–91.

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accentuate American dependency, colony crystallized the ambiguous legal

and administrative experience that had characterized the early incorpora-
tion of the Americas into the Kingdom of Castile,21 and served to project
reformists’ expectations of restoring Spain’s splendor using the riches of the
Indies.
And even though the word colonia was not employed in the Crown’s
legal codes to designate American provinces, it was routinely used by offi-
cials in Madrid’s court during the second half of the eighteenth century,
when reformism carried out extensive discussions on the role and nature of
America within the monarchy. The formula employed by the inspector gen-
eral in New Spain, José de Gálvez, that reforms should be implemented
“under the same rules with which they were enacted in the Peninsula . . .
without changing them except with regards to the promotion of factories,
which are banned in the colonies,”22 redefined the relationship between
America and Europe by supporting the idea that non-European possessions
were subordinated to metropolitan interests, as suppliers of raw materials
and captive markets for metropolitan manufactured goods. Count Revil-
lagigedo, viceroy of Mexico (1789–94), wrote in his account to his succes-
sor that

one should not lose sight that this is a colony that must depend on
Spain, and it must pay with profits the benefits . . . it receives from
Spain; and so it takes great skill to combine such dependency and
that there be mutual and reciprocal interest, which would cease at
the moment when European manufactures and products are no
longer needed in these regions.23

For much of this period there was a coexistence of older and novel mean-
ings, drawing at once from classical sources (i.e., settlements within empire)
and the new geopolitical demands of European expansion (i.e., overseas
possessions for metropolitan benefit).

21
Ricardo Zorraquı́n Becú develops the idea of the ambiguous legal and administrative
insertion of the Spanish American provinces in “La condición polı́tica de las Indias,”
Revista de Historia del Derecho, 2 (1974), 285–380.
22
“Informe y Plan de Intendencias para el reino de Nueva España presentado por el
Visitador D. José de Gálvez y el Virrey Marqués de Croix, y recomendado por el Obispo
de Puebla y el Arzobispo de México.” Reprinted in Luis Navarro Garcı́a, Intendencias en
Indias (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1959), 173.
23
Instrucción reservada que el Conde de Revillagigedo dio a su sucesor en el mando
Marqués de Branciforte sobre el gobierno de este continente en el tiempo que fue su
Virrey (Mexico City: Agustı́n Guiol, 1831), 90–91.

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 Ortega ✦ Conceptual History of Independence and the Colonial Question

By the early nineteenth century, the word had transformed from being
a univocal and not very controversial term into a descriptive evaluative
term that furnished speakers in the Iberian world with the semantic means
to respond in markedly different ways to the political crisis of the monar-
chy.24 Colony developed a semantic nucleus with two slightly different
meanings. On the one hand, the concept signaled, in the aftermath of the
crisis of legitimacy and political representation created by the vacatio regis
of 1808, the uneven modes of representation available to Americans. The
inequality perceived by Spanish Americans during the parliamentary de-
bates in Cádiz (1810–14) supplied the word with unprecedented pugnacity.
Newspaperman and politician Antonio Nariño wrote in 1811, “We are no
longer colonos: but we cannot pronounce the word freedom, without being
insurgents.”25 Colony had begun to designate a state of despotism exerted
over other people, a kind of injustice or moral damage that had to be
resisted. As the war intensified (1816–25) a second meaning became
dominant among young military officers in the republican armies: colony
designated the lack of self-determination experienced by a territory or pop-
ulation when subjugated by another nation. It thus became an early ant-
onym of the then nascent national sovereignty signaling the beginning—but
not the plenitude—of our contemporary semantic construct. By then, the
comprehensive set of reforms that had altered relations between Spain and
its provinces and the geopolitical developments in Europe and the Carib-
bean—both processes already described by social and economic history—
informed the structures of experience of the term colonia; similarly, its
existing conceptual elaborations informed and oriented collective action in
response to the political crisis brought about by these processes. Further
research on diverse social experiences and expectations will shed light on

24
See Tau Anzoátegui, “Las Indias ¿provincias, reinos o colonias? A propósito del planteo
de Zorraquı́n Becú,” 120. Recent studies have verified his conclusion. See Ortega Martı́-
nez, “Colonia, nación y monarquı́a. El concepto de colonia y la cultura polı́tica de la
Independencia,” in La cuestión colonial, ed. Heraclio Bonilla (Bogotá: Universidad Naci-
onal de Colombia, 2011); Ortega Martı́nez, “Ni nación ni parte integral: ‘Colonia’ de
vocablo a concepto en el siglo XVIII iberoamericano,” Prismas: Revista de historia intel-
ectual, 15 (2011): 11–30; Ortega Martı́nez, “Entre ‘constitución’ y ‘colonia’, el estatuto
ambiguo de las Indias en la monarquı́a hispánica,” in Conceptos fundamentales de la
cultura polı́tica de la Independencia, ed. Ortega Martı́nez and Yobenj Aucardo Chican-
gana (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2012); and Regina Martı́nez Idarreta,
“La crisis de los imperios atlánticos y la globalización de los conceptos: El caso de
‘Colonia,’ ” in Actas del XIV Congreso Mundial Anual de Historia Conceptual, ed. M. E.
Gay and E. Palti (Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Consejo Nacional de
Investigaciones Cientı́ficas y Técnicas, 2012), 102–33.
25
Supplement to issue 5, La Bagatela, Bogotá, August 11, 1811.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2018

the intellectual resources available to Spanish Americans to meet the chal-

lenges of their time, including the daunting task of constructing popular
representative republics.
This brings us to a second point of convergence. Neither pre-
revolutionary nor republican societies were static or homogenous. Since a
fundamental socio-political concept emerges out of the public dispute
among socially divergent and antagonist agents, it is essential to character-
ize those heterogeneous and dynamic sites of contestation to capture the
reach and breadth of a concept. And here we grasp one of the traditional
limits of intellectual and conceptual histories. For we usually focus on liter-
ate and elite groups and their intellectual production. In the absence of
sources from literary culture—books, philosophical tracts, salons, acade-
mies, letters, etc.—we seem unable to engage the conceptual universe of
subaltern groups.26 Such insufficient theorization about the nature and
character of popular participation in the political culture of the period,
combined with a normative view of modern politics, has led to a blank
characterization of subalterns as static agents, trapped in traditional Catho-
lic corporatist tradition, unable to adequately participate in modern elective
and representative politics. Consequently, these works remain vulnerable
to accusations of being elitist and Eurocentric.
Historical records indicate that subalterns’ expectations and actions
played an important role in the events of the period. In some cases, they
mobilized on behalf of the King; in others, they rallied along with American
patriots; in most cases, they evinced a particular appropriation of the new
political languages and mobilized them for their purposes. It should not
surprise us that local elites often resisted popular participation and publi-
cists warned about the consequences of adopting democratic measures in
socially heterogeneous and conflictive societies. Spanish polemicist Joseph
Blanco White chastised American elite revolutionaries in 1810 and pon-
dered if they “will accommodate practice to theory? Or, if using devices

26
See Jan-Werner Müller, “On Conceptual History,” in Rethinking Modern European
Intellectual History, ed. Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2014), 88. Recent studies have significantly modified our understanding
of the participation of the subaltern groups, el pueblo, in the region’s political life during
the period. See Peter Guardino, The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca,
1750–1850 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Gabriel Di Meglio, ¡Viva el
bajo pueblo! La plebe urbana de Buenos Aires y la polı́tica entre la Revolución de Mayo
y el rosismo (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2007); Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race
and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia 1795–1831, Pitt Latin
American Series (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); and James Sanders,
Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century
Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

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 Ortega ✦ Conceptual History of Independence and the Colonial Question

and tricks, they will foreclose on their black or pardos (Mulattoes) brothers
from full participation in political authority.”27 As Blanco White dreaded,
subalterns were equally motivated by the notions of liberty, justice, and
equality and were active, if not always evident, players in the conceptual
fields. They might even have had an important role in the immediate future
of the concept of colonia in the post-independence republics, though that is
difficult to determine now.
Depending on the balance of power, subalterns’ demands led elites to
bargain with them or to enact repressive strategies. A privileged form of
action was to counter popular conceptual aspirations by endorsing strictly
formal and restricted definitions of democratic concepts, such as sover-
eignty, people, liberty, and equality. During periods of great repression,
subaltern conceptual elaborations remained hidden—as was the case with
slaves—and have remained unavailable to conceptual historians. This is
largely true because the tools for recovering these hidden transcripts—or at
least for identifying their effects—are not within the domain of conceptual
or intellectual history. Recourse to social sciences—and their expertise in
the study of riots, uprisings, rumors, and other forms of collective action—
becomes essential. In all cases, conceptual intellectual history must re-
cognize concepts as constituted by heterogeneous and dynamic sites of
contestation. As a new research agenda is initiated for social, conceptual,
and political history, it will be foolish to ignore the sustained meditations
by subaltern and post-colonial scholars on the methodological difficul-
ties—but also potential rewards—when researching the non-elite’s motiva-
tions and intellectual milieu.28
Finally, I want to mention a third area of convergence. A conceptual
approach matters because it allows comprehending the past from the pro-
tagonists’ point of view; but it is also important because it traces the arche-
ology of our contemporaneity by identifying the subsequent horizon of
theorization of a society. As Koselleck writes, the coming into existence
of a concept—say colonia—“establishes a particular horizon for potential
experience and conceivable theory, and in this way sets a limit.”29 It thus

27
El Español, London, XXII, January 30, 1812, 253.
28
See the already classic anthology by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds., Selected
Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Guha, ed., A Subaltern
Studies Reader 1986–1995 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). The con-
tributions by Latin American scholars are equally significant. See Silvia Rivera Cusican-
qui, Violencias (re)encubiertas en Bolivia (Santander: Otramérica, 2012) and her
introduction to the anthology Debates Postcoloniales: Una Introducción a los Estudios
de la Subalternidad (La Paz-Rotterdam: Aruwiyiri, South-South Exchange Programme
for Research on the History of Development, 1997).
29
Koselleck, Futures Past, 86.

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 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ JANUARY 2018

traces the resources with which the present has been conceived as a genuine
historical product.
Certainly, Spanish America broke away from Spain at a moment when
a certain notion of empire was in decline and a new imperial formation—
embodied in the rapid ascent of British influence—emerged. The semantic
enrichment of colonia registered such transitions and its conceptual emer-
gence identified the region’s entrance into our global contemporaneity.
Thus, the investigation into the social, political, and conceptual transfor-
mations that began to take place two hundred years ago and laid the foun-
dations of our contemporary world (and that include the already mentioned
histories of the concept of colonia) is also an inquiry into our present, the
violences that made it possible, the promises that remain unfulfilled, and
the political possibilities available to us.
Furthermore, drawing on its discursive traces and orders, which appear
haphazard and hesitant, offers a privileged mode of writing a “history of
the present.” Such archeology reveals that the two imperial designs are not
the same but are not entirely disconnected. For even though the sixteenth-
century incorporation of the Indies into the Spanish monarchy and the sub-
jugation of its native inhabitants followed a different political logic from
that of the late British and French empires, subsequent colonial enterprises
undertook their expansion by learning from such logics. The emerging con-
temporary concept of colonial preserved different temporal strata and its
theorization was characterized by the synchronous presence of the anachro-
nistic. This coexistence sheds light on two features that we have already
considered: the refusal to engage the concept to theorize subaltern exclusion
and its centrality as a philosophy of progress in Spanish America. Thus, the
temporal strata of the concept of colonia point not only to the integration
of the region into our global contemporaneity, but also to the very grounds
on which such globality was constituted and was normalized. Colonial
Spanish America stands at the threshold of our contemporary global world.
Not surprisingly, the collapse of the Spanish empire is legible from a double
perspective: as the last dispute between two imperial modes and as the first
dispute about the requirements concerning post-imperial political citizen-
ship.30
And if the archeology reveals the violence with which our present has
been made, it also provides us with elements to critically engage the present.
For just as every past has multiple possible futures (most of which remain
unrealized) it is also true that every present has multiple “past futures”

30
Annino, “La cuestión imperial,” in Silencios y disputas, 128.

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 Ortega ✦ Conceptual History of Independence and the Colonial Question

which were never realized but remain constitutive as a possibility for our
present futures. This wealth of past expectations—which are now our past
futures—are the realm of experiences on which we can draw to face our
present’s own finitude. Spanish America is not simply “colonial,” but with-
out the term the region and our present would not be understood.

Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá.

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