The broad theme defining today's discussion is how states were able to shape and maintain global empires connected by the tenuous and problematical means of transoceanic exchanges.  I come at this problem as a specialist in early modern economy and society in Spain, and I have also worked on the logistics of transoceanic trade and defense.  In examining ship construction in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, I became interested in Portugal as well as Spain, because the two Iberian kingdoms shared a succession of Habsburg monarchs between 1580 and 1640.  More recently I have been working on the transition between Habsburg and Bourbon rule in the Spanish world around 1700.  The "Seascapes" conference provides an ideal opportunity to consider how Portugal and Spain managed their empires, especially during the time that both were ruled by the same monarchs.  By looking at the Iberian Habsburgs' global empires, I hope to stimulate discussion about the organization of oceanic empires in general.¹

            Each of the Iberian empires encompassed a collection of territories and peoples all over the globe, and each was successful in terms of longevity and cultural cohesion.  It has been fashionable for some time to emphasize the failures of the Iberian monarchies in controlling their empires -- for example, to stress that their official monopolies on trade were ineffective in excluding other European states that wanted to trade in Asia and the Americas.  Nonetheless, the Portuguese empire in Brazil lasted well into the nineteenth century, and dispersed enclaves in Asia lasted well into the twentieth.  The Spanish empire in the Americas held together politically for more than 300 years and in the early nineteenth century encompassed over twelve million square miles and more than 15 million people.  Remnants of the Spanish empire in the Americas and Asia lasted until 1898, and the cultural traditions of both empires persist into the present.  What explains that longevity and cultural cohesion?  The answer, it seems to me, relates to the intricate fabric of public and private traditions and institutions that Iberians carried with them overseas.

            One essential Spanish tradition was the bureaucratic structure of advisory, thematic, and territorial councils, linked to permanent and ad-hoc committees (juntas).²  Evolving from medieval councils in both Castile and Aragon, the structure accomodated the Italian territories linked to Aragon, the American territories conquered by Castile, and -- from 1580 to 1640 -- Portugal and its empire.  In other words, the administration of overseas territories was fully integrated into the bureaucratic structure.  Councils and committees met regularly to discuss matters within their purview and communicated with one another and with the monarch through written consultations (consultas).  During the dual monarchy that linked Spain and Portugal, their imperial administrations remained largely separate bodies, but they were joined to the same head, so to speak, for sharing information and coordinating action.  For personnel, the structure as a whole drew upon a pool of highly trained and dedicated professional bureaucrats.

            Among other things, the Habsburg bureaucratic structure made it possible to organize fleets for worldwide commerce and defense -- an immense task.  For the late sixteenth century, I have estimated that several hundred vessels and more than forty thousand men served in Spain's commercial and military fleets to Spanish America each year.³  For military use, the Habsburg monarchs embargoed and leased the services of privately-owned ships and their crews to supplement the small number of ships owned by the crown -- in effect, using them as a reserve arsenal and source of manpower.  The Portuguese fleets to India and Brazil employed far fewer ships and men, but they were nonetheless notable in a Portuguese population between one and one-and-a-half million people.⁴  The government had to resort to various expedients to provide ships' crews and colonists for the Portuguese empire, so as not to depopulate the metropolis.⁵  With so many Spaniards and Portuguese, and their families, involved in transoceanic trade and defense, I would argue that citizens in the home countries and the empires could feel that they were part of the same social and emotional space, even though they were thousands of miles apart.  I will return to this point later.

            The Habsburg bureaucracy took an active interest in the ships used both for trade and for defense, because the continued existence of the Iberian empires depended upon the performance of those ships.  During the dual monarchy, the government sponsored an ongoing debate about the ideal size and shape of vessels used for transoceanic shipping.  Officials solicited the opinions of numerous Portuguese and Spaniards expert in ship design, mathematics, shipbuilding, and trade.  I know the names of over a dozen men, and I have no doubt there were more.⁶  Their treatises discussed ship sizes and configurations for both American and Asian trajectories, and government officials were well aware of the different requirements for each.  Certain ship characteristics were adaptable world-wide; others had to be altered to suit requirements in Europe, Africa, America, or Asia.  Informed by expert opinion, the government issued several sets of regulations -- in 1607, 1613, and 1618 -- defining ship sizes, configurations, and operating norms for voyages between Spain and America.  The regulations aimed to ensure the safety of crews, passengers, soldiers, and merchandise. The government also wanted to ensure that appropriate ships would be available to embargo and rent for military uses when the need arose. 

            Separate but parallel discussions took place regarding Portuguese vessels.  We can glimpse the issues involved by reading the minutes of a committee in Madrid that considered Portuguese finance during the reign of Philip III, known as Philip II in Portugal.  Fray Luis de Aliaga, the king‚s confessor, chaired the committee, which habitually met in his monastic cell.  At one meeting on January 9, 1614, they focused on ships.  In addition to Aliaga and the Archbishop of Braga, who had served as a Portuguese governor in India, the committee included Luis Mendes de Vasconcelos, expert in both African and Indian Ocean trade and defense, and the Bishop of the Canary Islands, well-versed in Atlantic ships and shipping.  In the course of their discussion, the committee considered a range of issues: the size and configurations of ships used for trade to India; norms for loading and sailing long-distance vessels; sailing conditions in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; Dutch activities in Asia; the comparative cost of building ships in Lisbon versus India; labor supplies and costs in both venues; the quality and availability of several kinds of Asian hardwoods, copper, and tin; and the political situation on the Malabar coast.⁷  In other words, to discuss ships, they had to have an impressive grasp of conditions in Portugal's eastern empire as a whole.

            The most demanding tests of the bureaucratic system of councils and committees concerned defense.  Portugal and Spain both claimed monopolies on trade with their colonies from the earliest days of empire and had to defend those monopolies against other Europeans who had every reason to challenge them.  How did government officials in Lisbon and Madrid organize military expeditions to Asia and America during the Habsburg period?  Portuguese enclaves were strung out over the eastern hemisphere from Lisbon to Macau, and the journey between them took months at best, complicated by the annual pattern of winds, currents, and weather in the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.⁸  After the Dutch mastered the route to the Spice Islands at the end of the sixteenth century, they challenged the Portuguese openly in some venues and negotiated with local rulers for competing trading privileges in others.⁹  Despite the ability of the bureaucracies in Madrid and Lisbon to organize imperial shipping, it proved impossible to send timely reinforcements to Portuguese settlements under attack or to repel well-armed interlopers. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch squeezed the Portuguese out of many of their former strongholds.  Eventually, they held only a few isolated enclaves in Africa, India, and China, although thousands of individual Portuguese settled in other places as well, adapting to local conditions.¹⁰

            Like the Portuguese, Spaniards faced enormous difficulties in establishing and maintaining a base in Asia, in part because they were bound by treaties not to follow the Portuguese route around Africa but instead had to sail westward from Europe to America and then to Asia.  It took decades for Spanish mariners to discover a return route back across the Pacific, but as soon as they did, in 1565, they established regular trade between their settlement at Manila and New Spain (Mexico).  Nonetheless, Spanish Manila, like the Portuguese enclaves in Asia, was largely on its own in terms of defense.  It was simply too difficult for the metropolis, or even for New Spain, to provide timely reinforcements. Although the Habsburg government encouraged Portuguese and Spaniards in Asia to cooperate with one another during the dual monarchy, conflict continued to mark relations at the borders of the two empires À in Asia as well as America.

            The bureaucracy was better able to organize defensive efforts for the Americas, because they were closer and far quicker to reach from Europe.  During the dual monarchy, Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Americas faced serious threats from enemy fleets and privateers in wartime and from pirates in peacetime.  In addition, the Habsburg government experienced chronic deficits of funds, ships, and men because of wars in Europe.  Nonetheless, when Dutch forces captured the Brazilian port of Bahia in 1624, the crown organized a powerful combined force of Portuguese and Spaniards to recapture the city for Portugal.  In pulling this off, the government relied heavily on another Iberian tradition that served as an organizing principle for empire: the crusading heritage of both Portugal and Spain, who had each fought intermittent wars against Muslim forces established in the peninsula in the Middle Ages.  In 1625, the Habsburg monarchy shaped the military response in Brazil as a latter-day crusade against invaders who were both heretics and rebels, from its point of view.¹¹ 

            More broadly, the Catholic faith was another tradition that served as an organizing principle for Iberia's transoceanic empires.  It is safe to say that the vast majority of Portuguese and Spaniards identified themselves as loyal Roman Catholics -- often militantly so.  During the medieval re-conquests, there was considerable cultural interchange among Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities in Iberia.  Nonetheless, Catholicism emerged from that period as perhaps the strongest marker of the dominant community, which grew increasingly hostile toward Muslims and Jews in their midst.  Early in the period of overseas exploration, both Spain and Portugal forced their minority communities to choose conversion or exile, and religious inquisitions prosecuted and persecuted converts who were suspected of backsliding.  The rise of Protestant Christianity in the sixteenth century enhanced the sense of Portuguese and Spaniards that they were besieged soldiers defending the true faith.

            The institutions of Catholic religious identity reinforced community identity at home and abroad.  For ordinary citizens, Catholicism permeated daily life at the most basic levels, from church rites and annual rituals of religious observance in countless villages and towns, to the efforts of missionaries in imperial outposts around the world.  To the extent possible, Portuguese and Spaniards took their faith and all of its social and communal trappings with them when they migrated, and it provided a constant reminder of who they were and a sense of continuity with the homeland they had left behind.

            The Catholic faith also served as an entry point for Europeans outside Iberia who served the Habsburgs as soldiers or sailors.  Navies in early modern times faced chronic manpower shortages, especially in periods of active trade and warfare.  Although some states were loathe to crew official navies with foreign sailors, the Habsburgs in Iberia openly recruited foreign sailors -- as long as they were Catholic.  Twenty percent or more of crews on Spanish vessels, including warships, were foreign-born in the late sixteenth century; many of them came from Portugal, even before the dual monarchy began.¹²  Although royal officials worried about having large numbers of foreigners on royal vessels -- the legal limit was six per ship, or some 12-15 percent -- in general religious loyalty was accepted as a partial substitute for national identity when ships were short-handed.  Foreign sailors who served the Spanish crown loyally could earn rewards and pensions equal to those of native-born sailors.  In sum, Catholic religious traditions proved useful in defining and organizing the global empires of Spain and Portugal and in uniting them during the dual monarchy.

            Secular traditions also helped to organize the Iberian empires.  The naval and mercantile fleets that connected Portugal and Spain to their colonies relied on the ability of shipwrights and supply contractors to prepare the fleets, on traditions of seafaring and mariners' guilds to command and crew the vessels, and on merchants' guilds to organize trade.  Merchant fleets might seem somewhat tangential to today's focus on political and imperial organization, but in the case of Portugal and Spain commercial as well as military fleets were overseen by government bureaucrats and royal councils.¹³  In other words, trade cannot be separated from political and imperial organization.  The government also worked with merchants' and mariners' guilds through India House in Lisbon and the House of Trade in Seville.  Overall, imperial fleets of all sorts relied on public-private partnerships, blending the traditions of each component part into the broader enterprise.  But how and why did those traditions blend?  That question leads into a broader examination of how government and society functioned in Iberia.

             Recently I have been examining the 1706-1708 Spanish fleet to South America, (Tierra Firme), half a century after Portugal threw off Habsburg rule and right after the Habsburgs died out in Spain.  In studying that fleet, I have been lured from Spain across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and from there around South America and across Panama to the Pacific, following a paper trail that stretched in time from 1699 to 1722.  What strikes me most about the documentation is that the men writing it did not seem to have experienced the disorientation that I first felt in reading it.  In other words,  like the members of the committee mentioned above that met in a monk's cell in Madrid to discuss Portuguese shipping in Asia, they seemed to feel quite comfortable dealing with the whole world at the same time, despite the vast distances, logistical difficulties, and diverse local conditions involved.  Modern scholars often chop global empires into more manageable chunks for their research.  Contemporaries did not have that luxury, and their inclusive view helped them to maintain control over empires that spanned the globe.  But that begs the question of where their inclusive view came from.

            One source was the tradition of written law.  Later this morning we will have the chance to discuss legal systems in detail, so I will not dwell upon them here, except to note that they were crucial to the functioning of the Iberian empires.  At a personal level, the framework of written law meant that you could write your last will and testament in Buenos Aires with the expectation that it would be proved and carried out in Seville; you could arrange a business deal in Burgos with the expectation that it would be enforceable in Manila.  I hasten to add that overlapping jurisdictions, differences between civil and canon law, and differing legal norms at various levels of administration made the legal landscape highly complex and contested.¹⁴  Moreover, various social classes differed in their relationship to the law and how they viewed it.  Nonetheless, in the documents I study, ordinary citizens in Spain and Portugal, and their imperial subjects, regularly had recourse to law to manage their affairs and clearly thought they had a right to equal justice as members of the community.  Citizenship gave them the reasonable expectation that justice would be done under the sponsorship of the crown.  There is a wonderful aphorism in Spanish that says, "To our friends we render justice; to our enemies we apply the law."  The aphorism can be interpreted in various ways, but at its most basic level, it promised justice to loyal citizens.  I would argue that a basic trust in royal justice enabled the Habsburg monarchy to reign over empires of enormous proportions, with a minimum of capital and personnel.

            Legal traditions combined with traditions of local governance in Iberia to produce a viable framework for global empires.  Early Portuguese forays overseas, after the medieval re-conquest of territory from the Muslims, established enclaves in the Atlantic Islands.  In their later exploration of the African coast in search of a route to India, the Portuguese had no possibility of establishing large, land-based colonies, given the strength of local rulers and the small population of Portugal.  Instead, they replicated the structure inherited from the re-conquest and the exploration of Atlantic islands: the king granted trading privileges and allotted captaincies to individuals to rule over in the name of the crown.  The model of trading companies and captaincies was the only viable choice in Asia as well, because of the small scale of Portuguese emigration and the strength of local rulers.  In Brazil also, the crown first granted commercial privileges and captaincies, but later brought colonial administration under royal control, with a local government structure similar to that in Portugal.   Most of the early Portuguese colonists in Brazil stayed close to the coastline and avoided the vast interior regions, making it easier to maintain their physical and mental connections to the metropolis. Everywhere the Portuguese traveled, they brought local traditions of governance with them, which were reinforced under Habsburg rule.  Despite the power of the captaincies, locally elected councils (camaras) established by Portuguese settlers could and did challenge their authority.

            The administrative structure of the Spanish empire, like the Portuguese, began with enclaves in the Atlantic Islands, where individuals received administrative, judicial, and economic power in return for exploring, claiming, and administering land in the name of the crown.  Columbus used the captaincy model of a tightly controlled enterprise based on monopoly privileges on his first two voyages; it was a model he understood from his earlier trading ventures and his Genoese background.  Some of the economic structures used by Spain in the Canary Islands -- especially the plantation economy for growing sugar --  evolved from this model and were later replicated in the Spanish empire in the Americas.¹⁵  Before Columbus's  third voyage, however, the Catholic Monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand temporarily rescinded his monopoly privileges, and before his fourth voyage, they sponsored the ventures of several other explorers who hoped to plant colonies across the ocean.¹⁶

            Spanish colonization in the Americas generally relied on a rather different model of settlement overseas, however, following traditions that went back millennia.  The Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and Muslims had established numerous colonies in what the Greeks called Iberia, the Romans called Hispania, and the Muslims called Al-Andalus.  In medieval times, as Christian forces pushed the Muslims southward, the crown granted lands and jurisdiction to crusading military orders, religious establishments, and towns in exchange for loyalty and a promise to defend the reclaimed lands.  Frontier towns founded during the Reconquest received royal charters defining the extent of territory and authority that the crown granted them; they attracted settlers by the promise of land, tax benefits, and privileges as citizens.   By the late fifteenth century, Castile was a mosaic of largely self-governing, contiguous municipalities.¹⁷  The crown appointed emissaries to town councils, but these corregidores depended on the cooperation of local officials to implement the royal will.  The parliament of Castile -- the Cortes -- began in the twelfth century as an assembly of representatives from the major towns in the realm, which by extension represented the whole municipal mosaic.¹⁸  Any town, whether or not it sent delegates to the Cortes, could correspond directly with the crown, and might even send a few elected officials to petition the monarch in person.

            Most Spaniards had grown up within a township and presumably thought of a municipal structure as the natural way to organize society.  It would be difficult to overstate the importance of municipal identity as an organizing principle of Spanish life.  Spaniards colonizing overseas customarily formed themselves into a municipality and elected a town council as their first collective act.  The new town became the legal embodiment of their community, linked directly to the crown.  By 1519, when Hernˆn Cortþs left Cuba for the coast of New Spain, there were already several dozen Spanish towns established on Cuba.  And when Cortþs decided to ignore his instructions from the governor of Cuba, he and his men formed themselves into a municipality.  Legally speaking, the Aztec Empire was conquered by the municipality of Veracruz, with Cortþs as its town captain.  The town council of Veracruz then petitioned king Charles I (by then he was also Charles V the Holy Roman Emperor) to ratify the conquest carried out in his name.¹⁹ 

            The laws of 1573 that prescribed how towns in the Spanish colonies were to be founded and governed merely confirmed what had been common practice since Spaniards first went abroad.  Nearly all of today's principal cities in South America were founded between 1500 and 1650.  Once recognized by the crown, colonial towns were expected to move as quickly as possible toward self-sufficiency and self-governance, under the overarching authority of the monarch.²⁰  The resources to support the imperial bureaucracy were supposed to be generated by tax revenue on production and trade collected and administered locally, though the crown also expected that there would be substantial revenues left over to fund the royal agenda in Europe.  Paradoxically, however, the larger the empire grew, the more private profits and public revenues remained in the colonies to fund local economies, administration, and defense.²¹

            The structure of imperial governance that characterized the Habsburg centuries empowered officials at the local level and strengthened ties of loyalty to the crown at the same time.  Typically, the Spanish crown appointed the highest officials -- the viceroys of New Spain (Mexico) and Perì (South America) -- often in exchange for a "pecuniary service" to the crown.  The viceroys in turn appointed a certain number of subordinate officials, from each of whom they also collected a fee.  Other officials were elected locally. Written laws, most notably the huge compilation called the Laws of the Indies, provided a framework for imperial administration, and all officials faced a judicial review (residencia) at the end of their terms in office, with fines and other punishments imposed for wrongdoing.²²

            Viewed through modern eyes, making official appointments on the basis of fees or patronage is seen as a corrupt practice, yet such practices were common in Europe in the period, and the expectation was that only qualified men would be allowed to pay the fee and be appointed.  Obviously, reality sometimes fell short of expectations, but many learned and upright men could defend such traditions on the basis of their value to imperial governance.  In my recent research, I encountered one such defense by the Count of Monclova, who served as viceroy in New Spain and then in Perì for two decades at the end of the seventeenth century.  When the Council of the Indies decided in 1690 that more of the officials for Perì would be appointed from Madrid rather than by the viceroy, Monclova complained to the king.  If that occurred, he said, "I would not be able to accommodate relatives and dependents of mine, Ä who have come to these remote realms trusting that they would be able to achieve what followers of other viceroys have achieved, Ä and IÄwould be left with no more authority than the corregidor of a city is accustomed to have."²³  Monclova's complaint emanated not only from self-interest, but also from his certainty that the empire was best maintained and the king best served by reinforcing traditional loyalties.  By mentioning the limited power of the corregidores -- always dependent on negotiation and local cooperation -- Monclova tied his ability to enforce the royal will to bringing in his own men, who owed their loyalty to him and not to the local power structure.

            Even with their own men in subordinate offices, viceroys like Monclova were in the delicate position of representing the monarchy but having to rely on the local power structure to provide additional manpower and funds for government expenses.  It was in the interests of the crown to allow local elites to govern and profit from the colonies, as long as they remembered that the crown held ultimate control.  And it was in the interests of local elites to remain loyal to the crown, because that was the key to fulfilling their social and political ambitions.  Although the Bourbon dynasty that inherited the Spanish monarchy in 1700 would try to bring the empire under more centralized control during the eighteenth century, the structures of local control in the colonies were too well entrenched by then to dislodge.  Nonetheless, local elites would remain loyal to the crown until the early nineteenth century, mindful of the benefits that loyalty provided.  The traditional ties that bound Iberian elites to the monarchy not only guaranteed social stability at home.  They also proved to be eminently portable and adaptable, even when monarchies went global, as Portugal and Spain did in the late fifteenth century. 

            Officials sent out to remote colonies were the monarch's sworn representatives, and the ones I have encountered took their oaths very seriously.  They also knew that their authority was only one small piece of the bureaucratic fabric that covered the empire.  Their sense of continuity and professional identity was reinforced by the standard trajectory of  bureaucratic careers.  As Portugal and Spain developed centralized monarchies in medieval times, royal officials were shifted around from place to place and were held accountable for their terms in office.  If they served the crown well, they could expect to be promoted to a higher position somewhere else.  Imperial procedures worked much the same way, though the scale changed enormously.  A standard trajectory for officials in both the Portuguese and Spanish empires involved moving back and forth across the oceans between posts in the colonies and posts back in the metropolis.  A young man who came out of university in Portugal or Spain might begin his career with a minor post near home, then go to Mexico or Goa, and end up on a royal council, with several other stops in between.²⁴   Portugal founded no universities in the colonies, preferring to educate its imperial elite in the peninsula.  But men who graduated from universities in Spanish America customarily spent time in Spain to advance their careers.

            Men involved in the hierarchy of imperial bureaucracy seem to have experienced it as a whole, even though its component parts were scattered around the globe.  In reading through hundreds of memoranda and reports from Spanish officials during the early modern centuries, I have been struck by the familiarity and continuity of the documents, whether they were written from a provincial capital near Madrid, or from Lima, thousands of miles and many months away from the seat of the monarchy.  Reading the reports, you would not guess that the officials were even aware of their remoteness -- though they clearly were -- or that it bothered them.  In a peculiar way, imperial administration was like cyberspace these days.  Wherever they were, officials wrote -- and presumably felt -- that they were part of a single corporate enterprise.  That attitude had enormous importance for political and imperial organization, but how was it formed and maintained across space and time?  And why did ordinary citizens of the empire, who were not employed by the crown, accept the governance structure of a remote monarchy?  The answers to those questions, it seems to me, were embedded in Iberian social structures and traditions, carried across the oceans and continually reinforced by everyday practice.  

            Family defined the most basic of personal loyalties.  In addition to the steady flow of published work on demography and kinship in the past several decades, a number of scholars have explored the effects that transatlantic migration had on families.²⁵  Migration had the potential to both weaken and strengthen family ties, and its effects varied from migrant to migrant.  On balance, family loyalties seem to have been strong enough to provide a sense of continuity between Portugal and Spain and their overseas colonies, and to contribute to the formation of cohesive communities at home and abroad.  Apart from feeling a natural loyalty based on blood kinship, individuals knew that family networks could be useful in gaining privileges, preferment, and jobs, and family networks were reinforced by repeated demonstrations of loyalty and reciprocity.  At the upper levels of Iberian society, individuals in official posts routinely sponsored kinsmen for jobs and royal favor, and helped to arrange marriages for kinswomen, regardless of where they resided.  One naval commander I am currently following sponsored his nephews for membership in one of Spain's noble military orders, though they lived in Mexico and he lived in Spain.²⁶  It took several years to collect the paperwork on both sides of the Atlantic to support his nominations, but the long lines of communication seem to have been accepted as a matter of course by the individuals involved.

            Membership in the noble military orders created smaller affinity groups within the fairly large noble establishments in Spain and Portugal.  Members of the orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcˆntara in Spain, and Santiago and the Order of Christ in Portugal formed elite clubs within the broader ranks of nobility and thought of themselves as such.  In the case mentioned above, the naval commander belonged to the Order of Alcˆntara, but he nominated his nephews for the more prestigious Order of Santiago, because they were his older brother's children and therefore stood higher in the noble hierarchy.  By supporting his nephews' advancement, he strengthened family ties and also ensured that his nephews were connected to broader networks of loyalty and patronage outside the family.  Such networks spanned the oceans and provided a sense of continuity from generation to generation among the ruling elite in both Spain and Portugal.

            Inheritance patterns provided similar linkages.  Individuals in Portuguese and Spanish colonies around the world routinely left bequests to relatives here, there, and everywhere, even when they had not seen one another for decades.  In many cases, the testator did not even know if his or her heirs were still alive.  Wills written in the colonies also commonly included bequests for religious organizations and charities back home and sometimes included detailed instructions for the burial of the testator's mortal remains back home as well.  The viceroy of Perì who died in 1710 specified that his body be buried in the church of San Francisco in Lima, but that his heart be sent to the monastery of Montserrat in his native Catalu¿a, although he had rarely visited there since becoming an adult.²⁷  Nothing shows more clearly that he felt connected both to his homeland and to his official residence in the colonies.

            Men and women who abandoned their family responsibilities when they traveled across the seas may have thought that the benefits of independence outweighed the loss of traditional support networks, but some of them discovered that it was not easy to sever the ties of family and community.  Cases of bigamy regularly surface in the records of state as well as church, because the Portuguese and Spanish states took an active role in supporting stable families at home and abroad.  I have found a batch of petitions from abandoned wives, asking Spain's official House of Trade to make their husbands return home from America.  By their continued absence, they deprived their wives of the benefits of "married life" [vida maridable] and failed in their duties as householders in their home communities.²⁸  The aggrieved wives appealed to the monarchy as the enforcing arm of the church, as well as the ultimate patron of family and community life on both sides of the ocean.  Such patron-client relations linked the whole of traditional society together in early modern Europe, and they seem to have been particularly strong in Iberia. 

             Similar links extended an individual's network of loyalty beyond the family to individuals both higher and lower in status and wealth.  I have found numerous examples of such links among the officers and men who manned the imperial fleets of Portugal and Spain.  We might think of sailors as rootless individuals, rarely staying anywhere for more than a few months, or as "citizens of the world," exempt from stultifying community norms at home.  Yet many Spanish sailors I have encountered in the documents retained their links with their home towns, and shipboard command and social structures were often shaped by the presence of regional communities among those on board.  Many of the captains general in Spain's Indies fleets, besides appointing their relatives to various posts, also preferred men from their home provinces above other sailors, when they had a choice of crews.  On land as well, ties of non-familial affinity were often based on municipal and regional identity.  During the early modern centuries, marriages, business partnerships, and many other relationships were based on where families originated in the old country. That remains true even today.

            As I mentioned earlier, members of the bureaucratic elite in both Portugal and Spain often traveled back and forth between the metropolis and the colonies for education, practical experience, and career advancement, preserving and reinforcing ties with extended family and professional colleagues in the process.  And local communities in the metropolis had every reason to remember distinguished native sons and daughters, who frequently returned to their hometowns after living abroad, investing part of their fortunes in local building and charitable works.  As a result, the citizens of quite remote towns and villages in Iberia felt a real connection to the overseas empires, and the exploits of local emigrants inspired a continued flow of Iberians across the seas -- some four or five thousand Spaniards a year in the Habsburg period, for example.²⁹

            If municipal citizenship and community were central to the Portuguese and Spanish sense of identity, citizenship also involved an assortment of rights, duties, and privileges.  As community structure was transplanted across the seas, the question arose as to how to define citizenship in that new context, and by extension, how to define the community, especially when colonial cities included various ethnic groups and mixtures of local peoples and immigrants.³⁰  Not surprisingly, the immigrants to Iberian colonies tended to identify with one another more than with local peoples, regardless of status or wealth distinctions.  Research on the early colonial period has shown that Africans in the Iberian colonies, even when they remained slaves, were much more closely aligned with Europeans than with Indians; this may have held true in other early American colonies as well.

            Overall, family and community seem to have been elastic concepts that stretched from tiny villages, towns, and cities all over Portugal and Spain to nearly every corner of the known world where Portuguese and Spaniards migrated.  Migrants not only felt connected to their home communities by nostalgia or memory, but by a sense of continued attachment and citizenship.  For example, traditional Iberian organizations such as religious brotherhoods in a town parish might have members in colonies around the world, because they had carried their communal identity overseas with them.³¹  Whether or not their physical connection with Iberia was reinforced by transoceanic travel, their mental and emotional connections with their ancestral homeland persisted.  Moreover, membership in some parish-based brotherhoods blurred distinctions of wealth and status, thus strengthening community identity.  The natural extension of local religious brotherhoods to a global context helps to explain social cohesion abroad as well as at home.

            The key to effective bureaucratic, familial, and communal networks in the Iberian world lay in their relationship to the highest level of society -- the monarchy, ultimate source of legitimacy and favor.  The continual flow of transoceanic paperwork regarding governance, plus petitions asking and granting favors from the crown, reminded everyone of the reciprocal relationship that bound them together.  That relationship was easier to nurture in the presence of the monarchy, more difficult to nurture in its physical absence.  Throughout the Iberian empires, however, periodic rituals kept the relationship not only alive, but vibrant.  For example, the viceroys in Lima and Mexico City organized lavish public events to honor the king's birthday and other days of importance for the royal family, such as a royal birth -- no matter that it took months for the news of a birth to reach the Americas and that the celebration might be sadly out of date if the royal infant had died in the interim.  If and when such tragic news arrived, the viceroy's court would simply go into mourning and stage solemn funerary rituals as a further public display of loyalty and connection to the monarchy. 

            These public performances of respect and obedience ensured that the monarch remained a real presence in the empire, and the royal image was present at every performance.  In a well-known painting of the 1625 victory of Portuguese and Spanish troops over the Dutch at Bahia, which I mentioned above, Captain General Fadrique de Toledo gestures toward a tapestry showing king Philip IV being crowned with the laurels of victory by Minerva, goddess of wisdom, and the king's chief minister the Count-Duke of Olivares.  In the left foreground, Portuguese settlers minister to a Spanish soldier wounded in the battle.  Defeated Dutch soldiers kneel before the image of the king, and the combined Hispano-Portuguese fleet rides at anchor in the left background.  Underscoring the broader significance of the victory, Philip IV stands on figures representing treachery (France), discord (England), and heresy (the Dutch rebels).  The artist Juan Baptista Maino summed up in this composition the official definition of the dual Habsburg monarchy: Portuguese and Spaniards joining forces in faraway Brazil to defeat their common enemy -- all in the symbolic presence of the king.  Reality was much more complicated than that, but the official view is what interests me here.

            I should emphasize that loyalty to the royal person was freely given; it could not have been enforced.  In both the Portuguese and Spanish empires, and indeed in Portugal and Spain, the crown had a minimal military presence.  Spanish viceroys in the Americas had to rely on local militias for defense, and they had to rely on local merchants and other members of the elite to fund all sorts of governmental functions.  In other words, the crown did not control its colonies.  Rather, the colonists controlled the colonies in the name of the crown.  Enforcement mechanisms relied on the implied psychological distress that would result from falling out of the king's good graces. 

            The notion of absolute monarchy in Europe used to be understood in rigid terms that equated theory and practice.  In recent decades, historians have re-discovered the practical limits to absolute power and the need for negotiation to carry out the royal will at all levels.³²  We now better understand that royal authority rested on patron-client relations and the principle of reciprocity, but those relationships were well understood at the time.  We have merely re-discovered what contemporaries already knew.

            I would argue that royal authority was strongest when it fulfilled the requirement to act for the well-being of the citizenry and when it rewarded steadfast loyalty with tangible benefits.  In the Iberian case, colonists overseas were allowed, and encouraged, to run local government in the king's name.  It should come as no surprise that members of colonial elites often ran local affairs for their own benefit, but we miss the point if we simply denounce their self-serving actions as cynical and hypocritical.  The officials I study, whatever their actions, seem to have felt real loyalty to the crown and recognized that all good things flowed from that source.  When necessary, they put their money where their mouths were, submitting to extraordinary tax levies in times of war, and passing the hat to launch defensive fleets, which were, by rights, the crown's responsibility.  In other words, they willingly took on the burdens and expenses of imperial governance because they recognized it as a shared burden from which they benefited.

            We can see the limits to loyalty and a demand for reciprocity in the buildup to Portugal's 1640 rebellion against the Habsburgs.  Philip II of Spain, who became Philip I of Portugal in 1580, promised to respect the separateness of Portugal's empire in the collection of lands and titles that he held around the globe.  To a large extent he honored that promise, though he and his successors made decisions about imperial administration that affected both empires.  But the situation changed in the seventeenth century.  The Maino picture representing the 1625 joint victory in BahÍa was actually painted in 1635 at the height of the Thirty Years' War, when the dual monarchy was showing increasing strains, following several decades of economic downturn amid the crushing expenses of global warfare.  Five years later the Portuguese rebelled.  Many historians have presented the Habsburg dynasty's tenure in Portugal as a foreign domination, doomed from the start.  I disagree.  The Habsburgs had strong family ties in Portugal, dating from royal marriages in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the early decades of the dual monarchy seem to have gone fairly smoothly.  When Philip III/II visited Lisbon in 1619, members of the Portuguese ruling elite mounted an extraordinary demonstration of their loyalty and affection, in part to persuade the king to make Lisbon the capital of the global Habsburg monarchy.  The situation deteriorated thereafter, and I would argue that the noble rebels of 1640 had decided that it no longer made sense to remain loyal to an absentee king who did not have their interests at heart.  In other words, the Habsburg monarchy in Portugal failed when the ties of loyalty based on self-interest and reciprocity failed.  Those were the only ties that could preserve transoceanic empires.

            A parallel but contrasting case was the change of dynasty in Spain and its empire when the last Spanish Habsburg Charles II died in 1700 and a French Bourbon prince succeeded him.  Spain and France had been antagonists since the late fifteenth century, and Louis XIV launched one war after another against Habsburg territories in Europe and abroad from 1672 to 1697.  Nonetheless, in 1701 his grandson became the first Bourbon king of Spain.  The last Habsburg had named the Bourbon his heir, because the Spanish and French royal houses had intermarried at regular intervals since the 1500s, and the dying king decided that France could best defend the Spanish empire. The new king Philip V sent letters to all royal officials in the Spanish empire, instructing them to treat French visitors, including warships and their crews, as allies and brothers, despite two hundred years of knowing them as enemies and interlopers.  At the popular level, the new directive met some resistance, but at the administrative level it fared surprisingly well.  The Spanish bureaucracy at home and abroad simply transferred their loyalty from Habsburg to Bourbon, because the mutually beneficial relationship of imperial bureaucrats, the territories they administered, and the crown remained intact.

             In sum, I would argue that the strength and resiliency of Habsburg imperial administration resided in strong ties of loyalty and reciprocity between the monarchy and its subjects, and that those ties emerged from social, legal, and political structures in Iberia that were carried around the globe.  The ties linked monarchy, bureaucracy, and citizenry in a shared enterprise that had developed over the centuries, as Iberian kings and queens shaped frontier societies into monarchies that, in theory, were centralized and absolutist.  In practice, the Iberian monarchies sat atop a structure formed by intersecting networks that began with the family and spread outward to connect with the rest of society and with the monarchy. 

            Wherever they went in the early modern world, nearly all the Portuguese and Spaniards I have met in the records seemed to retain their sense of connection with traditional networks of social, political, and religious support.  They continued to think of themselves as sharing the same emotional space as their families and other affinity groups thousands of miles away.  Today we might describe them as well-grounded and sure of their own identities.  But however we describe them, I would argue that their groundedness gave them the ability to think locally and globally at the same time and -- not incidentally -- to shape and administer oceanic empires.