Indigenous Reducciones and Spanish Resettlement: Placing Colonial and European History in Dialogue

Abstract

Arguing for the urgent need to place colonial and European history in dialogue, this text criticizes the literature that examines campaigns to resettle the native population of Spanish America in villages, identified as reducciones or congregaciones. It argues that, rather than a colonial technology aimed at controlling and exploiting the colonized, campaigns to resettle individuals also took place in Spain and that, in Spanish America, they also encompassed the Spanish population. The text also takes issue with what urbanization meant in the early modern period, demonstrating that the main factors that distinguished communities from non-communities (despoblados) were not material or economic questions but the relationships that linked residents to one another and the legal regime that bound them together.