Freedom to Wander and the Right to Travel in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America
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Placing Mobile Identities: Freedom to Wander and the Right to Travel in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America by Beatriz E. Salamanca A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies University College London November, 2019 Declaration I, Beatriz E. Salamanca, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 To my parents 3 Abstract Urban growth and the unprecedented expansion of imperial Spain sparked a sense of constant fluctuation and anonymity that challenged early modern categories of belonging and space demarcation. The Spanish crown claimed a monopoly which sought to exclude tentatively defined foreigners, and in the peninsula, urban growth encouraged measures to identify and restrict the presence of the ‘undeserving’ poor. Nascent frameworks of legal identity exacerbated a public discourse of suspicion against constant motion and the ‘undocumented’, and this interaction between mobility and emerging techniques of identification has an intellectual history that has not received sufficient attention. The Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria controversially oscillated between the ethical defence of hospitable behaviour and a notion of ‘openess’ permeated by the language of the rights of ‘nations’. His disciple Domingo de Soto more openly challenged current measures by insisting on the limits of any attempt to create fixed definitions of poverty and legitimate movement. This research explores how movement was both monitored and discussed in a highly mobile world of fragile categories of identity and fragmentary and porous boundaries. It inquires how different narratives of identity and belonging were articulated in regulations and legal cases, and examines their influence on intellectual debates about hospitality and kindness to strangers in both transatlantic and local frameworks. In this context, I intend to offer new insights on the means through which nebulous identities and mechanisms of identification were incorporated to an emerging bureaucracy of movement, and contribute to a better understanding of how these practices helped shape the terms in which freedom of movement was advocated or objected. This research claims that the discursive ambivalence of notions like the right to travel or the itinerant-undeserving poor, exposed a climate of resistance to an emerging bureaucracy of identification and increasing mobility regulations. 4 Impact Statement This research incorporates social, cultural, legal and intellectual history approaches, which illuminate how highly malleable and flexible categories of identity obstructed emerging processes of legal identification and state formation. It offers an entangled approach to the history of mobility regulations and identification by integrating concrete practices and ideas about movement. It goes beyond purely intellectual frameworks, examining practices of identification and legal cases containing the perspectives and claims of both travellers and local authorities, while also looking at the different ways in which these policies and practices shaped and were shaped by ideas. This research pursues perceptions and conceptions of movement through their incomplete terminology, and claims that undefined notions of ‘legitimate poverty’ and ‘Spanishness’ obstructed royal administration’s emerging policies of migration. Francisco de Vitoria’s defence of the universal duty to behave kindly to strangers is contrasted with increasingly stringent transatlantic mobility regulations, but also with travellers’ defiant practices resisting the establishment of fixed classifications. Meanwhile, the slow implementation of begging licences for the itinerant poor conveyed a climate of resistance expressed in Domingo de Soto’s critique of policies based on rigid definitions of poverty and legitimate movement. The fear and mistrust of strangers continue to haunt us today, and the line separating hospitality from hostility often remains obscure. The current migration crisis has challenged the nation-state’s capacity to cope with large scale displacement, reactivating anxieties about knowing and naming newcomers. Current policies and technologies of identification do not suffice to answer the pressing ethical questions about the rights of locals and strangers, making it critical now more than ever to gain historical perspectives on the different ways that ideas of movement have been conceived, debated, and transformed. With this in mind, this project seeks to offer insights that are relevant not only within but beyond academia: to enrich the discussion and formulation of policies, to offer historical perspectives to humanitarian organizations, and to influence public discourse. To this end, this project can be disseminated to a wide audience through lectures, seminars and publications, as well as through activities of public engagement such as radio programmes, public debates, collaborations and exhibitions. 5 Table of Contents Abstract Impact Statement Acknowledgements Introduction 11 Chapter 1 The Spaniards’ Right to Travel: Kindness across the Ocean 46 1. Francisco de Vitoria 2. Armed Strangers and Invasion 3. Peaceful Travel: Vitoria’s Commentaries on Aquinas 4. Hospitality and Imperial Affairs 5. Fellow-Feeling and Neighbourly Love 6. Only Spaniards Welcome? 7. Hugo Grotius: Hospitality for the Dutch Chapter 2 Monitoring Movement: The Challenge of Mobile Identities 85 1. The Transatlantic Passenger 2. Narratives of Belonging: On Spanishness 3. Defining Strangers 4. Living ‘Derramados’ 6 5. Cosmopolitan Spanish Fleets 6. The American Shores Chapter 3 Licencing Wandering and Paper Frontiers: Local and Transatlantic Licences 120 1. Mobile Impostors and the Poor Laws 2. Extramural Growth and the Gate 3. Anatomy at the Gate 4. Juan de Solórzano Pereyra’s Wall of Eyes Chapter 4 Freedom to Wander: Domingo de Soto and the Itinerant Poor 146 1. Domingo de Soto 2. Vagrancy and the Law 3. Contagious Mischief and The Metaphors of Movement 4. Defining Vagrancy: Between Criminal and Moral Law 5. Poverty, Idleness, and Quixotic Journeys 6. Freedom of Movement – for Whom? 7. The Rights of the City and the Common Good 8. The Universal Community in a World of Nations Conclusion 184 Bibliography 191 7 Acknowledgments Many thanks to my supervisor, Alex Samson, for his enthusiastic support and encouragement, and for the fruitful discussions through which we considered and developed many of the themes of this thesis. I am immensely grateful for having had the opportunity to receive his constant and detailed feedback, and have been continually inspired by his exciting research undertakings. Also many thanks to Zoltan Biedermann, whose insightful comments enriched this project. I am especially grateful for Linda Newson’s judicious comments and suggestions, as well as those of Bethany Aram, Igor Perez Tostado and Angus Gowland. I am also deeply indebted to the rigorous comments offered by Luca Zenobi, Pablo Gonzalez Martin and Rosa Salzberg, which allowed me to further develop many aspects of my research. Many thanks as well to the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, especially the very constructive suggestions of Nigel Ashford, Stephen Davies, Michael Doumas and Tony Hernández. Members of staff at the Archives in Bogota and Seville were enormously helpful throughout; I would not have been able to navigate my way through without their kind assistance. I am immensely grateful to my family’s unconditional, loving support and constant presence regardless of the vast ocean in between. I am thankful to Annie Hoile and all my friends – especially to Jing Xu, who cheerfully endured our long writing sessions at Cafe Nero, and Polina Vasilyeva, who was always there and encouraged me to keep going. Finally, I want to thank my partner Will, whose love, company, understanding, sense of humour, and extraordinarily audacious editorial skills enlivened this journey. 8 Note on the Translations: All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. 9 ‘What men, what monsters, what inhuman race… Shut up a desert shore to drowning men, and drive us to the cruel seas again?’ Virgil, Aeneid, I.760, 22. ‘Ideas are the most migratory things in the world’ Arthur Lovejoy, “Reflections on the History of Ideas,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1, no, 1 (1940): 4. 10 Introduction The Global Hispanic World The Spanish Empire reached unprecedented dimensions in the sixteenth century, encouraging an enormous flow of peoples, goods and ideas. It was estimated that about 450.000 Spaniards officially travelled to America between 1500 and 1650. Studies on illegal migration have suggested, though, that these numbers were significantly higher.1 At the local level, and as a result of high mortality rates, early modern cities relied on a constant influx of newcomers to maintain their size and growth. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the population of Seville grew almost five times, increasing from 25,000 to 120,000 inhabitants, alongside Madrid’s population which reached 130,000 by the mid-seventeenth century, a figure nonetheless dwarfed by London’s population which grew from 40,000 to 400,000 across the same period.2 In this context, most residents of heavily populated cities were likely to have been born outside those cities. Migration accounted for a large percentage