SECTORAL AUTONOMY

The tendency of metropolitan sectoral institutions to retain autonomy yet cooperate with each other carried over from the empire-building era into the years of colonial consolidation.

To address autonomy first, the colonial government and various missionary bodies retained separate structures, each with its own jurisdictional units, personnel system, financial accounts, holdings and rights in land, and revenue-raising tech­niques.¹¹ Church-state links were doubtless closest in Iberian phase i colonies. Yet even there missionary bodies (especially the Jesuits) retained substantial autonomy. It was precisely the Jesuits’ freedom from royal control that led to their expulsion from Iberian colonies in the 1750s and 1760s, when centralizers in Lisbon and Madrid set out to tighten control over overseas possessions.

The distinction between a colony’s public and private profit sectors was less sharply drawn in the phase 1 mercantilist era than subsequently. In Spain’s colonies, the distinction was blurred because the state was itself a major profit maximizer, owning mines, handling the transport of bullion to Spain, exercising monopoly rights over the sale of certain commodities, and the like. Sectoral lines were crossed in a different way with the officially chartered companies of the British, Dutch, and French.

Even in phase 1, however, private entrepreneurs played their own hand. Much of what appears as statism in the Spanish colonies is economic activity directed by private groups, the government formally asserting control but then subcontracting with capitalists to do the real work. Thus in 1543 the Crown’s Casa de Contratacion (House of trade) granted the consulado (wholesale merchants’ guild) of Seville a monopoly of trade with the Americas.

By phase 3 the public-private profit distinction was more clearly drawn. The old chartered companies had been disbanded or were in the process of dissolution, re­placed by institutions more obviously on one side or the other of the sectoral divide.

Sectoral autonomy in the colonies facilitated power consolidation in several ways. Each institution specialized in what it did best, leading to efficient deployment of the resources available to it. Autonomy ensured the persistence of vigorous as­saults on a broad range of non-European institutions, behavior patterns, and beliefs. The intensity and scope of the triple assault, its synergistic character, its power to subvert the ways other peoples used to arrange their lives, increased with the passage of time. Colonized peoples found themselves continually responding to the latest round of plans to change them. Being forced on the defensive on many fronts at the same time hindered any sustained counteroffensive.

Multiple institutions of dominance created many targets of anger and frustra­tion. European merchants, settlers, and missionaries could not avoid experiencing some of the disruptive consequences of their activities. As long as popular resent­ments were focused on these groups and did not take the form of open rebellion, colonial administrators had some measure of respite from unpopularity.

The presence of sectoral actors may have prolonged colonialism by enabling some of its worst excesses to be reformed. Many missionaries felt called by their faith to protect the rights of victims of exploitation.