How Did Spain Maintain Imperial Control Over Colonial Latin America

Despite the weakness of the Spanish Crown during the Colonial Period, Spain surprisingly succeeded in creating, establishing, and enforcing (to an extent) a system of political organization in Colonial Spanish America that, while completely taxing in terms of time and distance to travelers, allowed the Crown to persevere for as long as it did. The Viceroyalty System, the main and most powerful system utilized by the Spanish Crown during the Colonial Period, was how Spain maintained control over Colonial Spanish America; despite a few setbacks and riots that occurred during this stage, Spain managed to uphold its supremacy and created a political structure specifically for the purpose of allowing the Crown to maintain imperial control for as

Burkholder and Lyman Johnson’s book Colonial Latin America, Geoffrey Spurling’s book Colonial Lives, as well as through sources posted on JSTOR and discussed during class lectures.

By definition, the Viceroyalty System was a structure created by the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns in the early-to-mid-1500s where the Crowns “relied on bureaucrats located both on the peninsula and in the Americas” to uphold the existing power system and maintain political stability in the colonies. By the mid-to-late-1600s, the Spanish Crown had established positions in the Viceroyalty System, such as positions in the treasury and provincial positions, and was selling these points of power to those willing to pay the price. Spain’s selling of Viceroyalty positions is a point of interest, however, because even though the positions within the audencias and Viceroyalties were

During this time, “ambitious conquistadors in the Spanish colonies and early settlers there and in Brazil sought to become genuine aristocrats with all the seigneurial rights such status implied,” thus the Crowns became concerned with having influential, formidable nobility come to power so far out of the Crowns’ line of control. The time and distance that existed between Spain and the colonies in Latin America caused communication to be strained—a crucial illustration of this distance is how Spanish fleets and ships carrying messages usually returned to the Indies “fourteen to fifteen months” after leaving, demonstrating how taxing and intense the separation was. One of the ways Spain oversaw their chosen officials and the people in the colonies was to place an emphasis on the Church and on the Inquisition; the Church was “undoubtedly the single most important institution in Colonial Latin America,” and it had a significant amount of control over the lives of the colonial people “from birth, through marriage, and until death.” The Church acted, in part, as the eyes and ears of the Spanish Crown in the colonies, and it controlled nearly every element of life in Colonial Latin America, allowing Spain the opportunity to employ the