Jurisdictional Battlefields

The book examines three expeditions by the Spanish to the borders of Charcas, a district that covers present-day Bolivia and the northwest of Argentina, in the second half of the sixteenth century, through an approach that has not been attempted until now. Scholarship on these events has framed them as part of a gradual top-down process of centralisation driven by the Crown to extend its power and build a colonial 'state' in the Americas. This book challenges this view approaching the expeditions through an analysis of the political culture that underpinned them. It explores the events within the process of installation and consolidation of royal jurisdiction, understood here as the authority to establish law and deliver justice, in a remote area. This was a process done through coercion and violence, as well as negotiation and consensus, that involved both the Spanish and indigenous peoples, and that frequently created overlapped jurisdictions, via downscaling of politics and dispersion of power. Jurisdictional politics were decided and settled in battlefields and courts and involved the theatricalization of power, to make a distant monarch present, which paradoxically, made such absence the more evident. The book is an invitation to re-dimension the scope of Spain's empire.