Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy

Abstract

This chapter examines the Spanish bureaucracy in terms of a thought-provoking hypothesis recently advanced by Andrew Gunder Frank. The conflicting-standards hypothesis provides a more satisfactory explanation of the wide gap between the law and its observance in the Spanish empire. The Spanish colonial administration was a dynamic balance between the principles of authority and flexibility. In which the highly centralized decision making vested in the king and the Council was counterbalanced by some substantial measure of decentralized decision making exercised by bureaucratic subordinates in the colonies. In applying Frank’s hypothesis to the Spanish imperial bureaucracy, the chapter outlines the structural features of the colonial administration. There were a variety of ways in which colonial administrators responded to those manifold pressures created by mutually incompatible standards. The very conflict among the standards, which prevented a subordinate from meeting all the standards at once, gave subordinates a voice in decision making without jeopardizing the control of their superiors over the whole system.

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