Colonial exclusion sustained empire by dividing colonizers against themselves

Evidence

What made the exclusion appear rational in the metropole? Doubtless the confluence of a time-honoured Machiavellism with the growth of conceptions of biological and ecological contamination that accompanied the planetary spread of Europeans and European power from the sixteenth century onwards. From the sovereign’s angle of vision, the American creoles, with their ever-growing numbers and increasing local rootedness with each succeeding generation, presented a historically unique political problem. For the first time the metropoles had to deal with – for that era – vast numbers of ‘fellow-Europeans’ (over three million in the Spanish Americas by 1800) far outside Europe. If the indigenes were conquerable by arms and disease, and controllable by the mysteries of Christianity and a completely alien culture (as well as, for those days, an advanced political organization), the same was not true of the creoles, who had virtually the same relationship to arms, disease, Christianity and European culture as the metropolitans. In other words, in principle, they had readily at hand the political, cultural and military means for successfully asserting themselves. They constituted simultaneously a colonial community and an upper class. They were to be economically subjected and exploited, but they were also essential to the stability of the empire. One can see, in this light, a certain parallelism between the position of the creole magnates and of feudal barons, crucial to the sovereign’s power, but also a menace to it. Thus the peninsulares dispatched as viceroys and bishops served the same functions as did the homines novi of the proto-absolutist bureaucracies. Even if the viceroy was a grandee in his Andalusian home, here, 5,000 miles away, juxtaposed to the creoles, he was effectively a homo novus fully dependent on his metropolitan master. The tense balance between peninsular official and creole magnate was in this way an expression of the old policy of divide et impera in a new setting. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 228

Categorization

• XREF: The divide-et-impera mechanism pitting peninsular functionary against creole magnate parallels how colonial/racist structures manage ruled populations by fracturing them — key transferable scaffolding for the Islamophobia reading of how Muslim communities are internally divided or co-opted. — connects to: Britain transplanted its nation through colonization rather than building a multi-peopled empire; ‘Solidarity among whites’ in colonies mirrored trans-state aristocratic class solidarity — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 577; Colonial sentiment discipline targeted colonizers themselves, not only the colonized (+5 more)

Related

• Colonial birth itself, not behavior, barred creoles from imperial office (similarity 0.82)
• Colonial bureaucracies did not extend European absolutist career rationality overseas (similarity 0.78)
• Creole revolutionaries sought to preserve parallelism, not to overthrow the Old World (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial sentiment discipline targeted colonizers themselves, not only the colonized #expands (0.85)