Archipelagos of government: Distances and territorial discontinuities as subject of the historical analysis in Colonial Spanish-American studies

Abstract

The author reviews some contributions which studied the great distances and the territorial discontinuities as one of the problems that the Spanish monarchy had to face for the government of its American colonies. He begins with the interpretations offered for the problem of distances (and their scale); continues with those who have studied the devices used by the monarchy to reduce the problem; continues with a categorization of the different types of distances represented in these analyses; and finally, he proposes to test how the idea of «archipelago» (of settlement, of exploitation, of government) has contributed to improve the understanding of the general problem of government at a distance in those pre-capitalist and ancien régime societies.