BIOPOLÍTICA COLONIAL, GESTIÓN DE LA POBLACIÓN Y MODERNIZACIÓN BORBÓNICA EN SANTO DOMINGO. EL PROYECTO DE PEDRO CATANI (1788)

Abstract

This article analyzes the “Report written by the Oidor Pedro Catani (1788)” regarding Santo Domingo’s economy, the development of its agriculture, and the domination and government of particular sectors of the population located outside the system of the colonial extraction of labor. Catani’s text—representative of the unsuccessful Bourbon modernization policies of the Dominican economy in the late eighteenth century—displays a biopolitical rationality of exploitation and economic governance. Furthermore, it proposes the colonial management and regulation of the population; that is, the transformation of the insubordinate forms-of-life of the large rural population of free blacks and mulattos in order to transform their idle lives into productive lives.