What Distributive Justice Requires:"Negotiating Empire and Local Orders in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century New Spain

Abstract

Theories of distributive justice played an important role in negotiations between the Spanish crown and the inhabitants of the Indies. Whereas historians have often equated the notion of distributive justice with a vassal's unvarying right to be rewarded by his lord for services rendered, contemporaries used these theories in more than one way to reflect on the just distribution of offices, privileges, and honors within a hierarchically ordered society. This paper examines how ideas about what distributive justice required changed in the process of aligning the shifting necessities of the crown to that of different groups in the viceroyalty of New Spain during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. I argue that these theories on the one hand prompted a common interest in the mapping of the viceroyalty and its inhabitants, as well as the creation of an archive of meritorious (personas beneméritas). On the other hand, I contend that the changing meaning of distributive justice rendered visible a paradox that would contribute to an important shift in the use of this archive in the process of negotiating empire and local orders.