5
nations in Europe, were unrelated to the tension between Spain and the property-holding
classes of Spanish America (Anderson 1991, 47 and 67-82).
Instead, Anderson claimed, the growing distance between Spain and America was, at
least in part, a product of the peculiar and changing architecture of colonial rule (Anderson
1991). Beginning with the reign of Carlos III in 1759, the Spanish court came under the
influence of political and intellectual currents flowing across Europe. The court attempted
to extend jurisdictional control over the wide extent of its territory, enforcing administrative
order over what had been a lazily ruled colonial project. Simultaneously, Spanish rulers,
influenced (to what ever small degree) by enlightened liberalism, enforced more humane
regulations for the treatment of slaves (Anderson 1991). Meanwhile, planters in the new
world were preoccupied with local concerns, primarily how to hold onto their wealth and
control subject populations. However reasonable and morally justified these reforms may
have appeared from the perspective of Madrid, they were both misguided and meddlesome
in the eyes of the creole planting-class.
Yet, as Anderson points out, these circumstances, while producing tensions between
Madrid and its colonial population, did not in themselves determine the specifically
nationalist rebellions that followed. To understand the emergence of nations in the new
world, one has to look at the division of the vast territory into administrative units, that
over time developed a semblance of permanence and their own internal social and
economic networks (Anderson 1991). Anderson is proposing, as other authors have, that
borders—or at least administrative territories—came first, and the engineering of a
territorial identity and a resulting sense of connectedness followed.
Convention