ABSTRACT
Was Hispanic America ever a colony of Spain? This chapter points out that this ‘startling’ question is anything but new, having been debated off and on since the late eighteenth century. As many a historian of Latin America has noted, officially the administrative units of the ‘Occidental Indies’ of the Hispanic Monarchy were not called ‘colonies’ but viceroyalties, kingdoms and provinces. But that does not mean that the concept of ‘colony’ was absent or irrelevant. Indeed, the evidence strongly suggests that this and related concepts underwent a polemical transformation during the first wave. Hispanic American arguments about the constitutional nature of their societies were key to this critical transformation in the meaning of the concept. Thus, the ambivalent answer to the question is ‘yes and no.’
