Nature, Bodies, and Land: Reframing Ownership and Property in Early Modern Spanish America

Abstract

Rooted in medieval juridical thinking, early modern legal culture saw commu- nity’s law as the expression of an underlying order of things, something defined not by the willing agreement of the parts that constituted the community, but rather by nature and nurture. For the Iberian world, this belief was expressed in the idea of the ‘señorío natural’, which according to legal doctrine was a bond that linked subjects to the land where they were born and subjected them to a common jurisdiction (Hespanha, Uncommon Laws ). Communities and all kinds of corpo- rate bodies thus also had a natural origin, which points to an intertwinement, and not a contradiction, between nature and different kinds of collective bodies. These bodies—corporations, guilds, communities, families, and so on—were the basis for the assignment of rights, obligations, privileges, and duties, but also for the dis- tribution of access to land. This article seeks to reframe ownership and property within this framework as a way of rethinking the ways in which communities defined their relations to land.