Governor Sancho and the Politics of Insularity

Abstract

Governor Sancho's rule on the ínsula Barataria in Part II of Don Quijote has been read as evidence of Cervantes's endorsement of a more or less concrete political vision in response to the perception of Spanish decline. By focusing on Sancho's actions on the ínsula, however, scholars have overlooked the politics of the ínsula itself. This essay takes the Barataria episode as a point of departure for an analysis of the transatlantic politics of insularity in early modern Spain. In this context, insularity is necessarily a colonial matter. Filled with references to the practices of colonialism and specifically to the Americas, Barataria speaks to the legitimacy of possession and the spatial dimensions of governance. By reading Cervantes next to political theorists like Francisco de Vitoria, this essay suggests that the modernity of Barataria's politics lies in its insular ambiguity, a reimagining of the spatiality of colonial relations.

Part II of Don Quijote (1615) opens with a discussion between the knight, the priest, and the barber, on the topic of "esto que llaman 'razón de estado' y modos de gobierno." As they debate, the friends become the prophets of a self-consciously "modern" politics of reform:

enmendando este abuso y condenando aquél, reformando una costumbre y desterrando otra, haciéndose cada uno de los tres un nuevo legislador, un Licurgo moderno o un Solón flamante, y de tal manera renovaron la república, que no pareció sino que la habían puesto en una fragua y sacado otra de la que pusieron.

(Cervantes II, 549-50)

What stands out about this triply emphatic formulation of political modernity is the striking lack of detail, concrete references, and political programs. This silence contrasts with the proliferation of at times inconsistent political references during Governor Sancho's rule on the ínsula Barataria, which recall and parody not only the books of chivalry but also biblical and classical tropes and the minutiae of contemporary Spanish law. What, then, are the politics of the ínsula and, by extension, the Quijote? While critics have attempted to address this question by analyzing Sancho's acts as ruler, in this essay I take a different approach. Rather than focusing on the politics that take place on the ínsula, I take as my starting point the politics of the ínsula itself. What purpose does this insularity serve? The Barataria episode draws on a long cultural and discursive history of insularity that shaped and was shaped by contemporary debates about transatlantic colonialism and governance. Insularity here performs a set of simultaneous operations that are fundamental for understanding the modernity of the Quijote's politics: it articulates a legitimacy of possession to colonize a space of sovereign jurisdiction while at the same time deploying this textual domain as the closed space of a sort of colonial "laboratory of modernity" aimed at resolving the political and economic crisis that was devastating Cervantes's Spain.¹

While unstated, the contemporary Spanish reader would likely have understood the "abusos" of the hero's friendly debate as a reference to this crisis that had generated, by the end of the sixteenth century, a tangible sense of decline.² This perception sparked an explosion of political commentary by social critics seeking to generate solutions to the crisis. Although many of these so-called arbitrios were ridiculed in public discourse and literature and, as John Huxtable Elliott rather caustically notes, "no doubt richly deserved the oblivion which overtook them," others offered "sensible programmes of reform" (Spain and Its World 231).³ In fact, despite this ridicule, much Golden Age literature participates in a similar kind of critique. Augustín Redondo has thus suggested that Don Quijote can be read as a form of literary arbitrismo, in that the alarming conditions of the Spanish countryside and the desire to fix them are precisely what push the hero to take on the identity of the Caballero de la Triste Figura (Redondo 60)-his desire is not for adventure but for "el servicio de la república" (Cervantes I, 31).

But for many of the arbitristas, this "república" extended far beyond the Iberian peninsula, making it impossible to separate Spain's crisis from the question of empire and the Americas.⁴ When Francisco López de Gómara declared in his Historia general de las Indias (1552) that "La mayor cosa después de la creación del mundo, sacando la encarnación y muerte del que lo crió, es el descubrimiento de Indias" (5), the American colonies were already serving as Spain's principal source of wealth, exporting ever-increasing shipments of gold and silver to the metropolis. Paradoxically, however, these precious metals at the same time brought about the crippling inflation and debt associated with what Earl Hamilton originally called the "price revolution" of the sixteenth century. As the arbitrista Martín González de Cellorigo put it in 1600, "el no haber dinero, oro ni plata en España, es por haberlo, y el no ser rica es por serlo" (90). By the middle of the century, members of the School of Salamanca had developed surprisingly sophisticated analyses of the impact of the Americas on Spain's economy to come to grips with these economic problems (Grice-Hutchinson). Just as important as the question of economics was the question of imperial politics, of how to overcome vast geographical distances to govern Spain's massive empire effectively. "[P]or estar más lejos," wrote Bartolomé de Las Casas in 1552, "han vivido más sin orden y justicia" in the colonies (156). The Crown shared this concern with the abuses of conquistadores and encomenderos and sought to consolidate a workable administrative relationship between metropole and colony.

My argument builds on historiographical and literary approaches to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Spain that acknowledge its transatlantic character. Like the mentalités approach of Maravall and Redondo, I am interested in historicizing the political debates about "modos de gobierno" that inform Cervantes's work in general and the Barataria episode in particular. But given the globalized nature of Spain's early modern empire, I find it important, like Diana de Armas Wilson, to read these debates from a transatlantic perspective. This is not to say that the European context is unimportant, but that it must be read alongside Cervantes's deployment of colonial and American tropes. Rather than the archeological approach adopted by Wilson, which seeks to excavate these traces of cultural Americana, I focus specifically on the place of insularity in framing the Quijote's meditations on (colonial) governance. Thus, I read Cervantes next to those who theorized the politics of colonialism in early modern Spain-in particular, Francisco de Vitoria, professor at the University of Salamanca and "one of the most influential political theorists in sixteenth-century Catholic Europe" (Pagden, "Introduction" xiii). More than simply tracing the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Quint x), in Don Quijote Cervantes offers a vision of political modernity as, in the first place, a colonial matter and, in the second, a question of spatial relations, of how best to organize the points of a political constellation.

I

At about the same time as Cervantes was writing the second part of the Quijote, Sebastián de Covarrubias was compiling his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611). His definition of the word isla serves as a useful point of departure for understanding the cultural economy of the island in early modern Spain:⁵

Del nombre latino insula. . . . No sólo se llaman islas las que están cercadas de aguas, pero también las casas que están edificadas sin que otra ninguna se les pegue, siendo essentas de todas partes. . . . En la navegación que ay de Portugal a la India Oriental, que son cinco mil leguas de agua, está en medio del gran Occéano (donde dizen no hallarse suelo) una isleta despoblada llamada Santa Elena, abastada de dulces aguas, de pescados, de caça y frutas, que la misma tierra sin labor alguna produce, donde los navegantes descansan, pescan, caçan y se proveen de agua.

(742)

As Covarrubias makes clear, the word has dual implications. On one hand, there is the literal, geographical meaning of land surrounded by water. But he also points to a metaphysical meaning, for which isolation as such becomes the essential category for understanding insular space. In this sense, insularity is no longer defined by the topography of the conventional island but by its context, the social and spatial relations that characterize its position. And, for Covarrubias, this context is inescapably colonial. The ease with which the lexicographer inserts Iberian colonial history into his etymology suggests an important connection between the discourse of insularity and early modern conceptualizations of colonialism.

Covarrubias's definition provides a useful frame for approaching the ambiguous spatiality of the ínsula Barataria. This is because, in the first place, the so-called ínsula is not much of an island. As Sancho slowly makes his way back to his master after abandoning the governorship, he bumps into his old friend Ricote on the road. He tells the Morisco about his recent post, gesturing down the road toward Barataria. "Calla, Sancho," retorts Ricote, "que las ínsulas están allá dentro de la mar, que no hay ínsulas en tierra firme" (II, 966). Ricote's remark only confirms what we already suspect. After all, Cervantes made sure to leave things blurry, as in the description of Sancho's departure, when the duke, duchess, and Don Quijote send him off to the "lugar que para él había de ser ínsula" (II, 878).⁶ Barataria, it seems, is only an island in the squire's mind.

While Sancho's misunderstanding may strike us as a reaffirmation of his peasantlike simplicity, Covarrubias points to an alternative reading in which it is Ricote who is mistaken. Though Barataria may in fact be a town on the Spanish mainland as Ricote asserts, its essence is insular-as Cervantes's preference for the term ínsula (instead of the more common isla) suggests.⁷ Cervantes describes Sancho's arrival to Barataria, but omits any mention of his journey or reference to its location.⁸ A break in the narration provides cover for the absent route, establishing a narrative distance that structurally reinforces Barataria's insularity and the geographical distance that defines the island. An artificial insularity of narrative form, here, establishes a literary space analogous to the artificial geographical insularity of Thomas More's Utopia, originally a peninsula but severed from the mainland by human engineering (More 70). Likewise, Cide Hamete's invocation at the beginning of chapter 45 in the Quijote suggests an isolation not only formal but also geographic:

¡Oh perpetuo descubridor de los antípodas, hacha del mundo, ojo del cielo, meneo dulce de las cantimploras, Timbrio aquí, Febo allí, tirador acá, médico acullá, padre de la poesía, inventor de la música, tú que siempre sales y, aunque lo parece, nunca te pones! A ti digo, ¡oh sol, con cuya ayuda el hombre engendra al hombre!, a ti digo que me favorezcas y alumbres la escuridad de mi ingenio, para que pueda discurrir por sus puntos en la narración del gobierno del gran Sancho Panza, que sin ti yo me siento tibio, desmazalado y confuso.

(II, 887)

This passage crystallizes the link between the narrative insularity of Barataria and the importance of an imperial gaze looking out toward the Americas. The centrality of the sun, whose top-down perspective characterized as the "ojo del cielo" reflects a new discourse of mapmaking being formalized in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the context of imperial expansion, invites a cartographic reading (Certeau 92; Padrón). At the same time, the call to "alumbr[ar] la escuridad" evokes the language of evangelization used by missionaries like Las Casas to justify the conquest in terms of bringing the "lumbre y socorro de doctrina" and thereby end the "escuridad de ignorancia y miseria" (132). What Cervantes is alluding to at the beginning of the Barataria episode-pace Ricote-is a cultural context of transatlantic Spanish colonialism.

The reference to the "descubridor de los antípodas," furthermore, touches on sixteenth-century cartographic debates about the nature of the globe and its inhabitants. López de Gómara, for example, opened his account of the conquests of Mexico and Peru with a review of the contemporary extensions of classical debates about the existence of antipodes, "los hombres que pisan en la bola y redondez de la tierra al contrario de nosotros"-or, put more simply, "los indios, a quien llamamos antípodas" (16). Magellan, he wrote, had clearly established the validity of their existence and, in doing so, "declaró la ignorancia de la sabia antigüedad" (16). For López de Gómara, then, Europe's antipodes were located in the Indies: "Asia, África y Europa son la una parte, y las Indias la otra, en la cual están los llamados antípodas" (15). At the same time, the centrality of the "descubridor" specifically situates the question of discovery in the context of sixteenth-century Spanish theorizations of territorial possession. Columbus, of course, comes immediately to mind. Perhaps Cervantes was thinking, in light of Sancho's path to the governorship, of the admiral's decision during his second voyage to reward his crewman Michele da Cuneo with the Caribbean island of La Bella Saonese for his valuable service (Wilson, Cervantes 155). Cuneo himself records the gift by insisting on the "modos y formas convenientes" he used to take possession of it (qtd. in Wilson, Cervantes 155).

This concern with possession is eminently colonial; it locates Sancho's arrival to Barataria within the practice-based juridical foundations of colonialism. As the title of the first chapter of Sancho's reign makes clear, rule is established first and foremost through the act of taking possession. Within the colonial contours of the Barataria narrative, Governor Sancho's arrival evokes what Patricia Seed has called "ceremonies of possession," fundamental in the practice of European colonialism, while simultaneously constituting a parody of them. In a series of "ridículas ceremonias," Sancho is presented with the keys to the town and informed of the "costumbre antigua en esta ínsula . . . que el que viene a tomar posesión de esta famosa ínsula está obligado a responder a una pregunta que se le hiciere que sea algo intricada y dificultosa" (II, 888). Unlike the legalistic practice of reading the requerimiento, these ceremonies are performative; they intend not to articulate a justification of colonial possession but to actualize that possession.⁹

But the ceremonies do not exist in a cultural vacuum. More important than the practices themselves is the allusion to their explicitly colonial juridical foundations in the context of the theoretical debates about the legitimacy of the conquest. The question of legitimacy, in many ways, depended on a complex discourse of insularity. By the early sixteenth century, European theologians, cartographers, and historiographers were engaged in heated debates about the geographical nature of the American territories. Were they in fact a continent, like Europe, Asia, and Africa? Or did they consist, as the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller wrote in his Cosmographiae introductio (1507), of "an island [insula], inasmuch as it is found to be surrounded on all sides by the ocean" (qtd. in Padrón 164)?

More than an attempt to develop an increasingly scientific discourse of cartography, however, these conceptualizations of American insularity served as justifications for colonial dominance. In addition to its spatial implications, insularity had an important human dimension. As an island, for example, the Americas might be isolated from the human race. Christian theology indicated that humankind descended, in the first place, from Adam; but more importantly, humans descended from Noah, whose three sons had repopulated respectively the three parts of the Old World after the flood. "An insular America," Ricardo Padrón argues, "was understood to isolate the inhabitants of the New World from those of the Old in geographical, historical, and even genealogical terms, thus making it easier to imagine the Amerindian as a different sort of human being even while explicitly accepting the pope's dogmatic assertion that they were indeed human" (165). This explains Las Casas's anachronistic insistence that America was in fact territorially connected to Asia-it transformed the Indians into another group of "orientals" like the Chinese, who, in spite of their differences, still participated in the human genealogy of the Christian cosmovision (O'Gorman lxxvii). It is only a short jump from here to Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda's infamous arguments in his Democrates secundus that the Indians' condition as Aristotelian natural slaves justified Spanish colonial control. What could be better for these "homunculi in whom hardly a vestige of humanity remains" than to be subjected to Christian rule? (qtd. in Pagden, Fall of Natural Man 117). Sepúlveda's dehumanizing use of the Latin term homunculus betrays his underlying assumption of an essential difference between the inhabitants of the Old World and those of the New.¹⁰ Insularity, then, has geographical as well as social significance, as its meaning impinges on not only the land but also those who inhabit it.

Not everyone agreed with Sepúlveda, who after all "lost" the Valladolid debates of 1550-1551 to Las Casas. But the relationship between insularity and colonialism found other, more convincing outlets. I focus here on the influential work of Vitoria, who played an early and important role in Spanish debates concerning the legality of the imperial project. In De Indis, a relectio delivered in 1539, the Dominican poses a critical question: "by what right (ius) were the barbarians [in the New World, commonly called Indians] subjected to Spanish rule?" (233). By outlining and critiquing seven "unjust titles" or justifications for the Spanish conquest of the Indies, he discounts a number of conventional arguments including those that underlie the juridical claims of the requerimiento-namely, that the authority of the emperor or pope is enough to legitimize territorial possession. But Vitoria, no critic of Spanish imperialism, also offers a series of "just titles" that effectively justify the colonial project.¹¹

Between these unjust and just titles lies an ambivalent juridical space rooted in Vitoria's own ambivalence about the applicability of the doctrine of res nullius as a justification for Spanish colonialism in the Americas. Alfonso X's monumental legal code, the Siete Partidas, had inscribed this doctrine from its original Roman law formulation into Castilian vernacular within an explicitly insular context, granting possession of "la ysla que se faze nueuamente en la mar" to "aquel que la poblare primeramente" (Partida III, tít. 28, ley 29).¹² Early theorists of colonialism had indeed used this precedent to justify Spain's possession of Caribbean islands. For Anthony Pagden, however, these claims of res nullius depended not on insularity per se but on the absence of "legitimate civil societies." While in the case of the Caribbean islands, he writes, the argument "did not seem implausible," the massive cities of the Inca and Mexica on the mainland made it less convincing (Spanish Imperialism 17-18). This reading suggests that res nullius is irrelevant for understanding Sancho's arrival in Barataria, a polity with city wall, church, and a population of "hasta mil vecinos" (II, 887-88)-in short, the material traces of a "legitimate civil society." But Vitoria's articulation of res nullius is more complex than Pagden allows. Far from an unconditional denial of the doctrine's relevance for Spanish possession, Vitoria's relectio is strikingly ambivalent. It is this ambivalence-which both builds on the doctrine's original foundations of insularity and mirrors the ambiguous space of Barataria itself-that opens the door for a newly expansive res nullius, transformed from a passive discourse of territorial extraction into an active one of depopulation, repopulation, and possession.

The Dominican begins by questioning whether the "right of discovery" [in iure inuentionis] is enough to justify the conquest:

All things which are unoccupied or deserted become the property of the occupier by natural law and the law of nations, according to the law Ferae bestiae. Hence it follows that the Spaniards, who were the first to discover and occupy these countries, must by right possess them, just as if they had discovered a hitherto uninhabited desert.

(264)

Deserts, like islands, constitute insular space.¹³ But Vitoria has already argued that the Indians possess private and public dominion over their territories. "Since the goods in question here had an owner," he continues, "they do not fall under this title" (264-65). Although he appears to quickly reject the argument-"we need not argue long," he writes (264)-he leaves open the possibility of its return, arguing that while res nullius "of itself . . . provides no support for possession of these lands," it "may have some validity when taken in conjunction with another" (265; my emphasis). Vitoria has not discarded the precedent, but laid the groundwork for its reactivation.

The title with which it is to be paired is that of "natural partnership and communication" (278). For Vitoria, human sociability demands a freedom of movement and trade. Presupposing the extractive colonialism he intends to justify, he writes that Spaniards should be able to travel freely in the New World and likewise that the Indians "may import the commodities which they lack, and export the gold, silver, or other things which they have in abundance; and their princes cannot prevent their subjects from trading with the Spaniards, nor can the princes of Spain prohibit commerce with the barbarians" (279). Given the conquistadors' well-known obsession with precious metals, the inequivalence of the exchange is striking-as is the implicit threat of a legitimate violence that could be deployed as a "defensive" response to the iniuria of obstructing lawful trade. Furthermore, Vitoria declares goods held in common to be fair game and reiterates that "it is not lawful for the barbarians to prohibit the Spaniards from sharing and enjoying them" (280). Lest his audience imagine that he is merely referring to, say, firewood or wild game, he provides two concrete examples: Spaniards should be allowed to "dig for gold" and "fish for pearls" (280). Moctezuma's significant treasure trove, for one, makes the claim of communal gold mines highly suspect. But the reappearance of res nullius smoothes over such inconvenient concerns:

in the law of nations (ius gentium) a thing which does not belong to anyone (res nullius) becomes the property of the first taker, according to the law Ferae bestiae; therefore, if gold in the ground or pearls in the sea or anything else in the rivers has not been appropriated, they will belong by the law of nations to the first taker, just like the little fishes of the sea.

(280)

The free circulation of peoples and goods reactivates the previously discarded principle of res nullius and opens the door for a robust interpretation of the rights of the colonizer. Not only gold and pearls, but indeed "anything else . . . [that] has not been appropriated" can be legitimately possessed. Indeed, Vitoria's open simile-"just like the little fishes of the sea"-recalls his earlier exposition of res nullius, framed around the appropriation of land "just as if" it were "a hitherto uninhabited desert" (my emphasis). But the connection goes beyond mere resemblance; the two titles are meant to be read together, an operation that, in Vitoria's words, provides "some validity" to the original title of land occupation. A logic of productivity makes possible this shift from extracting goods to appropriating lands-a territory's potential, in the form of not only gold, pearls, and fish but even land itself, becomes the basis for determining the legitimacy of possession. For Covarrubias, not surprisingly, the word desierto refers to solitary land with neither inhabitants nor cultivation (459). Vitoria's ambivalence thus produced more than hermeneutical difficulties for his students, as Pagden and Lawrance suggest (Vitoria 280n77)-it laid the groundwork for an "expansive" view of res nullius that elides the legal existence of a land's inhabitants by displacing uninhabitedness as the foundation for legitimate sovereignty.¹⁴

This reformulation of res nullius did not remain isolated in the esoteric domain of legal theory, but appears in the literature of the Spanish Golden Age as well. In Lope de Vega's Los guanches de Tenerife y conquista de Canaria (1618), Don Alonso de Lugo, named for the historical figure who participated in Spanish expeditions to Gran Canaria, La Palma, and Tenerife, justifies the conquest and possession of the Canary Islands-and by extension the Indies-by arguing that their original inhabitants are "lejos de toda ambici ón. / La tierra es bella, y podría / tener en sí más provecho / del que por bárbaros cría" (lines 345-48).¹⁵ Another example is found in the utopian literature that served as Cervantes's intertextual referent for Barataria (Maravall 280). Like Vitoria, Thomas More's Utopians argue that legitimate possession comes only with use: war is "perfectly justifiable, when one country denies another its natural right to derive nourishment from any soil which the original owners are not using themselves, but are merely holding on to as a worthless piece of property" (More 80). Here again productivity mediates the justification for war and possession. Whereas the original doctrine of res nullius turns over only unoccupied land to its discoverer, the Utopians redefine occupation as a question of effective use. Indeed, the inhabitants or "owners" of the newly occupied territory-insular, like Barataria, in spite of its location on the "mainland"-find themselves at fault, preemptively guilty of withholding sustenance. The resulting war of conquest becomes defensive and "perfectly justifiable" from the point of view of the utopian political reformer.

Earlier, I noted Pagden's argument that res nullius played a minimal role in justifying the conquest of the mainland. Although this may be true of its original formulation, by the early sixteenth century, Spanish jurists and theologians had mobilized a vernacular discourse of insularity based on the Siete Partidas to make possible a newly expansive res nullius and reformulate the justification for colonial occupation. I have already highlighted the matrix of colonial discourses that surround the Barataria episode, but even Barataria's ambivalent territoriality mirrors Vitoria's res nullius dilemma-simultaneously colonial and metropolitan, unjust and just, inhabited and unpossessed. Far from invalidating the colonial connection, Barataria's inhabitedness reinforces it. Indeed, it is precisely the presence of officers and farmers, established institutions, and a history of rule that makes the ínsula particularly appropriate for staging a debate about the legitimacy of colonial possession, occupation, and, as I show in the following section, governance. Cervantes's depiction of Barataria draws on literary and legalistic traditions that had been and continued to be used to depopulate and thus justify taking possession of inhabited and insular territories. I locate this tendency not only in Sancho's performance of certain "ceremonies of possession," but also in his discourse of productivity. This is partly why, in one of his earliest acts as governor, Sancho identifies Barataria as essentially unproductive and aims his rounds precisely at eliminating these elements and replacing them with productive ones:

es mi intención limpiar esta ínsula de todo género de inmundicia y de gente vagamunda, holgazanes y mal entretenida. Porque quiero que sepáis, amigos, que la gente baldía y perezosa es en la república lo mismo que los zánganos en las colmenas, que se comen la miel que las trabajadores abejas hacen.

(II, 919)

David Quint has argued that Sancho's critique of Barataria's "holgazanes" serves as a criticism of Spain's unproductive aristocracy, figures represented by the duke and duchess, who dedicate their time to superfluous diversion (131-60). Such a critique would follow the lead of numerous arbitristas, like González de Cellorigo and Gaspar Gutiérrez de los Ríos, who located Spain's decline in a social code that undervalued labor.¹⁶ But there is a second level to Sancho's statement that, like the overlapping spatial and human geographies discussed above, connects back to the spatiality of the ínsula itself. The beehive metaphor, an early modern trope used to represent closed, utopian space, converts a critique of unproductive individuals into a discourse about the unproductive republic.¹⁷ Rendering Barataria's population as "gente baldía" exemplifies this slippage between the people and their land by applying a term associated with spatial productivity to those who inhabit it. As such, the ínsula too becomes "baldía," legally unoccupied, legitimately possessed.

At the same time, Sancho's practices of rule actively repopulate the ínsula with personalized micronarratives rooted in human bodies and relations, while the efficient administration of justice both establishes order and serves as a metonym for a productive, beehivelike colony.¹⁸ The parade of residents seeking justice from the governor-cum-judge inscribe everyday lives onto Barataria's insular space. Consider the story of the daughter of Diego de la Llana, which emerges during Sancho's rounds and constitutes, as Barbara Fuchs has suggested, "an unstaged moment of reflection on proper government" (31). The girl, cross-dressed but no less beautiful or sexualized, tells of her enclosure in her father's house, explaining that she donned her brother's clothes in order to better "ver mundo" (II, 926). Lightly chastised for her transgression, the girl is returned home, but not before Sancho's steward, struck by her beauty, falls in love and decides to ask for her hand in marriage. Sancho even imagines marrying off his own daughter to the girl's brother. Like the other cases brought before Governor Sancho, this episode populates Barataria with detailed stories of human lives and relations. But this narrative repopulation is further reinforced by the promise of sexual reproduction-marriage holds the key to ensuring the continuity of possession. After all, repopulation is fundamental-for Spanish colonialists, conquistar meant poblar.¹⁹ Barataria's colonial status is thus reinforced by these simultaneous operations of depopulation and repopulation, dispossession and repossession.

II

I have tried to show the ways that insularity served as a justification of territorial possession and, at the same time, a foundation for legitimate colonial authority. Returning to the political debate with which Part II of the Quijote begins, what "modos de gobierno" should this legitimate, modern authority employ? This question has served to frame much of the scholarly debate about the politics of the novel. But most critics have overlooked the importance of the Americas for understanding the politics of seventeenth-century Spain. As I have shown, Cervantes deploys tropes of political and literary insularity to link Governor Sancho's ínsula to the New World colonies. This connection is fundamental for understanding the transatlantic nature of the political agenda in question, which sought to address the crisis of a globalized empire in decline. In this section, I trace the development of Sancho's political thought to its climax on Barataria to show the colonial roots of Barataria's modernity.

Scholars like Luis Corteguera have read Governor Sancho's reign as an overall success and as Cervantes's endorsement of the politics of the "ideal Christian prince" in a world increasingly marked by the Machiavellian influence of "reason of state" (267). After all, Sancho's subjects, who marvel at his inspired judgments, label him "un nuevo Salomón" (II, 891). Corteguera further observes that Sancho, in stark contrast to the conventional economy of early modern governance, exemplifies the disinterested ruler-as-public-servant, that rare political appointee who does not seek personal gain from his position. Despite his "cowardly" reaction to the trick played on him by the duke, in which a feigned invasion threatens to overthrow his government, the squire-turned-governor proves in the end that he has "acted heroically" by "rising above his humble birth and lack of education and experience to deliver justice to his subjects" (Corteguera 267).

Because his argument depends on the figure of the moral prince, Corteguera privileges Governor Sancho's role as judge but is less inclined to acknowledge his administrative successes. I have already discussed the squire's rounds aimed at cleaning up the ínsula's "holgazanes," but not his appointment of an "alguacil de pobres" to address the economic problems of his population or varied laws he enacts (II, 946)-all modeled, according to Francisco Rico, on the laws of Cervantes's Spain (II, 946n34). There is little reason here to dismiss these programs as arbitrios worthy of ridicule (Corteguera 266), for Sancho's own subjects maintain his code of laws long after his brief reign comes to an end under the name "Las constituciones del gran gobernador Sancho Panza" (II, 946). After all, as we have seen, some of the arbitristas were on the right track. Sancho's actions as governor, then, represent a relatively heterogeneous constellation of interdependent practices that do not quite fit into a single political program.

Corteguera is right to read Sancho's government as a success. What he does not explain, however, is the reason for the squire's political coming of age. By the time he becomes governor, Sancho has wandered through over 900 pages of (mis)adventures, voicing his self-interested outlook on the world at practically every step. How could this greedy peasant transform himself into a ruler worthy of the title of "un nuevo Salomón"? The answer, I think, has less to do with the trope of "natural reason" and pastoral enlightenment (Corteguera 263-67; cf. Maravall 197-266) than with the pervasive discourses of colonialism, of a transatlantic-or better yet, globalized-administration of power, which are noticeably absent from Corteguera's analysis. Sancho's political maturity on the concretely colonial and American spatiality of the ínsula is directly tied to an evolving political trajectory that must first pass through imagined African, and later Caribbean, domains. His trajectory, from Africa to the Americas, retraces the steps of early Iberian expansion. The modernity of Barataria's politics, then, is located less in what some have characterized as Cervantes's rejection of imperialism than in a systematization of colonial relations that situates an unproductive, exploitative colonialism (modeled on the Portuguese presence in Africa) in an abusive, but distant, past.²⁰ Here I am building on what Mary Louise Pratt has called the discursive "strategies of innocence" that allowed colonizers to differentiate their own modern and enlightened techniques of colonialism from the "older imperial rhetorics of conquest associated with" a different time (7).²¹ By the time Sancho retires his post, he has repudiated the wrongs of this obsolete colonialism while actualizing not a set of concrete "modos de gobierno" but a set of proper relations to regulate metropole-colony interactions.

In this sense, Sancho is most usefully juxtaposed not with San Isidro (Corteguera 267), but with a Hernán Cortés or, better yet, a Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who more closely approximates the squire's social status. For such subaltern Spaniards-indeed, like Cervantes himself-the Americas represented the possibility of social advancement.²² My reading thus builds on Wilson's suggestion that, by exploring "the mad knight's confessed desire to be a conquering hero," Don Quijote himself might be usefully read as a conquistador (Wilson, "Cervantes and the New World" 218). The answer to Spain's crisis, for Cervantes, must be learned in those "laboratories of modernity" that made up the European colonies.

While I have focused the majority of my analysis on the second part of Don Quijote, Sancho's references to the ínsula and to gobierno-words so often juxtaposed over the course of the novel that they come to infuse each other with their respective semantic meanings (Pinet 183)-appear throughout. His very first speech in Part I is an explicit reminder of the promise of an ínsula with which the knight had lured him into service, and he confidently concludes that "yo la sabré gobernar, por grande que sea" (I, 74). But this confidence appears to the reader as misplaced, if not completely absurd, since more often than not Sancho ends up playing the fool (if not the self-interested glutton).

Sancho's first concrete reflections on the possibility of rule, then, are right in character. Tricked into believing that Dorotea is actually the Princess Micomicona, an endangered member of the Ethiopian nobility, Don Quijote and Sancho set off to avenge the loss of her kingdom at the hands of an evil giant. En route, the squire begins to imagine the rewards for completing such a quest, including the possibility that his master will end up marrying the princess and becoming king-and perhaps acquiring a post as governor for his squire. As he visualizes the gift, however, Sancho begins to worry that his vassals will be black. But not for long:

¿Qué se me da a mí que mis vasallos sean negros? ¿Habrá más que cargar con ellos y traerlos a España, donde los podré vender y adonde me los pagarán de contado, de cuyo dinero podré comprar algún título o algún oficio con que vivir descansado todos los días de mi vida? ¡No, sino dormíos, y no tengáis ingenio ni habilidad para disponer de las cosas y para vender treinta o diez mil vasallos en dácame esas pajas! Por Dios que los he de volar, chico con grande, o como pudiere, y que, por negros que sean, los he de volver blancos o amarillos.

(I, 295-96)

Far from a theory of government, Sancho's slave-trading fantasy articulates an abdication of rule fueled by tangible greed. Desire pushes him to imagine selling off his vassals to purchase an empty title of nobility and a comfortable life without work-precisely the life of the "holgazanes" that he will later round up and reform on Barataria. "Sancho negrero," embodying a model of colonialism based on the Portuguese slave trade, serves as a counterpoint to what I am reading as the colonial politics of the inspired governor-judge of the ínsula Barataria. Although the passage contains no direct reference to the Portuguese, the implication would have been clear to a seventeenth-century reader. After all, it was the Portuguese who continued to maintain the colonies established in the early fifteenth century on the west coast of Africa. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which gave Spain control of the majority of the American territory, granted Portugal control of Africa in return. Even after Spain and Portugal were united in 1580, Portuguese traders maintained control of the slave trade and in 1595 received specialized asientos (monopolies) to carry and sell African slaves in the Iberian peninsula and the Americas. Trade increased rapidly after 1580 and peaked around 1614-1615, profoundly marking the world in which Cervantes was writing the Quijote (Redondo 371-73).

For Sancho, then, the African slave trade, modeled on Portuguese colonialism, represents the first possibility of rule, one of the "modos de gobierno" that circulates throughout the novel. For Vitoria, Portugal's strategy of colonial governance in "their India" served as a point of comparison with Spanish colonialism in the Americas. In a letter to Fray Bernardino de Vique, written most likely in 1546, Vitoria begins by noting no objection to the slave trade in general. "It suffices that a man is a slave in fact or in law," he declares, "and I shall buy him without a qualm" (334). Although lawful trade, then, is legitimate, certain slaving practices are not. Vitoria calls the use of trinkets to lure Africans out of hiding and capture them, for example, a "cowardly ruse" and unjustifiable (334).²³ For Vitoria, then, there are two worlds of the slave trade: a legitimate one, within the law, and an illegitimate one, outside it.²⁴ About thirty years later, Tomás de Mercado would present these two possibilities in an even more striking comparison:

La primera, que la venta y compra de negros es de suyo lícita y justa. La segunda, que supuesta la forma que en ello hay, y aun la realidad de verdad que pasa, es pecado mortal, y viven en mal estado, y gran peligro los mercaderes de gradas que tratan en sacar negros de Cabo Verde. La razón es estar este trato tan infamado, y ser pública voz que a muchos dellos se les hace fuerza y violencia.

(qtd. in Redondo 379)

It is clear that Sancho's proposal falls into the latter category. Aside from the fact that his actions would violate the Portuguese monopoly on the slave trade, Vitoria and Mercado suggest that "fuerza y violencia" represent illegitimate means. Sancho, then, would have no right to sell his vassals at all. His insatiable greed mirrors that of the Portuguese traders who employ such illegitimate tactics. In addition, by linking the fantasy of a life without work to Portuguese colonialism, Cervantes adds a critique of productivity to that of legality. The slave trade, conceived of as a purely extractive operation, recalls the original formulation of the Spanish presence in the Americas that also appears in Vitoria's rereading of res nullius, focused obsessively on stripping the land of precious metals. Where colonial extraction rules, there is a colonial difference in which metropole and colony exist as ontologically distinct spaces, the former as the seat of civilization and the latter as little more than a source of raw materials. And where these materials are human beings, this model even goes against the conquistador's slogan: conquistar es poblar. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century and in the context of crisis, arbitristas like Cellorigo and Gutiérrez de los Ríos, who sought to change the social value of productive labor, found this model less and less tenable. Cervantes, it seems, agreed.

There is one more link in the chain of Sancho's political evolution that bridges the Atlantic gap between Africa and the Americas. Cervantes carefully plots the squire's transition from immoral greed to just, capable governance on a path routed, even before the ínsula appears, through the colonial Americas. Faced with the task of whipping himself in order, as the duke and duchess explain, to break Dulcinea's enchantment, Sancho declares that his will is "tan ajena de ello [azotarme] como de volverme cacique" (II, 827), utilizing a taíno term for ruler that the Spanish had exported to the rest of the American territories. A feeble excuse, in any case, for Don Quijote and the duke eventually convince him to fulfill his squirely duty. But Sancho's claim also rings false because, from the moment he speaks his first words in the novel on, we know that in fact his goal is precisely to become a ruler-and, even more precisely, the (colonial) ruler of an island, as implied in the word's Caribbean etymology. As the Diccionario de autoridades (1729) suggests, "parece lo tomaron de las Islas de Barlovento, que fueron las primeras que se conquistaron" (38). Finally, Sancho's terminology betrays a surprising familiarity with the politics of Spanish governance in the Americas. While the Spanish Crown relied on indigenous officials to tap into tribute networks and maintain convenient social hierarchies, the latter were nevertheless subjects of the Crown and as such subordinated to the Spanish authorities. Between the African slave trade and Barataria, Sancho's unwillingness to acknowledge the applicability of the term cacique evokes a peninsular subject displaced to the colonies but ready to rule. As such, he is cognizant of, and hostile toward, the potential threat to his authority posed by the "native" competition.

In Sancho's reign on Barataria, Vitoria's formulation of legitimate and illegitimate colonialisms becomes both a rejection of a conveniently "other" colonial method as well as a "strategy of innocence" that points toward a modern politics of empire. While the Portuguese version of Sancho's fantasy is based on an illegitimate economics of slavery, the Spanish version traces a long, vernacular genealogy of juridical support in the form of res nullius. Cervantes's staging of Spanish colonialism on the ínsula Barataria, which boasts a bounded but deterritorialized space rendered coherent through the practices of possession, on one hand, and of governance, on the other, represents an ideal site for reimagining (colonial) politics, in such a way as to make their coloniality almost invisible-much like the ínsula itself. The politics of Barataria conceptually bridge the geographical and social gaps between metropolis and colony by acknowledging their mutual interdependence-colonial governance, he shows, cannot be seen as separate from governance at home. It recalls, once again, Ricote's observation that despite evidence to the contrary, Barataria is located firmly (though mistily) on the Spanish mainland. Read from the spatial perspective of insularity, Sancho's political evolution serves as a model for a modern colonialism that judges governance not so much as a set of universal laws waiting to be uncovered, but by its relational character within a political network. The specifics matter less than the general-a subtle yet radical attempt to overcome colonial difference within the logic of the colonial project. This is the modernity of the brand new republic that Quijote and his friends rhetorically pull from the forge at the beginning of Part II.

I have tried to show the value of reading the Barataria episode from a transatlantic perspective rooted in imaginaries of insularity. This insularity performs a number of simultaneous functions. It legitimizes possession, while generating a sovereign space for political experimentation. But most importantly it eats away at imaginaries of difference-geographical, political, and human-that separate the New World from the Old as much as, if not more than, the Atlantic. Writing from the metropolis, Cervantes, like many of his contemporaries, realized that the key to Spain's recovery lay somehow, somewhere in the New World. As such, the political innovation-indeed the very modernity-of Barataria resides, like the spatiality of the ínsula, in the episode's ambiguity. While Sancho's government contains a multiplicity of political models, it is Barataria's insularity that provides the key for reforming a transatlantic system in crisis.