Prohibited journeys: power, mobility and resistance in early-modern Spain and Spanish America

Abstract

This article explores the Spanish Crown’s increasing regulations on mobility and their attempts to inspect and classify transatlantic travellers, highlighting both top-down and bottom-up expressions of power. It explores the efforts of early modern power to control movement, while tracing their shortcomings and limitations, as well as the means through which some travellers reclaimed power and their freedom to move. The article offers an overview of the Crown’s initial efforts to control movement, using historical accounts to enhance our understanding of the complex interaction between mobility and power, and how they shaped each other. By considering public policies, testimonies from local authorities, and freedom litigation suits, the article traces how power was resisted and balanced through individual responses and legal mechanisms, contributing to more nuanced and interdisciplinary views of power dynamics, the free movement of people, and global mobility studies. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, it proposes tracing earlier stages of this diffused form of power, shedding new light on mobility as a governing mechanism and as an amalgam of experiences that reconfigure power relations and convey stories of resistance.