Bureaucratization of the Colonial Process

I am a fan of David Graeber, who was already very influential in the discipline of economic anthropology, but whose writings are now beginning to reach a larger audience. As a master student I devoured his analyses of gift exchange in “Toward an Anthropology of Value” and as a PhD student the engaging writing of his popular breakthrough book, “Debt: The first 5000 years”, inspired me to attempt to write my thesis in a less technical, more broadly appealing style.

As a small head’s up for any prospective reader: Graeber’s writing is highly political and it is safe to say that his ideological stance is radically left.

His new book consists of four essays, which revolve around an annoyance all of us are faced with:  bureaucracy. Graeber seeks to uncover and present a critique of how both governmental and corporate regulations, backed up by the three forces of (threat of) violence, technology and economic “rationality”, demand increasing amounts of our time and energy. What’s more, we seem to be less and less resisting of how our lives and societies are dictated by bureaucracy. I do not want to delve too much in the contemporary issues the book brings up, but rather briefly discuss how it sparked me off to consider the role of bureaucracy in the Encounter.

The colonization of the Caribbean by Spanish and other European powers also saw the birth of the first globe (or at least Atlantic)-spanning bureaucracies.There is a great book to be written about this (or likely it has already been written, if you know of such a publication, I’d love to read it). As a blog-sized example of the birth of bureaucracy in the Caribbean, I will zero in on the failing regulatory policies of the Catholic monarchs, Isabella I and Ferdinand II, and other political and religious elites. In particular I want to discuss those policies that were geared towards the well-fare and protection of their new “subjects”, the indigenous people that were already living in the “Indies.”

Atrocities committed by the Spanish in the New World by Johann Theodore de Bry (1614)Indigenous peoples in the Americas were treated extremely harshly under their new, colonial regimes. The total death toll of the New World Encounter was enormous (ranked at 7 in the 100 worst wars and atrocities in the history of humankind). Those who did survive generally were living in very poor conditions and were (treated as) slaves. Presenting a new understanding of the violent transformation of Caribbean indigenous societies and cultures is one of the main goals of NEXUS1492, so I won’t delve too deep into the specifics of this black chapter of global history here.

This is not just a case of “Horrible Histories”, in which everything and everybody in the past was much more nasty than today. Interestingly, the political and religious elite back in Europe seem to have been acutely aware of and worried by the destruction their “colonists” were wreaking on the indigenous populations. If you read royal writs or papal bulls from the period they are often meant to control the hordes of fortune seekers that had descended on the New World. None of these bureaucratic endeavors had an unambiguously positive impact on the treatment of indigenous peoples, and many failed to produce any effect whatsoever.

So, although we know that in practice the colonization of Hispaniola, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands and mainlands was a European-induced demographic, political and cultural catastrophe, the bureaucratization of the treatment of indigenous peoples seems to suggest that European political and religious elites were actively trying to remedy the situation. Their well-intended regulations simply failed to effect any meaningful change.

For a long time I had trouble understanding this bureaucratic failure. Was the Spanish crown ultimately not aware of the situation and considered everything to be mostly fine and dandy in the Indies? Were the promises and threats of the crown ultimately toothless, because it was at the same time dependent on the persons that ran this brutal system? Then I read the following quote in Graeber’s book. In it he goes into the reason why banks and bank officials cannot be successfully sued and tried for any act of fraud, while if an infraction of a contract would be committed by, say, a home owner they are likely to be soon evicted and if they were to resist that face the full force of the law:

“Now on one level, this might just seem like another example of a familiar story: the rich always play by a different set of rules. […] But I think there is something deeper going on here, and it turns on the very nature of bureaucratic systems. Such institutions always create a culture of complicity. It’s not just that some people get to break the rules – it’s that loyalty to the organization is to some degree measured by one’s willingness to pretend this isn’t happening. […] What I am saying is that we are not just looking at a double standard, but a particular kind of double standard typical of bureaucratic systems everywhere. All bureaucracies are to a certain degree utopian, in the sense that they propose an abstract ideal that real human beings can never live up to.”

It is easy to see the double standard in the bureaucracy of the incipient Spanish empire: very few encomenderos or other Spanish elites were taken to court over their trespasses against the indigenous population, at the same time indigenous peoples were punished harshly for minor acts of resistance or, in some cases, even for failing to meet their production targets. I now suspect that the legislation for the colonization project was based in the kind of double-standard, utopian view that Graeber is talking about –  albeit that in this instance “real human beings” could have lived up to the rules, they were simply extremely unlikely to follow these rules for a variety of reasons.

Columbus petitioning Isabel of Castile, MadridBy setting up a bureaucratic system that at least seemed to be protective of the soul and body of indigenous peoples (from the perspectives of those times), the religious and political elite back home could wash their hands in innocence. This allowed them to keep their cut of the profit that resulted from the destruction of the Indies and gave them the possibility to distance themselves from the atrocities that were committed. They were filling their coffers and saving their mortal souls at the same time.

Colonists in the Caribbean were complicit in the sense that they knew that, as long as the crown got its fair share, everything goes. Sometimes new regulations, such as the encomienda, would be used as a novel way to gain authority over indigenous communities. In the case of the encomienda the system was instated so that encomenderos could provide care for indigenous communities and instruct them in the faith, so that their souls would be saved. Some colonists, maybe many of them, would even have believed that they were doing the right thing because they were following rules laid out by the top of the colonial organization.

 I am aware this is a very mono-causal and cynical view of the bureaucratization of the colonization process. Still, this is the insight I got from reading Graeber’s “The Utopia of Rules” that I wanted to share with you.

Do you agree or have a different take on the matter? I would love to hear from you via the NEXUS1492 twitter or my academia.edu account.

By Angus A. A. Mol