"Spanish 'Colonies': A Term Forged in the Hispanic-Anglosphere"

The legal codes of the Spanish Monarchy never employed the term ‘colonias’ (colonies) to refer to its overseas dominions. This absence from the Spanish juridical lexicon had political implications highlighted by the decree of 22 January 1809 which famously stated that the American dominions were neither ‘colonies nor feitorias, but an essential and integral part of the Spanish Monarchy’. The aim of this chapter is not to revive the controversy sparked in the 1940s by Ricardo Levene’s campaign to remove the term ‘colonial’ from Hispanic historiography, but rather to trace the way and establish the extent to which the word ‘colonies’ came to be applied to the Hispanic context through increased entanglement with the British and Irish world. The chapter concentrates on the particular case of Ireland, where the American Revolution had revived protracted disputes about its own ‘colonial’ status and designation, and explores some of the formulations of the Hispanic world produced by Irish commentators between the end of the eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth. It also offers a glimpse into a one-size-fits-all understanding of how global polities operated that was prevalent at the time in Britain and Ireland.