Trends and meanings of Hispanic militia legislation: from reformism to the revolutionary era

Abstract

This paper studies the meanings and contexts of the Spanish Crown’s and its emergency governments’ projects implemented in militias both in America and the Peninsula to identify and understand their different sensibilities in times of reform, crisis, revolution and independence. In doing so, the text evaluates successive intentions and modifications, amendments or adjustments of militia regulations of the Spanish Monarchy in the late 18th and early 19th century with the aim of providing a more solid interpretative basis to better understand the foundations of the diversity of armed forces that developed in that period. In particular, those which arose during the independence revolutions, with special attention to their impact on New Spain according to the analysis of regulations appeared in peninsular Spain during the war against Napoleon. This approach offers a problematization of the normative framework that encouraged some of the various impulses of militarization through which the Hispanic world transitioned to a nation-state order. Ultimately, this article highlights the historical implications of the legal differences between Spain and America in the projects of reform or deployment of disciplined provincial militias, urban and rural militias, volunteer corps and national militias. The present study recovers and dialogues with the legal, institutional, military and social historiography devoted to the research of the militia corps and the militarization processes in Spain and America in the 18th and 19th century.