I

Of the five major European powers to establish large-scale and enduring settlements on the American mainland – Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England – the English were relative latecomers. Although there are more similarities between them and the other European colonial powers than has sometimes been supposed, in many respects both the legal character and the administration of their colonies were unusual. The overseas possessions of the Spanish, despite early incorporation into the Crown of Castile, were legally identified as separate kingdoms – the reinos de Indias – governed by a separate body of legislation (codified in 1680) and administered by a royal council whose functions were similar to those of the councils that administered the European regions of the Monarchy: Italy, Flanders, and Castile itself. As the Milanese jurist Camillo Borello, looking at the Monarchy from the view of one of its most autonomous dependencies, remarked, “the kingdoms have to be ruled and governed as if the king who holds them all were only the king of each one of them”. The Spanish possessions were thus a separate but legally incorporated part of a single imperium, embodied in the person of the monarch – what has often been referred to as a “composite monarchy”. The Portuguese overseas dependencies were, with the exception of Brazil, trading stations (feitorias) not dissimilar to the factories the English later established in Asia and were under the direct control of the Crown. The French kings looked on New France – what would later become Canada – as part of the royal demesne, but, unlike their English neighbors, the French settlers were governed according to the body of local administrative law, the Coutume de Paris, which prevailed in most of northern France, a situation that would determine the ideological shape of the empire until the collapse of the monarchy itself.