A viceroyalty was an entity headed by a viceroy. It dates back to the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century.
In the scope of the Portuguese Empire, the term "Viceroyalty of Brazil" is also occasionally used to designate the colonial State of Brazil, in the historic period while its governors had the title of "Viceroy". Some of the governors of Portuguese India were also called "Viceroy".
The viceroyalty (Spanish; Castilian: virreinato) was a local, political, social, and administrative institution, created by the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth century, for ruling its overseas territories.[1]
The administration over the vast territories of the Spanish Empire was carried out by viceroys, who became governors of an area, which was considered not as a colony but as a province of the empire, with the same rights as any other province in Peninsular Spain.[2]
| Viceroyalty of Aragon | Zaragoza | 1517–1707 | Integrated into the Kingdom of Spain | |
| Viceroyalty of Catalonia | Barcelona | 1520–1716 | Integrated into the Kingdom of Spain | |
| Viceroyalty of Galicia | Santiago de Compostela | 1486–? | Integrated into the Kingdom of Spain | |
| Viceroyalty of Majorca | Palma de Majorca | 1520–1715 | Integrated into the Kingdom of Spain | |
| Viceroyalty of Naples | Naples | 1504–1707 | Ceded to Austria | |
| Viceroyalty of Navarre | Pamplona | 1512–1841 | Integrated into the Kingdom of Spain | |
| Viceroyalty of Portugal | Lisbon | 1580–1640 | Achieved independence as Portugal | |
| Viceroyalty of Sardinia | Cagliari | 1417–1714 | Ceded to Austria | |
| 1717–1720 | Ceded to Savoy | |||
| Viceroyalty of Sicily | Palermo | 1415–1713 | Ceded to Savoy | |
| Viceroyalty of Valencia | Valencia | 1520–1707 | Integrated into the Kingdom of Spain |
| Viceroyalty of New Granada | Santa Fe de Bogotá | 1717–1723 | Integrated into Peru | |
| 1739–1810 | Achieved independence as New Granada | |||
| 1815–1822 | Achieved independence as Colombia | |||
| Viceroyalty of New Spain | Mexico City | 1535–1821 | Achieved independence as Mexico | |
| Viceroyalty of Peru | Lima | 1542–1824 | Achieved independence as Peru | |
| Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata | Buenos Aires | 1776–1810 | Achieved independence as Argentina | |
| Viceroyalty of the Indies | Santo Domingo | 1492–1535 | Became the Viceroyalty of New Spain |
According to the lawyer Fernando de Trazegnies, the status of the Viceroyalties was like that of a Kingdom among the Kingdoms of the Indies, and that the fact that legal Pluralism was practiced in Derecho Indiano would be sufficient proof that the Crown did not seek to practice a Exploitative colonialism (where local institutions, which protect the socioeconomic rights of the Vassal people, are ignored, under the excuse of the Right of Conquest), if not political integration into the Hispanic Monarchy in the same plural way that had already been done with the rest of its territories in Europe, based on the characteristic Fueros of the traditional and composite Monarchy that maintained the regional laws of each nation integrated into the Spanish Monarchy (and that was even practiced within peninsular Spain after the Reconquista, such as the Fueros of Aragón or the Fueros of Navarra). This would be evidenced by the creation of the República de Indios in which the political traditions of indigenous customary law would remain alive as a state within the several states that made up the Composite Monarchy, or the desire of the Spanish conquistadors to make pacts with the Natural Lords of the new lands (indigenous nobility and chiefs) to legitimize the conquest in natural law and integrate them into the seigneurial system, respecting the sovereignty of the natives and their ethnic lordships, which could not be deprived of their rights and was only possible its annexation to the Spanish Empire through alliance pacts (whose conditions of such pacts had to include the part of the indigenous sovereign, protector of the common Indian).[3] At the same time, the Spanish Empire itself and the Council of the Indies did not perceive the American Viceroyalties as possessions analogous to the Factories or administrative Colonies, in the style of other empires with a more Mercantilist behavior towards the Natives of their non-European possessions, but rather perceived the Viceroyalties as overseas Provinces, with rights equivalent in hierarchy to those of the rest of the provinces of the Crown of Castile (according to the Laws of the Indies), of which they were an integral part.[4] [5] Even the word colony would not have been used in any legal document of the Spanish Monarchy with respect to the Indies until the 17th century, and after the arrival of the Bourbons it would be used in reference to its classic etymological sense of human settlements established in new territories, and not in the modern sense with connotations of economic exploitation.[6]
That would be reaffirmed in the late empire by official statements of the Supreme Central Junta (legal representative of occupied Spain in the middle of the Peninsular War).[7] Such statements would not have been questioned by American representatives in the Cortes of Cádiz, such as the Peruvian Vicente Morales Duárez.[8] However, there would still be historiographical debates in this regard, among those (the nationalist or colonialist school) who say that this was only De jure positions on paper, and not a De facto reality in social dynamics (the revisionist school). Authors such as Annick Lempérière consider that the “colonial” concept in Hispanic reality would have been an anachronistic concept that serves mostly an ideological use by historians (wanting to develop an idyllic vision of Spanish-American Independence) rather than to make a scientific description of the history of the Spanish empire, going so far as to question its apparent “objective” usefulness that modern historiography gave to the colonial concept to relate it to the causes of the Spanish-American Wars of Independence (that is, that there is an artificial consensus that American social formations, the Reinos de Indias and it's viceroyalties, have been institutionally formed for their economic exploitation and dependence on the metropolis, instead of being an integral part of the Empire like any extension of the Crown, just like its European dominions).[9]
After Canada (1867), Australia (1901) and New Zealand (1907) became dominions, the governor-general representing the monarch of the British Empire had the status of viceroy.