1Early modern empires depended on brutality and coercion, but nevertheless their participants wrote frequently about the consent on which empires were—or might have been—based. European colonizers carried a legal culture of consent with them and applied it when they sought to trade and settle around the globe. They argued, frequently, that the colonized agreed to their presence, control, and predominance. At the same time, subjects of European empires also used consent, both in indigenous social relations and in their transcultural interactions with colonizers. They, too, suggested that their consent was vital to empire. Consent, then, was a significant concept in this period, and one that requires further study if we are to comprehend what people meant by it at the time and how they could look for consent where violence and coercion were present.

2Indeed, today the layman’s understanding is that coercion should invalidate consent, and therefore consent to premodern empires would seem impossible. Further, consent is also now frequently held to be individual, autonomous, informed, well evidenced, and mutually beneficial to all involved parties. If these characteristics also obtained in the past, it is at best unsettling to see consent so pervasive in the source base of the history of empire. All of the people in the sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Spanish and Portuguese empires under study by the contributors to this dossier, for instance, knew that these empires were projects of European aggression and expropriation. Many of them understood empire to be based on the consent of just a few individuals who were taken to stand for a huge collective, in contexts where the colonized could not possibly be well informed, with no clear provision of evidence that would transcend the cultural differences involved, and with disparate outcomes through which the imperial agents often materially benefitted far more than those who they presumed to have agreed to join their empires.

4The texts of this dossier study consent to empire by breaking the rather amorphous and general concept down into component parts. The authors query the meaning of consent in processes of pacification, tribute, labor, trade, participation in imperial administration, and conversion to Christianity. They therefore broaden the scope of historicizing consent from the current state of the literature, which focuses on treaty making. Some colonizers—missionaries, especially—prioritized conversion above all else. Others were intent upon the establishment of trading or tributary relations and treated conversion as an equal or secondary concern. Europeans searched for or presumed consent in their imperial subjects both prospectively and retrospectively, as a tool of building empire as well as a framework for legitimizing and justifying what they had built.

5Ângela Barreto Xavier and Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto agree that because the Portuguese held only a weak presence in Asia in the sixteenth century, they sought consent prospectively from local elites as a matter of strategic necessity. Tamar Herzog and Caroline Cunill, in their examinations of the Spanish American empire, emphasize a retrospective importance to consent discourse in imperial relationships where the balance of power shifted more decisively toward Spaniards, in the several generations after initial contact. However, in both the Spanish-American and Portuguese-Asian contexts, Europeans did not hold a unified view that subject populations could consent to empire in coercive scenarios. Minority voices at the time took exception to this principle and demanded (generally in vain) that consent be free and informed. While colonizers were busy discussing consent, the diverse people who became subjects of Portuguese and Spanish imperial power spoke, wrote, and acted out their own giving and refusal of consent in ways that attempted to shape their worlds. Within the enforced nature of empire, the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica and Asia took consent as a category they could use to their own advantage when either accepting that they must now operate within imperial structures, or attempting to limit imperial officials’ expanding control through smaller concessions.

6The politics of consent in early modern empire did not reside primarily in a struggle over definitions of freedom and unfreedom. Interestingly, in instances where all parties knew that consent and coercion were operating in constitutive (as opposed to incompatible) modes, they referred to the importance of free will. Indeed, both Xavier and Cunill note the regular invocation of free will and voluntariness in documents written by indigenous people describing their loyalty, tribute, or belonging in European empires. This vocabulary could be taken to signify something akin to submission—but this submission was geared to strengthening native access to material resources as well as to spiritual salvation. However, even when consent was used to place checks on what colonizers could do, indigenous strategies of invoking consent in their dealings with the Spanish and Portuguese had the (paradoxical) effect of integrating them further into the Catholic church or the imperial bureaucracies and legal systems they had sought to check. The Spaniards, indigenous Mesoamerican populations, Portuguese, Goans, and other Asian peoples under Portuguese colonial rule under study here spoke past one another on the matter of consent to empire. From this din, the European notion of consent as open to presumption and compatible with coercion came out as dominant. In terms of scale, consent to one arrangement came to imply, at least in European eyes, consent to empire as a whole.

7The authors’ methods of translation, juridical inquiry, comparison, and chronology should be useful to further research. Translation is one general method that two of the contributors have found essential: Cunill and Xavier employ this skill with a variety of techniques, including reading across different genres of writing for how consent vocabulary shifted depending on a document’s form and whether the vocabulary had stable resonances. They also place this vocabulary within social and cultural contexts to discover its likely meaning to contemporaries. A juridically informed approach to the sources proves vital to both Herzog and Pinto, each of whom employ their knowledge of early modern just war theory to make Spanish and Portuguese invocations of consent clearer. Reading across the pieces encourages comparison, another method that has potential for further application. The story of consent as we see it from the Spanish and Portuguese language sources is not simply overturned or rejected by the scholarship based on Maya Yucatan and Sanskrit, or, as Pinto briefly touches on, Arabic. Instead, it has been surprising to find that all parties to empire had reasons to look to the resource of consent to serve their purposes. That in the ultimate analysis they did so at their peril is made obvious by the sensitive readings of these authors. Here, then, is the final method that anyone looking to historicize consent will need: to track change over time.

8The history of empire offers a crucial field of observation for historicizing consent. The stark injustices of imperial projects put scholars of consent into a position of inquiry from a starting point of confusion or even incomprehension. Consent in empire seems oxymoronic. Yet its repetitive appearance in the records means that contemporaries found the concept to be useable: not just the Europeans who wished to paint a picture of their own legitimacy, clemency, and diplomatic tactics, but also to a certain extent the indigenous people exposed to such ambitions. Contextualizing the meanings of consent in these ways allows us insight into previously opaque sources and better reveals the logic and patterns of imperial power relations.