• 1 What happened in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in both Spain and Spanish America was (...)

2Because status depended on observing conduct during multiple years and required interpreting a host of different cues, it involved elaborated calculations, in which some factors could lead to one conclusion and others to the contrary. As these debates persisted over time, the limits between one status and the other often proved flexible, the same individuals and families meeting with a different response according to how their behavior had changed, but also according to how society judged it, who was the decision maker, and what were the concrete circumstances and interests at stake. Producing a chaotic situation, in which individuals could be classified differently, or pass from one status to the next, with foreigners becoming natives and natives losing their condition as such, and the same happening with citizens, these practices came under attack in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nonetheless, attempts to adopt a new method that would detach local citizenship from Spanishnness, that would be easier to apply, or that would produce permanent classifications, mainly failed. Indeed, Old Regime interpretations persisted throughout most of the nineteenth century in the diverse Spanish American states and, in Spain, until the mid-twentieth century.1 Thus, although loyalty to the monarch and the Catholic church were essential characteristics of Spaniards on both sides of the ocean, neither of these conditions was sufficient to transform individuals into members. Instead, the Spanish community was imagined as the aggregate of multiple local communities, in which individuals and families integrated as citizens (vecinos) in order to be recognized, when such a recognition was necessary or desired, also as Spaniards.

• 2 On processes of identification, see Brubaker and Cooper (2000).

3At the time, studies of early modern citizenship in Europe were divided mostly into works that sustained the existence of two models for citizenship, identified as ius soli and ius sanguinis (Brubaker 1992; Lefebvre-Teillard 1993), that surveyed legal and intellectual debates regarding citizenship (Riesenberg 1992; Álvarez y Valdés 1992; Benoehr 1982), that included detailed case studies (Bizzari 1916; Zannini 1993; Bellavitis 1995; Ventura 1995) or that observed the political uses of citizenship by emerging states (Sahlins 1989; Sahlins 2004). Though I found many of these works extremely informative, even inspiring, as a legal historian, trained to believe that law formed and informed our daily lives and our most quotidian activities in ways we do not always acknowledge, I was unsatisfied by these responses. Many scholars either observed the theory, or the practice, but there was hardly any dialogue between “bottom up” and “top down” analysis. Neither was there an interest in processes of identification, that is, in the particular circumstances, in which identification was required, including the actors, the sites, the times, the occasions, and the procedures, in which the question who was who was asked and answered.2

• 3 These questions continue to haunt me: I found the same correspondence between how contemporaries (...)

8Historically, I realized that there was a larger story out there that one could tell. That story would combine questions of local citizenship with the emergence of states, showing that states could be constructed by aggregating municipalities and their citizens, rather than by replacing them, as the usual interpretation held. It would tie immigration and naturalization more closely with citizenship, demonstrating that the same processes that excluded individuals and communities were also responsible for identifying members. In Spain, at least, community members were often imagined as permanent and loyal residents and in fact were distinguished not so much from those of foreign origin but from those who were – according to the standards of the period – far too mobile and therefore considered untrustworthy. The expansion of communities to new territories in both Europe and Overseas complicated these dynamics but did not fundamentally alter their nature. Indeed, eventually, in both Europe and Overseas discourses other than citizenship would be elaborated and used, for example, race, to exclude those who were integrated yet rejected. The substantial similarities between what individuals and communities argued, and what jurists explained, was the most perplexing of my findings. How could illiterate peasants who defended their rights (or excluded others) use categories and images so similar to what jurists described? Were juridical categories popularized to such a degree, or perhaps jurists mainly observed and theorized the practices already followed around them? And how to explain, despite local variations, the substantial similarities in practices and beliefs across very wide territories?3 What do we still need to know about early modern law that could account for this mystery?

• 4 According to Google Scholar, consulted on September 17, 2020, the book in its various reiteration (...)
• 5 Particularly striking, for example, are several of the contributions to Ciaramitaro and Puente Br (...)

10Much of what I had proposed was adopted by a plurality of scholars of early modern Spain and Spanish America.4 It is now habitual among these scholars to pay attention to both vecindad and naturaleza, inquire on the relations between them, and interpret their meaning and practice in ways similar to what I had described. Scholars use these findings as guidelines that can explain a variety of situations, but many also turn to them in order to ask quintessential questions regarding the importance of local communities and civic belonging in the Hispanic world. Indeed, what I suggested became so naturalized that some present it as either obvious, or as of their own making.5

• 6 Sahlins (2005, 466) admits “important parallels” between the Spanish situation and the late medie (...)

11Over the years, I was particularly happy to find out that my work was also useful to a variety of scholars in other fields. Historians of the Jewish experience found it valuable (Studnicki-Gizbert 2007, 45, 193; Lyon-Caen 2014, 123). So did historians of the Netherlands, who were particularly sympathetic to the centrality of municipal citizenship in my analysis of the early modern state (Prak 2018, 308, 310). Several historians of France followed suit, though while some sought to distinguish the Spanish from the French experience, others found them surprisingly similar (Sahlins 2004, 341, 345, 365, 352; Sonkajärvi 2008).6 My analysis, so deeply inspired by the writing of Italian colleagues, ended up informing many of them in return, as they inquired on the relations between different levels of citizenship and identity (Crivelli 2017, 28). The scholarship on the English empire followed suit, with some historians affirming that England was different, while others contending that it was not (Musselwhite 2020, 36-37; Weiss Muller 2017; Herzog 2018). Also shedding lights on debates on citizenship in nineteenth-century California, by 2016 and 2018, Defining Nations was cited as demonstrating that several models for citizenship operated in Europe or as showing that there are alternative perspectives that one could employ for analyzing the relations between citizenship and empire in Europe and beyond (Cisneros 2009, 44-45, 77-78; Cooper 2016, 12; Cooper 2018, 43-45, 47-48, 51, 163-165; Terrasa-Lozano 2009, 639, 648). More recently, my work had been instrumental in dreaming of another world, or at least another Europe, in which municipal rather than state loyalties and citizenship would carry the day (Prak 2018).

• 7 This question comes up more clearly in my later work, for example, Herzog (2015, 249-253).

14Parting from what I had affirmed, some scholars proposed new questions, which I had not anticipated. For example, while I studied how certain non-citizens and non-natives became members, these scholars asked what happened with non-members who insisted on remaining external to the community. How did these individuals and families go about maintaining their status as permanent foreigners despite their integration (Bartolomei and Lloret 2021)? Alessandro Buono (2020) suggested that we could apply my methdological proposals also to membership in family units, which would thereafter be imagined not as the natural result of biological ties but as complex social conglomerates, where adhesion also depended on performance. Matching with interests I had developed much later, the issue whether the criteria I suggested for Spain could also operate in Portugal was equally discussed (Terrasa-Lozano 2012; Xavier 2015; Herzog 2015). Was there (or should there be) an Iberian history, or must Spain and Portugal (or, as my Portuguese friends would rightly say, Portugal and Spain) be always studied separately?7

• 8 In her later work (Salvatto and Carzolio 2015, 678-683), Carzolio extensively uses Defining Natio (...)

15Not all agreed with my conclusions. In an article that was elaborated contemporaneously to my own work but published a year earlier, María Inés Carzolio suggested that vassalage to a king was much more important in the early modern world than I had given it credit and indeed was the basic element constituting natives (Carzolio 2002, 640, 649-650, 652-653).8 On his part, Antonio Terrasa-Lozano (2012) made the observation that my analysis did not apply to nobles, for whom the logic of membership in municipal and kingdom communities was somewhat distinct. Some, who misread my exploration of the tools social members could use to integrate or reject others as indicating to particular conclusions, criticized me for arguing that Afro-Spaniards could be marginalized by demonstrating that they sometimes were not (Ireton 2017, 589). To reconcile this disparity, Ireton compared what I had said in 2003 to what I had written in 2012, concluding that I suggested that the status of these persons was perhaps distinct on each side of the Ocean. I was particularly puzzled by those who, familiar with my work, nonetheless pointed out that “little attention has been paid… to the term ‘natural’ and ‘naturality’... in spite of their importance,” who suggested that, when attention was paid to these categories, “analysis has been conducted in a way that takes for granted the fact that everyone clearly knows their meaning”, and who therefore heralded the need to undertake the task “to examine what ‘naturality’ actually was” (Pérez Sarrión 2011, 67-68). Though these affirmations were perplexing, they also confirmed that my attempts to reach Spanish historians has succeeded only partially as a recent article, which attributes to me the affirmation I never made that urban citizenship implied no political rights, and which continues to suggest that the local and the national were at odds, demonstrates (Sánchez León 2020, 23).

• 9 Regretfully, I could not find a copy of this text.
• 10 Ciaramitaro and Puente Brunke (2017, 11, 13-14), comparing Herzog (2003) with what I had said in (...)
• 11 Delgadillo Núñez (2018, 1878) allegedly uses my work to criticize, I gather, both me and Joanne R (...)

16But, regardless of whether people agreed with me or not, as I was preparing this text, I realized that in the process of engaging with my work, some scholars transformed it dramatically. According to one, I invented a theory that could thereafter be named after me (“the Herzog Theory”) (Ciaramitaro forthcoming).9 According to another, I belong to a school with followers (together with Simona Cerutti – hurray!) (Sahlins 2009, 1418). Interestingly, there were suggestions that I had changed my mind over the years. As told by a reader, whereby originally, I had thought that one was either a foreigner or a native, thereafter I came to describe these conditions as a continuum, with a plurality of indeterminate situations between these two extremes.10 In other words, my various pieces could be read together and analyzed for both agreements and inconsistencies and the particular words I employed could be used to explain and interpret my ideas. For example, what was the meaning of the term “juridical situations” that I invoked in an article but not in the book? Did I refer to legal rules (disposición normativa) or did I seek to explain that, although by law, only two categories existed, the complete native and the complete foreigner, the reality was much murkier therefore making the decision who belonged in which category so difficult and, on occasions, so arbitrary? In other words, when I spoke about “juridical situations”, was I speaking about how to apply conceptual distinctions to reality, or was I making a claim, as understood by this author, for subjective identities that would make the conditions for membership less “concrete”? Somewhat similarly, could my affirmations regarding the general rule (but not the exceptions) be transformed into weapons to criticize me, or others who allegedly followed me?11

• 12 “It is said that there are 144 customs in France that have the power of law: these laws are almos (...)

18Where do we go from here? As may be clear from my own trajectory, I will not be the one going. I tend to change questions, geographical allegiances, and periods, almost as often as Voltaire (1694-1778) once remarked you changed laws as you rode through the territory of early modern France (as often as you changed horses).12 But I do hope others will take my work elsewhere. There are so many questions that remain unanswered, so many things we still do not know, so much that needs explaining.