In the past decade, there has been a concerted effort to understand the relationship of the European colonial experience to the conceptual development of the state and international law in the early modern period. This thesis shares in this endeavor, but poses a new question about the relationship of empire to the maturation of the concept of representation, a concept that recent historical literature has shown to have been inextricably linked to the development of the concept of the state in the same period. The latest historians to have written on the subject have acknowledged that representation was first spoken of and exercised in monarchical and ecclesiastical settings, but these writers have not investigated the concept’s articulation within the political practices and theories of empires. This work thus serves to highlight the crucial role the concept played in the building of the Spanish overseas empire.

This dissertation challenges several orthodoxies prevailing around the historical development of the concept of representation from Roman antiquity into early modern political thought. My aim is not just to revise our understanding of the known intellectual pathways of the concept’s transmission, but to firmly demonstrate that the principal language used to talk about political representation through to the seventeenth century was not repraesentatio or its cognates, but rather a distinctly Ciceronian set of terms, which were closely associated with the idea of “bearing persons” in different spheres of public life. The classical expression of those ideas are found in their most influential form in Cicero’s De officiis, where he argued that the particular duty of a magistrate was “to bear the person of the city [se gerere personam civitatis].” Cicero’s language of representation reappeared most conspicuously in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), but, as I show, Augustine and Aquinas first appropriated this vocabulary for their own theories of political representation. I substantiate my argument about the perpetuity of Ciceronian representation by illustrating how, in their apologetics against the conciliarists, the Dominican theologians Juan de Torquemada and Cardinal Cajetan exploited numerous Augustinian locutions about St. Peter bearing the persona ecclesiae, enshrining a device of classical republican ideology in a monarchical theory of papal absolutism. I then map out a new understanding of the place of representation in second-scholastic sources, principally with reference to the work of the Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria, for whom, representation works within a wider set of theoretical preoccupations about human sociability, the origins of civil association, and the government of empire. Vitoria justifies the use of representation in the international sphere on account of the “possible insanity” of the American Indians, taking them collectively as a single juridical person in need of tutela. I illuminate this pattern of use established by Vitoria and continued by his Jesuit successors Francisco Suárez and Luis de Molina through to the Política Indiana (1648) of the Salamantine jurist Juan de Solórzano y Pereira, considering the very practical dimensions of Spanish imperial rule which formed the context of these questions about representation.