Censuses and imperial proto-demography in 18th century Spanish America: early racialization or historiographical bias?

This contribution is a reflection on the processes of racialisation of historical thinking about past societies and the biases it entails. In the first part, through a comparison between Ptolemaic Egypt and Iberian America, it emphasises the importance of the contextual meaning, occurrences and places of enunciation of the terms that emerge from the historical documentation. The notions of race, casta and calidad are thus related to specific forms of socialisation and social identification, highlighting the fundamental importance of the contextual synchronic relationship in the making of any identitary process, wich calls for an analysis in terms of relationships rather than statuses. The contemporary category of race therefore appears to be of little use. These theoretical questions make it possible to approach the second part, devoted to the more specific case of the censuses of Spanish America in the eighteenth century. Fomented for the purpose of defending the empire, and with a global aim, these censuses came up against a local reading of the hierarchy of the inhabitants of the Indies. Like the fragmented nature of the American territories of the Crown of Castile, which defined specific natural and demographic contexts, each region put forward its own forms of identification and personal designation. Everywhere, these forms of identitary assignment always expressed in a singular way phenotype/social quality/cultural inscription according to modalities that were very little normed and often in competition with other hierarchical logics. All this reveals the great space between self-identification and social perception, relative and changing aspects by definition, since they included many variables, and constituted an arena of negotiations and confrontations whose results could only be local.