António Manuel Hespanha (1945-2019)

Our friend, colleague, and teacher António Manuel Hespanha, Portugal's foremost historian of law and administration and a major influence on the reconceptualization of Brazilian colonial history and of the history of the Portuguese empire in general, passed away on July 1, 2019, after a long struggle with colon cancer. Renowned not only for the volume and quality of his publications but also for his personal kindness and generosity to students and colleagues, his scholarship greatly influenced the post–António de Oliveira Salazar generation of historians in his own country as well as the broader scholarly communities of Europe and Brazil. His work should be of interest to anyone interested in government, law, and society in the ancien régime, and especially to those interested in the Lusophone and Hispanic monarchies and their empires.Shortly after completing a degree in law at the University of Coimbra in the late 1960s, Hespanha became an assistant professor of legal history at Coimbra's law school. A few years later he moved to the University of Lisbon. This juridical background had a great impact on his research trajectory. Beginning in the mid-1970s he surveyed a wide variety of topics, from legal theory to western European juridical institutions of the ancien régime. Hespanha became interested in identifying the specificities of power relations in past societies. Marxist theories and Michel Foucault's work both proved to be particularly influential on his thought. He gradually came to regard power as essentially relational, exerted through means that went far beyond the law, brutal coercion, and open violence. From Hespanha's point of view, political bonds fundamentally relied on a reciprocal commitment of both parties involved. According to him, domination was based on mutual involvement and consent, and not on brute force of the ruler over the subjected. As for the political system of the ancien régime, its long duration is, above all, the outcome of this relationship and not the result of violence and coercion.Hespanha developed this perspective during the first two decades of his research trajectory. Throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s he intensely interacted with young Spanish, Italian, and German legal historians, a relationship that proved to be particularly fruitful. Scholars like Bartolomé Clavero, Paolo Prodi, and Johannes-Michael Scholz, among many others, were important interlocutors for Hespanha. Also significant for him was a series of research stays at the Frankfurt-based Max-Planck-Institut für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte, a leading research institute on the history of European law. It was there that he became involved in major research projects focused on topics such as the social history of jurists, the origins of the early modern state, and the transition from the ancien régime to the liberal political system.Together with other legal historians of his generation, Hespanha played a major role in the renovation of the field of legal history throughout the 1980s. Particularly noteworthy was his contribution to the study of early modern European politics. Hespanha constantly insisted on the enormous cultural gap between present-day politics and the way that early modern and eighteenth-century power relations operated. Together with other legal historians, Hespanha developed an anthropological approach to the past that underscored its complexity and its foreignness. He also developed a theory of action in which the choices of individual actors were largely determined by models of behavior that gave almost no space for variations. As a result, individuals and individual agency became almost absent from Hespanha's interpretive framework.Systematically questioning the concept of the early modern state, Hespanha fiercely argued against a teleological interpretation of the world, and he eventually denied the concept's pertinence as a tool to interpret ancien régime political life. According to him, prior to the nineteenth century a state that centralized all the power and held a monopoly of coercion simply did not exist. Instead, power was scattered across many parts of the body politic.Significantly, traditional legal historians deemed these ideas heterodox. Therefore, Hespanha eventually earned his PhD not at a law school but at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa's Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities. His thesis, “As vésperas do Leviathan: Instituições e poder político, Portugal, século XVII” (1987), subsequently published in expanded editions in Portuguese and in a Spanish translation in 1989, was a systematic analysis of the early modern Portuguese political system. Based on in-depth archival research and the previously mentioned theoretical and methodological frameworks, this groundbreaking study was a fundamental contribution to the history of ancien régime European politics and society. Its curious combination of German rechtsgeschichte with a quantification of royal, ecclesiastical, and noble sources of income as a key to their relative power intentionally undercut the predominant historiographical image of the precocious centralization of the Portuguese monarchy and its empire. It also set the stage for a series of subsequent surveys on European polities and their composite nature.For Hespanha, the king was only one power among many other sovereign entities, and royal law coexisted with several other forms of regulation. Hespanha also stated that, in southern Europe during the early modern era, nonjuridical normative sources such as Catholic morals and theology were eventually far more important for social and political order than royal law. Morals and theology spoke of a social world largely determined by natural law, in which individuals accepted that they were unequal for natural reasons. Most contemporary jurists subscribed to such a view, and early modern European law always took this normative plurality into account.Underscoring the normative force of morals and theology did not mean that Hespanha disregarded the juridical system. On the contrary, he constantly claimed that jurists were particularly influential in early modern and eighteenth-century politics. Together with the theologians, jurists were the ones best equipped to understand the multinormative character of the ancien régime political system. In a series of highly innovative studies about juridical and theological treatises, Hespanha showed that jurists wrote some of the most authoritative works on politics. He argued that Catholic morals and justice framed political action and shaped the behavior of both rulers and subjects. In addition, he demonstrated the performative force of the categories forged by jurists, in particular the concept of jurisdiction. Significantly, beginning in the mid-1980s Hespanha and other legal historians introduced the expression “jurisdictional paradigm” to name this form of political system made up of various intertwined normative orders and deeply shaped by this sense of justice. Additionally, Hespanha carried out a systematic prosopographical study of ancien régime Portuguese jurists and was one of the first historians to use computer techniques to enhance the quality of this type of survey. In this project he and his students were following in the footsteps of John Leddy Phelan, Mark Burkholder, and other Hispanists who by the 1970s had already done considerable prosopographical work on the Spanish American judicial bureaucracy.In the decades that followed, Hespanha explored a wide range of topics, such as the interplay between erudite and popular law; the early modern forms of administration; the changes in financial administration and criminal law; the contemporary understanding of territory and jurisdiction; jurisdictional politics and the role of grace (reward); the domestic order, gender roles, and the status of women; and, throughout his career, the sources of social and political inequality.Beginning in the late 1980s, Hespanha became increasingly interested in the Portuguese colonial possessions in Africa, Asia, and America. This imperial turn was also the result of his becoming, in 1996, the head of the Portuguese Commission for the Commemoration of the Portuguese Discoveries (CNCDP) and a principal sponsor of its extensive publication of historical texts and classics as well as new scholarship that resulted in a boom of historical studies. A great deal of his initiatives at the CNCDP fostered the debate about Portuguese imperial rule and eventually contributed to the development of a less Portuguese-centric view of colonial domination.By the 1990s, even though much of his earlier work had a Eurocentric bias and As vésperas do Leviathan had not even considered colonial income as part of the crown's resources, aspects of Hespanha's decentralized view of the monarchy had become attractive to a growing body of scholarship in Brazil, especially among historians in Rio de Janeiro like João Fragoso, who viewed Brazil's social and political life as self-governing and very much within the concept of a negotiated or composite empire, in which local elites had become a colonial nobility and the colony could best be understood as “the ancien régime in the tropics.” These historians tended to see this autonomy not as the crown achieving rule cheaply by proxy by granting certain privileges to local elites but rather as a colonial weakening of central authority. From Hespanha's perspective, the Brazilian colonial order, including its extremely violent and exploitative character, resulted not only from the decisions made in Lisbon but also from the agency of the settlers, who autonomously operated and thus shaped social and political relations at the ground level. By insisting on this interpretation of the colonial regime, Hespanha was by no means attempting to deny Portuguese involvement in colonial oppression and exploitation. Instead, such a view was consistent with his aforementioned understanding of government and power relations in early modern societies.Numerous studies and symposia reinforced this approach and made Hespanha's work the foundation of their argument. But objections were also raised in various quarters, especially among scholars trained in São Paulo who believed that the predominance of slavery in Brazil, the colonial conditions of rule, and the racial divisions of a slave society (as opposed to a society with slaves) had so transformed the nature of the colony that to consider it simply another province or a tropical ancien régime was to take the viewpoint of its elites and to misrepresent the role of violence, coercion, and colonial domination. These objections were put forward forcefully by Laura de Mello e Souza, in an essay to which Hespanha elegantly responded.1 This debate between two of the world's leading scholars on the Portuguese empire, despite the difference of their views and the passion of their positions, was conducted respectfully, courteously, and at a high level of intellectual exchange. It constituted an excellent example of the personal and professional qualities that had made António Manuel Hespanha an author so widely read and admired, even by those who sometimes disagreed with his conclusions. This debate and Hespanha's legacy remain very much alive.Hespanha's corpus was extensive: 20 books and over 150 scholarly articles. He retired as catedrático of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa's Law Faculty and had been a visiting professor in Macao, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Brazil, and the United States. His list of honors and recognitions is impressive. His last book, published shortly before his death and titled Filhos da terra: Identidades mestiças nos confins da expansão portuguesa (2019), on the mixed-race and Lusophone populations that lived beyond the borders of the Portuguese empire, demonstrated that he was still moving in new directions, broadening his perspectives, and bringing his astounding erudition to bear on new areas. He left us at the height of his considerable talents, but he also left an influential body of scholarship and many personal relationships that will make him often cited, long remembered, and sorely missed

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