Imperios intolerantes. Las raíces de la unidad religiosa y la tolerancia en los imperios ibéricos

Abstract

While various empires sought by religious tolerance to integrate dispe-rate peoples under a single ruler, the Spanish and Portuguese empires were based on a policy of religious unity and thus intolerance. This article examines the policy of religious intolerance in those empires in the context of theology and the missionary impulse, but also in relation to the commercial and political needs of the State. It argues that orthodoxy reinforced commercial exclusivity and was thought to assure loyalty, but that from the origins of these empires voices of dissent were raised arguing for freedom of conscience. This was especially true in the Caribbean where local interests in contraband undercut policies of religious exclusivity. By the late Eighteenth Century, in the atmosphere of political change, religion was increasingly seen as a security matter by the forces of traditional society. "Inquisition" and "toleration" came to represent two competing concepts of society in a political and cultural struggle that continued through the Nineteenth Century.

URI: http://hdl.handle.net/11721/1512