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Santiago Chile, 1541–1581: A Case Study of Urban Stagnation

Attempts to understand the nature of colonial Latin American cities have tended to focus on the role of urban centers in the process of empire building. The Spanish cities of the New World served initially as spearheads of conquest, and later as centers for the exercise of Imperial control. A particularly important aspect of this control was the effort by the Crown to limit the power of encomenderos, men whose royally granted right to use Indian labor threatened to create a local ruling class independent of Imperial power. Richard Morse has recently asserted that the patrimonial nature of many of these urban centers resulted from the efforts of the mother country to retain them in the Imperial structure against the counter-claims of the encomenderos. As for those poorer settlements on the outskirts of empire. Morse believes that the appeal of landed wealth drew many of their most prominent citizens into the countryside, leaving the cities to stagnate.