Ultramar excepcional

This paper discusses the possibility of thinking the colonial ambit of 19th century Spain as a common legal space in which legal understandings and categories covering both the metropolis and colonies are shared. The consolidation of the American independences and the political redefinition of Spain, not to mention its imperial remnants would have led in appearance to a normative division of space between metropolis and colonies; one that allegedly would have introduced the European Spain into a liberal constitutionalism, while the American and Asiatic territories would have remained mired in the Ancien régime, thus giving rise in 1837 to the »special legislation« attributed to the Spanish Antilles and the Philippines. However, if the entirety of that space was contemplated not from the perspective of a legal system, but rather from a wider cultural and juridical point of view, then a shared understanding of the law both on the Peninsula and overseas would emerge which had the potential to explain how the metropolis conceived, through juridical instruments, the government of the colonies and, in turn, how they modulated the progressive establishment of the own Spain as a liberal state