Rights and autonomy under the Spanish and British empires: the RGT dimension

The rights-and-autonomy dimension of the empire benchmark applied to the Spanish and British Atlantic: what legal personality, protective legislation and courts the native population held de iure in each system, and what the record says about de facto enforcement - the Spanish protective code and its documented violations side by side, the British colonial polity that never included the natives at all, and the one empire that formally debated its own legitimacy.