by Amina Marzouk Chouchene First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (August 28, 2019) Twenty-first-century Britain brims with a revival of rosy visions of Britain’s imperial past. Nowhere is such a tendency clearer than in the restless efforts to rehabilitate the empire by prominent conservative historians such as Niall Ferguson. Britain’s imperial glories and its benign […]
1400s to 1700s
Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (2016)
By Tiana Wilson After reading this book in three different graduate seminar courses, I can confidently argue that Marisa Fuentes’ Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is one of the most important texts of our time, and a must read for anyone interested in overcoming the limitations of archival research. For many scholars […]
Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History by Sarah Knott (2019)
By Jesse Ritner The easy correlation contemporary American and British cultures build from sex to pregnancy, pregnancy to birth, and birth to childrearing within a nuclear family is far from uniform throughout history. Mother is not an identity. Not all women will mother during the course of their lives. In Sarah Knott’s words, “mother is […]
Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America by John M. Monteiro (2018)
By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nobody questioned enslaving Amerindians. In Blacks of the Land (originally published in 1994 as Negros da Terra) Monteiro studies Amerindian slavery in the Capitania de São Vicente, now known as São Paulo, and thus sheds light on practices and debates that took place all over the continent. […]
Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World; Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade by Roquinaldo Ferreira (2012)
By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Luanda and Benguela became the busiest, most profitable slaving ports in the transatlantic slave trade in the seventeenth century precisely because these two ports set up tribunals to hear tens of thousands of enslaved petitioners demand freedom. Paperwork in local tribunals set hundreds of thousands free, even at the risk of bankrupting […]
Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain by Martin Nesvig (2018)
By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Power, he argues, was “promiscuous” in sixteenth-century Michoacán because there were dozens of claimants to overlapping jurisdictions: indigenous nobilities, native commoners, encomenderos (tributary lords responsible for conversion of entrusted indigenous communities), bishops, parish priests, friars, audiencia (high court) magistrates, alcaldes mayores (city mayors), city councils, corregidores (regional authorities), viceroys, general inquisitors, inquisitorial […]
A Brief History of Feminism by Patu (illustrations) and Antje Schrupp and translated by Sophie Lewis (2017)
By Namrata B. Kanchan “Let this really be brief!” was the first thought that crossed my mind as I read the title of Patu and Schrupp’s book. It was listed on the syllabus for a course on Gender and Decolonization and after some heavy reading on decolonization, I was less than enthusiastic about reading this book. […]
When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History, by Matthew Restall (2018)
By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra Matthew Restall’s When Montezuma met Cortés delivers a blow to the basic structure of all current histories of the conquest of Mexico. Absolutely all accounts, from Cortés’ second letter to Charles V in 1520 to Inga Clendinnen’s masterful 1991 article “’Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty,’”[1] assume that the conquest of Mexico was led by […]
Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, by William Cronon (1983)
By Jesse Ritner Thirty-five years ago William Cronon wrote Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. It has aged well. The continued relevance of the book is likely a result of two things. First, it is eminently readable. Flipping through the pages, one can imagine the forests that Cronon describes and […]
The Visitor: André Palmeiro and the Jesuits in Asia by Liam Matthew Brockey (2014)
By Abisai Pérez This book addresses the life of Jesuit father André Palmeiro (1569 [Lisbon] – 1635 [Macau]), who was the first inspector, or Visitor, of the Jesuit Company in India and East Asia with the mission of consolidating and expanding religious conversion in the remote regions of the Portuguese empire. Through the analysis of […]
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