Atlantic History Archives

Review of We the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-century Spanish New World by Adrian Masters (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

In late 1546, auditor-president Pedro de la Gasca landed in the New World charged with retaking the entire continent for the crown, from Nicaragua to Chile. After having beheaded the viceroy, Gonzalo Pizarro had declared himself ruler of larger Peru with a fleet controlling the South Sea, from Callao to Panama. Curiously, La Gasca came with no armies, just a pile of blank decrees signed by Charles V. In one year, however, La Gasca quickly took over Pizarro’s fleet and routed Gonzalo into the Peruvian heartland. He was able to accomplish this because of the power of royal decrees and edicts granting rewards to any potential turncoat. La Gasca quickly dispatched the Pizarros, reorganized Peru, and promptly went back to become bishop of Palencia in 1550.

This largely bloodless, swift conquest of conquistadors by paperwork seems not to have caught the attention of historians of the sixteenth-century Spanish Indies, who were accustomed to narrating gory blood baths in Tenochtitlan. How did a faraway monarch manage to control a sprawling empire teeming with violent and ruthless factions, including, not only raiding conquistador-pirates but also thousands of theocratic friars and rebellious indigenous lords, all willing and able to seize control. This is the subject of Adrian Master’s extraordinary We, the King which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.

Anyone superficially familiar with the history of conquest and colonialism in the Americas knows two things: First, Spain imposed a ruthless autocratic regime via top-down religious bureaucracies that enforced religious compliance and cultural uniformity. Second, Anglo America was a decentralized society of settlers with loose crown oversight until the eighteenth century, when overreach triggered revolution. This is not a cartoon version of history but rather our current historiographical canon. It is the argument at the heart of John Elliott’s monumental Empires of the Atlantic (2006). The Anglo-American bottom-up and Spanish American top-down dichotomy also structures the writings of the entire Cambridge School, from J.G.A Pocock to Quentin Skinner to David Armitage. Clerical Dominican and Jesuit theology allegedly organized top-down state formation in the south whereas bottom-up markets and indirect providence did it in the north.

Drawing of Guaman Poma — *GKS 2232 4º: Guaman Poma, “Nueva corónica y buen gobierno” (1615), Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen*

In a bold, deeply researched book drawing on no less than twenty-six archives, Masters shatters this paradigm. The liberal and decolonial obsession with top-down Spanish autocracy has overlooked that the discourse of tyranny, underlying all neo scholastic theories of regicide, implied vast bottom-up forms of communication between vassals and monarchs. To claim legitimacy, that is not to be a tyrant, the crown encouraged all sorts of bottom-up paperwork communication via petitioning, audits, and denunciation (which was the point of the Inquisition). In the Spanish Indies, the state was created from the bottom up every bit as much as it was in Anglo America.

Masters’ subject is the hundreds of thousands of royal decrees created in the sixteenth century, but he does not discuss the millions of viceroyal edicts, mandamientos. Scholars have argued that the crown regulated everything from the length of trousers of Purepecha commoners to the number of horses of Nahua lords. We have been told that the crown rounded up natives into towns and issued top-down decrees on how to sleep on mattresses. The topic of race is especially dear to this scholarship. The crown decreed out of thin air prefigured categories of human difference. From the top-down, it engineered republics of Indians, Spaniards, Mestizos, and some forty Casta out of the Reconquista experience with purity of blood statutes.

Masters has no patience with any of this. Most decrees, he shows with brilliant empirical skill, came from bottom-up petitioning from millions of vassals, including both enslaved people and women. Even the very language of the decrees was often taken verbatim from bottom-up petitioning. The function of the Council of Indies was primarily to handle bottom-up paperwork on unsolicited reform and legislation. To be sure, this was no democracy where commoners had unmediated access to the Council and paperwork, but neither, it should be said, is ours. Be that as it may, Masters shows that systems of legislating petitioning were largely responsible for the creation of most racial categories in the Indies. Indigenous factionalism prompted petitions to draw casta (caste) and mestizo distinctions. Every bit as much as friars, bishops, and viceroys, native commoners participated in the creation of colonial categories of human difference.

Map of Teozacoalco — Mapa de Teozacoalco (1580) was part of a set of documents made in response to inquiries from the Spanish King Philip II. Source: Relación de Teozacoalco y Amoltepec, Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala Collection, Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas, Austin.

This is not a minor contribution. The scholarship on colonial Latin America is plagued by teleological narratives. As with any bad script, we all know how the movie ends. Categories, institutions, allegedly all came down prefigured from Spain. Masters shows throughout that the labor of making of the law not only took up a lot of actants (scribes, paper, ink, tlacuilos, ships, rowers, servants, porters, muleteers, magistrates, rivers, oceans, candles, seals, chasquis) but also rendered the system unpredictable. It took individual and communal agency to succeed. It also involved, stubbornness, networking, resilience, corruption, lying, luck.

Along with the top-down authoritarian shibboleths, the literature on the Spanish Empire is packed full of picaros, the much-needed Macondo picaresque in our much-loved liberal and decolonial narratives. Masters is aware that the Indies was not Spain and that petitioning in the Indies changed over time. Corruption and deception were the twin bête-noir of legislation (decrees, edicts, ordinances).

Masters shows that over the entire century the crown struggled to stem corruption and misinformation from undermining its own legitimacy before vassals. In fact, this was the main function of Council magistrates. In a series of riveting chapters, Masters shows how various council audits transformed Indies systems of communication, relegating elite women from legislative decisions, for the wives and daughters of magistrates were the main conduits used by petitioners to communicate and sway the will of magistrates. Masters also shows that the battle to control misinformation led to the creation of a far less passive crown toward the end of the century, capable through its own archives of finally assessing the credibility of Indies testimonies accurately. For every picaro there was an archive.

This book is a tour de force that ought to transform our understanding of Latin American colonial state formation. We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World is a brilliant study that I recommend to all.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Historical Objects: Latin America

“Colonial Latin America Through Objects” is a class taught by Prof. Jorge Cañizares that offers a view of a region’s past by exploring material remains: currencies, playing cards, musical scores, water mills, comets, relics, mummies, coded messages, to name only a few of the 50 objects studied. The class introduces students to a region from unusual angles that upset deeply seeded assumptions about Hispanics.

The students are required to produce two online museum exhibits. The five best exhibits for the mid–term are sampled here. These five exhibits address unusual aspects of colonial Latin America through their material culture. Click on links to see full exhibits (and credits for images).

The history of conquest as described in sixteenth-century indigenous codices by Tymon Sloan

Bernadino De Sahagun, Illustration of the Mirror-Faced Bird, La Historia Universal De Las Cosas De Nueva Espana,1577 Ink on Paper Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence, Italy

Bernadino De Sahagun,
Illustration of the Mirror-Faced Bird, La Historia Universal De Las Cosas De Nueva Espana,1577
Medicea Laurenziana Library, Florence, Italy

Cranial Deformity and Identity by Aaron Quintanilla

Native Drinking Cups of the New World by Riley Reynolds

Ancient Zapotec Chocolate Vessel (Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art)

Syncretism and Marian Representations by Lily Folkerts

Our Lady of the Rosary of Potama (Anonymous, 17-18c, New Mexico History Museum)

Las Bolsas de Mandingo: Deconstructing Misconceptions of Traditional African Religions in the Luso-Atlantic World, by Maryam Ogunbiyi

Manuscript showing syncretism of African and Portuguese Catholic representations

Slaves and Englishmen, by Michael Guasco (2014)

By Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Historians have been puzzled by the rapid development of slavery in English America in the last three quarters of the seventeenth century: Scott Irish indentured laborers, Algonquian prisoners of war, and captured Africans were pressed into slavery. In a society that flaunted “English” freedoms at home, the introduction of slavery in America allegedly represented a radical departure. Moreover by the early eighteenth century the Caribbean islands and many mainland colonies witnessed the emergence of mature plantation economies and the growth of racial slavery. Michael Guasco has written a book to challenge this narrative of two seemingly different moments of transition. Although the English might have praised themselves for their freedoms, slavery was an institution deeply entrenched in England and in English America well before the 1620s. When it came to slavery there never was a divide between an English metropolitan core and a colonial periphery. Slavery was constitutive of the English Atlantic from its very inception in the mid sixteenth century.

Purchase of Christian captives from the Barbary States in the 17th century

Guasco presents a gamut of events and institutions that rendered slavery familiar to the English within and without. Penal slavery, forms of inherited agrarian servitude, and impressment of captured Irish rebels thoroughly acquainted the English with domestic forms of servitude. The Old Testament, patristic Christian sources, and the Greek and Roman classics helped reinforce the deeply rooted naturalness of the institution. English travelers painstakingly reported the near universality of servitude in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, China, Japan, and Africa. Moreover, tens of thousands of English sailors became themselves slaves, captured and held hostage for a ransom by Barbary corsairs.

Five Englishmen escaping slavery from Algiers, Barbary Coast, 1684, by Jan Luyken

It was the imperial rivalry with Portugal and Spain that familiarized the English to the institutions associated with African slavery. The English followed the Spanish and the Portuguese everywhere and learned from them how and where to obtain slaves in West Africa. Many of the so-called Iberian slave traders were themselves English rooted in Iberian soil, operating from Seville or the Canary Islands. Moreover, inter-imperial rivalry provided the English with an excuse to raid Spanish vessels and ports, hijacking hundreds of slaves who were later resold back to the Iberians or retailed in England and its emergent colonies.

For Guasco the English connection to Iberian empires created a smug rhetoric of liberty that cast the English as liberators and the Spanish as brutal overlords. Indians and Africans appeared as allies of the English, battling a Spanish slaving antichrist. While “liberating” the Africans, the English also learnt from Spaniards how to integrate them into households through conversion and miscegenation. Like their Spanish teachers, the English provided some legal protections for African slaves, including safeguards for slave property and married couples and families, as well as the right to self-purchase. There were plenty of freed blacks in the early English Atlantic. Guasco does not mythologize these institutions as they slowly went away while the plantation regime of racial slavery came of age. For Guasco there were no sudden transitions from one slave regime to the next. Slavery of whites or Native Americans (either through penal institutions or captivity in “just war) always had a “moral” dimension to it. Pre-capitalist slavery sought to uplift morally the captive rather than to resolve labor shortages. In the early English Atlantic, African slaves were from the very beginning commodities purchased to solve labor needs.

British Slave Traders load a ship off the coast of West Africa. Image courtesy of Discover Liverpool

This is a stimulating book but for a reader not acquainted with the narrative of English freedoms and sharp slave-regime transitions not very surprising. What is surprising is that this vast world of forced labor regimes would have remained hidden to the historiography. Early-modern polities traded in slavery and forced labor systems promiscuously. The English were no different, for all their alleged freedoms. Given the overwhelming number of galley slaves, Irish captives, pirates, apprentices, indentured labor, agrarian servants, child laborers, and late medieval oblates, how could it have ever been possible to imagine the English world as singularly “free”? The English constructed a fiction of English freedoms that was no different from that built by, say, the Spaniards. In fact, Spanish Old Christians enjoyed even more “freedoms” than did the English. Old Christians, who battled invading Islamic overloads by retreating to their Cantabrian strongholds, not only were entitled to their freedoms but also to the fueros of hidalgos, that is, to the right to have others work for them. They went one better than the English by clearly articulating the paradox of early modern freedoms: there were institutions of forced labor and slavery so that a handful could be free.

Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World, by Michael Guasco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014)

This review was first published in the Journal of Southern History, Volume LXXXI, no. 2, May 2015

Outlaws of the Atlantic, by Marcus Rediker (2014)

By Kristie Flannery

How can historians recover the nature and the significance of the interconnectedness of early modern Anglo and Iberian Atlantic worlds? One option is to study the maritime workers who laboured on the deep-sea sailing ships that were crucial to empire building and the expansion of capitalism during the age of sail (roughly 1500 to 1850).

The crews of the deep-sea sailing ships that traversed the Atlantic Ocean in this era were “motley” or multi-ethnic. Sailors who were born in England and England’s North American colonies commonly toiled alongside people from many different parts of the world, including cities in the vast Spanish and Portuguese empires such as Cadiz, Lisbon, Cartagena de Indias and Lima. Native Americans and free and enslaved Africans also joined the maritime labour force.

In his latest book Outlaws of the Atlantic, Marcus Rediker argues that that sailors, pirates, and motley crews profoundly shaped the world they inhabited in ways that challenge nation-bounded histories or comparative approaches to studying the past.

Challenging the notion that elites were the early modern world’s only political theorists, Rediker contends that maritime workers invented many of the radical philosophies that gained currency in the Atlantic. He shows, for example, that a servant who had spent many years as a sailor and had voyaged to Brazil was the main source of information for the French philosopher Montaigne’s famous sixteenth-century essay, On Cannibals. The seaman’s account of the indigenous people who populated the New World shaped Montaigne’s declaration that Native Americans were not barbarians but “noble and dignified people” who deserved to be treated as such. Rediker says that it was not out of the ordinary for Montaigne to seek advice from a sailor. In fact, it was common practice for writers and statesmen to go to the docks to seek out lessons about distant parts of the world from the seamen who knew them best.

Rediker argues that the deep-sea sailing ship was a fertile ground for the formation of egalitarian and anti-authoritarian politics. Outlaws of the Atlantic uses a fascinating array of sources, including the seventeenth-century sailor Edward Barlow’s 225,000-word journal, to demonstrate that maritime workers developed a sophisticated class politics. Men like Barlow attributed their collective shipboard suffering of hunger, violent punishments, and fundamental lack of liberty, to the desire of powerful people to profit from the exploitation of the weak.

The ‘Cadiz Merchant’ under way, 1682 Plate from Edward Barlow’s journal of his life at sea in king’s ships, East & West Indiamen & other merchantmen from 1659 to 1703 ((National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK)

He shows that motley crews imagined and often tried to implement alternatives to their subjugation. Rediker considers the experiences of the thousands of seamen who became pirates in the early eighteenth century. He describes the pirate ship as a novel experiment in egalitarianism and democracy. Rejecting the hierarchy of a royal navy or merchant ship, pirate crews elected their own leaders and voted on important decisions. Rediker also shows that slave ships could be sites of resistance where enslaved Africans revolted against those who were transporting them across the ocean in chains.

In the second half of the eighteenth century sailors, pirates and motley crews became “the driving engine of the American revolution.” In the 1740s maritime workers led mass riots in North American port cities that attempted to stop the abhorrent practice of impressment, or of forcibly recruiting people into the royal navy. Rediker argues that these protests transformed political discourse and political strategy. For example, after witnessing these riots, Samuel Adams Jr. developed a new “ideology of resistance, in which the natural rights of man were used for the first time… to justify mob activity.” The violent tactics that sailors used in impressment riots, such as attacks on naval property, were later used in protests against the Stamp Act later in the 1760s.

Contemporary painting of the Amistad ship, 1839 (Via Wikiemedia Commons)

It is in Rediker’s discussion of Atlantic outlaw culture that we most clearly see the entanglement of the Anglo and Iberian and Atlantic worlds from below. The final chapter of this book sheds light on North American popular responses to the 1839 Amistad rebellion. Rediker presents fascinating evidence that working-class New Yorkers celebrated the Mende slaves who revolted against their Spanish masters on board the Amistad as heroic black pirates. In the city’s poor Bowery district, men and women flocked to see plays that praised the uprising. Printers wanting to profit from the popularity of Joseph Cinqué, the leader of the rebellion, published highly sought-after engravings that depicted him as a handsome, strong, brave, and confident man. For the growing multi-ethnic proletariat in North America’s bloating cities, “the autonomous, armed men, many of them black, inspired… not fear but hope.”

Color Engraving and Frontispiece from John Warner Barber (1840). A History of the Amistad Captives. New Haven, Connecticut 1840, via Wikimedia Commons

Outlaws of the Altantic leaves us wondering, did the cult of Cinqué spread beyond North America? Did Cubans and Mexicans also celebrate the feats of the black pirate? Rediker’s research would lead us to assume that maritime workers spread the story of the Amistad rebellion throughout the Atlantic world and beyond. This book sets the stage for further studies of anti-authoritarian proletarian traditions that ran across and beneath nation-states and empires.

Marcus Rediker, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail (2014)

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