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The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable – Introduction

This special roundtable brings together four distinguished scholars to examine the arguments advanced in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters’ recent publication The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World (Harvard University Press, 2026). Drawing on research conducted across 26 archives and tens of thousands of documents, the book offers a new interpretation of the Spanish conquest and the formation of the early colonial state in the Americas.

Rather than offering conventional book reviews, the essays that follow engage with the book from the perspective of each contributor’s own research and expertise, and are intended to be read in conversation with one another. Together, they explore the book’s implications for the histories of empire, law, political thought, race, and archival practice.

As Spanish conquistadors swept through the New World, the Spanish Crown envisioned a rigidly hierarchical aristocratic order that would flourish in their wake. At first, that vision appeared within reach: the leading conquistadors ruled as noblemen over millions. Yet the Spanish empire in the New World quickly became a hotbed of efforts to overturn the emerging order. As the conquistadors retreated, new centres of power emerged around influential friars and Indigenous lords, only to give way in turn to new political arrangements.

The Radical Spanish Empire (RSE) shows that these social orders broke down thanks to the challenges mounted by countless individuals across the Spanish Americas–including non-elite Spanish and Indigenous people, women, and the enslaved. To achieve their goals, they turned not only to outright violence but also to massive amounts of paperwork: petitions, complaints, lawsuits, and secret testimonies. Through this grassroots “lawfare,” vassals undercut the emerging seigneurial dynasties of the conquistadors, stripped the friars of theocratic authority, and curtailed the might of native lords. Collectively, they spearheaded movements against tyranny and slavery, proposed and challenged laws, produced new types of knowledge, created archives and historical accounts, and questioned the nature of truth itself. In the process, however, these actors also gradually co-created a lasting new society of orders–one that would solidify in the 1570s with viceroys, bishops, and inquisitors at its apex.

The roundtable discussion begins with Harvard historian Daniel Carpenter, who examines RSE’s analysis of petitioning as the preferred form of radical political participation in the sixteenth-century Spanish Empire. As a specialist on colonial and republican petitioning in the Anglo-American world, Carpenter situates RSE in the much larger context of other early modern empires and grassroots politics. 

The New University of Lisbon historian Pedro Cardim, specialist on both Spanish and Portuguese imperial politics,  uses RSE to evaluate comparatively vernacular political philosophies and the politics of subaltern petitioning in colonial Brazil. 

The University of San Francisco Professor Katrina Olds, historian of early modern Iberian local religious traditions via the circulation of forged documents and artifacts, engages with RSE’s arguments on counterfeited documents as a central political strategy of factional sixteenth-century indigenous politics.

Finally, University of Oregon’s Professor Michelle McKinley, historian of the law and of Afro American women petitioners in seventeenth-century Peruvian religious tribunals, evaluates RSE’s claims on the use of bottom-up paperwork as causal factors in the generation of both colonial radical politics and new racial hierarchical social orders.

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.

All Eyes on the Petition: Reflections on The Radical Spanish Empire

This essay is part of The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below.

The action seems frenzied, turbulent, anxious, and, at the same time, thorough and calculated.  At the beginning of Chapter Three of Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’ remarkable new book The Radical Spanish Empire, we, the readers, meet three suppliant men: Gualpa, an Indigenous man who had accidentally discovered a new vein of silver; the Spaniard don Bartolome Inca y Orozco, whose father had created new mining technologies; and don Francisco de la Cueva, a Spaniard whose family of conquistadors and warriors had “pacified” New Spain, in part by slaying hundreds, if not thousands, of Natives.  Gualpa’s son approached the Viceroy don Francisco de Toledo asking for royal rewards.  Inca y Orozco wanted a royal pension.  De la Cueva asked for Indigenous tribute, the downstream spoils of conquest.  These men, from remarkably different social stations, all qualify as vassals, as those who inhabit a lower order of humanity in the caste system of the vast, complicated Spanish Empire of the sixteenth century.  Emphasizing their deservingness, here represented as service to the Crown, they sought benefits, rents, and privileges.  They ultimately received them.

Petitioning in the longue durée of Eurasian and Atlantic history has usually been an ineluctably relational process.  It can be studied neither entirely from the bottom up nor entirely from the top down.  Along with Masters’ remarkable We the King, Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’ Radical Spanish Empire demonstrates both widespread, decentralized petitioning and the workings of a vast administrative system of courts and offices.  Empires and states built courts, offices, and perhaps even forms of bureaucracy that both managed and, beyond that, encouraged supplication from those lower in the social order, sometimes at or near the bottom of it. From a comparative, longue-durée vantage point, Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’ notion of radicalizing paperwork extends an earlier literature showing that aspects of ancient Roman, medieval European and other imperial systems also had some inclusive and leveling aspects.  Yet the authors’ paperwork radicalism is not reducible to earlier imperial models, nor did it (yet) amount to the much more democratized and democratizing petitioning of the modern era, when petitions were used to recruit members to new organizations, expand legislative and administrative agendas, and foster new cultures of equality.  Among many literatures in which the book is properly nestled as a generative interlocutor and gadfly, however, The Radical Spanish Empire should be read in this current of world-historical studies of petitioning.[1]

Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 by Daniel Carpenter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021)

Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters narrate the stories of Gualpa, Inca y Orozco, and de la Cueva as a story of radicalism, of an upwelling of claims that shattered hierarchies both formal and informal and led to a non-trivial degree of empowerment for vassals.  Gracia’s paperwork “prompted a bottom-up deluge of knowledge creation” (160) and “drove politics and action at once incredibly violent and creative, participatory and elitist” (162). Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters are right to emphasize this upwelling of political activity, but I want to draw attention to what might be regarded as “the other side of the coin.”  A system like this carried considerable benefit to the Crown.  The benefits included information about highly scattered populations as well as the recognition of the Crown and its agents as sovereign when vassals sought the kinds of things that only the Crown could grant licenses (172-73), patents (171-72), pensions (159), tribute (159), and, in general, rights and rents accorded by the Crown.  As social scientists have begun to recognize, many of the most inclusive and participatory institutions of our time developed as imperial and monarchical institutions of rule.  A far-flung, exhaustive, and literally exhausting system of paperwork.  Paperwork produced information for the empire, and, beyond that, its actors participated in a system in which the sovereignty of the Crown was reinforced as well as occasionally undermined.[2]

The extreme scale and scope of the Spanish Empire’s paperwork regime endow Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’ book with vital comparative and world-historical lessons.  Early modern petitioning was more common in colonial Spanish America than in most other contemporary settings.  Indeed, as the authors show, petitioning did not wither but swelled after the great comunero revolt against Charles V. Spanish law governed these petition-and-response systems, and the set of categories studied under the concept of “paperwork” included justicia (court cases), gracia (privileges) and gobierno (administrative legislation). Justicia and gracia represented casuistic jurisprudence and bestowals of privileges. With gobierno petitions, imperial officials could issue edicts with the force of law; there were tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of such petition-induced rulings in the radical Spanish empire.  Gobierno petitions were sent to the Council of the Indies or to viceregal officials and high courts in Mexico.  Indigenous people and mestizos used paperwork regularly and with some success; even as their rights and land claims changed dramatically, and even as dispossession continued apace, petitioning led to Spanish creation of new indigenous entitlements, a system of rights that created pathways and agendas for further empowerment by petitioning.  In the larger view, scholars should revisit, if not jettison entirely, claims of a much more “inclusive” and “participatory” English North American empire as compared with the Spanish.[3]

Page from the Codex Osuna documenting the provisions and services supplied by an Indigenous community to a visiting Spanish auditing party. Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS VITR/26/8, fol. 492v–30v.

As this paperwork empire was built, however, two other things were constructed: a ritually recognized sovereignty in imperial venues and legible information about the Crown’s subjects.  The first is that the very act of supplication acknowledged a certain status of the Crown and its officials.  What Gracia paperwork asked for was usually the kind of thing that could be found elsewhere only with great difficulty, or not at all: licenses for mining, guaranteed revenue streams through pensions or tribute from dependent populations, legal privileges.  Recognition of the centrality of the Crown as a source of Gracia was all the more important because, as Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters emphasize, the Spanish Empire wrestled with a “world where disease and violence had fragmented society into countless unstable factions” (167).  Military domination was not guaranteed, and paperwork also made this society more visible, more legible to the Crown.  This was the second legacy of petitioning, which came from the very rules that generated so much paperwork.  “For a conquistador to receive any kind of reward, especially Indigenous labor but even entry into the ranks of the Spanish grandees, he would need to certify his exploits” (168), and at that, certify them according to the rules of the Crown and its officers.  Beyond the generation of facts and narratives, the Gracia paperwork embedded “open-ended emphasis on royal service” (171), which created new incentives to conquer, develop, settle, Christianize, and subjugate, and to do so in a way that was recognizable, justiciable to the Crown.[4]

Women’s antislavery petition, 1837. Library of Congress.

Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters show the duality of petition-and-response systems.  Long held to be a near-meaningless process of abject subjection, the imperial petition becomes, in their creative and exhaustively researched account, a tool for creating new knowledge that no single actor truly controls.  Paperwork becomes a ladder by which vassals can upend and destabilize hierarchies both imperial and Indigenous.  At the same time, paper generates powerful new bureaucracies, fashions new imperial lenses through which the Crown can glimpse and read its subjects, and institutionalizes an everyday, everywhere recognition of who, at least theoretically, has authority to grant what the supplicant asks.  As all eyes drift toward the petition, all eyes drift toward the petitioned who, even in ways ineluctably contested and liminal, establishes the visibility of his rule.

Daniel Carpenter is Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and Chair, Department of Government, in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. His book Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021) was awarded the J. David Greenstone Prize of the American Political Science Association, the Seymour Martin Lipset Prize of the American Political Science Association, and the James P. Hanlan Book Award of the New England Historical Association.

[1] Consult Zaret (2025) for the most comprehensive Eurasian overview.  On republican and post-republican Rome, see Eberle (2024), Deniaux (1993) and Millar (1977); on medieval Europe, Koziol (1992), Millet (2003) and Boucoyannis (2021); on modern democratized petitioning, Carpenter (2016), Carpenter (2021), Blackhawk et al (2021), Miller (2023), Carpenter (2023) and Carpenter (2025). 

[2] By rent here I mean the traditional sense of a source of supply controlled uniquely by its owner, whether a vein of bauxite in a mount she owns or a legal privilege (e.g., a monopoly) granted by a ruler.  For arguments about how more inclusive systems could serve imperial interests, consult Gailmard (2017), Gailmard (2024) and Carpenter and Gailmard (2024).

[3] See Anabitarte (2009), Owensby (2011), Masters (2017) and Masters (2023). As Herzog (2013: 213) writes, “By the end of this [claim-and-response] process, natives had come to be, rather than bearers of ancestral rights, holders of new and radically different kinds of entitlements.”

[4] Scott (1998) and Lee and Zhang (2017).

References

Anabitarte, Alfredo Gallego. 2009. Poder y derecho: Del antiguo régimen al estado constitucional en España: Siglos XVIII a XIX (Madrid, 2009)

Blackhawk, Maggie, Daniel Carpenter, Tobias Resch, and Benjamin Schneer. 2021. “Congressional Representation by Petition: Assessing the Voices of the Voteless in a Comprehensive New Database, 1789–1949,” Legislative Studies Quarterly 46, (3): 817-849.

Blackhawk, Ned. 2023.  The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Boucoyannis, Deborah. 2021. Kings as Judges: Power, Justice and the Origins of Parliaments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Carpenter, Daniel. 2016. “Recruitment by Petition: American Antislavery, French Protestantism, English Suppression,” Perspectives on Politics 14 (3): 700-723.

Carpenter, Daniel. 2021. Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790-1870 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press).

Carpenter, Daniel. 2023. “Agenda Democracy,” Annual Review of Political Science 26 (1): 193-212.

Carpenter, Daniel. 2025. “Petitioning as Governance: The Scattered and Multinational World of the Early United States,” Journal of the Early Republic 45 (3): 417-428.

Carpenter, Daniel, and Sean Gailmard. 2024. “Bootstrapping Sovereignty: Petitions and Power in Nascent States,” manuscript, University of California-Berkeley.

Deniaux, Élizabeth. 1993. Clientèles et pouvoir à l’époque de Cicéron (Rome: Publications de l’École française de Rome).

Eberle, Lisa Pilar. 2024. “The Edicts of the Praetors: Law, Time, and Revolution in Ancient Rome,” Law and History Review 42, no. 2 (2024): 237-261.

Gailmard, Sean P. 2017. “Building a New Imperial State: The Strategic Foundations of Separation of Powers in America,” American Political Science Review 111, no. 4 (2017): 668-685.

Gailmard, Sean. 2024.  Agents of Empire: English Imperial Governance and the Making of American Political Institutions (New York: Cambridge University Press).

Herzog, Tamar. 2013. “Colonial Law and ‘Native Customs’: Indigenous Land Rights in Colonial Spanish America,” The Americas 69 (3) (January 2013), 318)

Koziol, Geoffrey. 1992.  Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France. Cornell University Press, 1992.

Lee, Melissa M., and Nan Zhang.2017.  “Legibility and the Informational Foundations of State Capacity,” The Journal of Politics 79, no. 1 (2017): 118-132.

Masters, Adrian. 2018. “A Thousand Invisible Architects: Vassals, the Petition and Response System, and the Creation of Spanish Imperial Caste Legislation,” Hispanic American Historical Review 98 (3): 377-406.

Masters, Adrian. 2023. We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Miller, Henry J. 2023. A Nation of Petitioners: Petitions and Petitioning in the United Kingdom, 1780–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Millet, Helene. 2003. Suppliques et requêtes: le gouvernement par la grâce en Occident (XIIe-XVe siècle) (Rome : École française de Rome.)

Moore, Michael Edward. 2011. A Sacred Kingdom: Bishops and the Rise of Frankish Kingship, 300-850 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America).

Owensby, Brian P. 2011. “Pacto entre rey lejano y súbditos indígenas: Justicia, legalidad y política en Nueva España, siglo XVII,” Historia Mexicana 61 (1) (2011) 59-106.

Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Zaret, David. 2025. Petitioning and Power Relations in Pre-Modern Eurasia (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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.

Forgery, Invention, and the History of Skepticism in The Radical Spanish Empire

This essay is part of The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below.

As befits a work of such uncommon scope and ambition, The Radical Spanish Empire has already been the focus of a flurry of book reviews and colloquia evaluating the authors’ success in substantiating their main arguments, contributions, and provocations, with which the authors clearly hope to explode many scholarly and popular certainties about the history of colonial Latin America, as well as the region’s broader importance in world history.  This review will focus more narrowly on an aspect that has not yet received much notice, namely, the ways in which The Radical Spanish Empire illuminates the workings of fabrication, reinvention, and forgery in the early modern period, and how the authors tie these to broader claims about the history of doubt and skepticism.

Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters posit that the demographic, political, and social chaos created by the Spanish conquest, along with preexisting paperwork practices, by which supplicants would exact privileges from the Crown by petitioning, litigating, or lobbying, helped give rise in the Indies to an explosive, vigorous, and widespread culture of “lawfare.”  Paperwork – in the form of petitions, proposals for reform, litigation, inspections, and audits – provided the means through which distant Spanish, Indigenous, and other types of vassals could effect change.  As familiarity with the logic and practice of petitioning the monarch for privileges (gracia) spread, so, too, did its practice, and thus, “[e]very vassal, it seemed, now claimed to be a great conquistador or an Indigenous lord.  In an era of radical social upheaval, every commoner claimed to be a king, and whole communities were tearing themselves apart, alleging their ancient independence.  The past had grown wild” (184), as “[v]assals saw it as the moment to confirm, tweak, or perhaps outright invent their privileges,” which led to a veritable “flood of petitions, lawsuits, genealogies, treatises and extended investigations” (185). 

Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (Yale, 2015) by Katrina B. Olds

Indeed, as paperwork proliferated, so too did inventions and fabrications, from outright forgery to mild manipulations of truth.  This was especially true in the first decades of the sixteenth century (c. 1500-c.1570), which the authors call (perhaps hyperbolically) “one of the longest profoundly radical periods in recorded history anywhere,” when “lesser elites and commoners challenged old aristocracies, often producing proof of their own bloodlines – sometimes entirely out of thin air.”  In order to substantiate their claims, “explorers, conquistadors,” “indigenous and part-indigenous families and communities,” “friars, officials, indigenous commoners,” all participated in generating “a vast manuscript canon describing everything from marriage practices to cosmovisions to the politics of Native sovereigns,” through scores of “maps, histories, and genealogies” (165).  In these ways, petitioners sought to “dominate the archive,” that is, to invent truth more persuasively or successfully than one’s foes, and convince the Crown to grant or confirm one’s privileges. 

Yet the resulting body of work did not form a coherent canon; since such documents were produced out of “fierce factional struggles,” their truths were “mutually contradictory and agonistic” (165).  And as time passed, the earlier, radical period would be forgotten or effaced, as the resulting documents would in fact become canonical, forming the basis of royal, municipal, family, ecclesiastical archives, and would be mobilized in later generations to assert or claim privilege, or to vindicate tarnished reputations (11).  In the meantime, the difficulty of confirming the authenticity of any of these claims – based on the cultural and physical distance of the petitioners from Madrid, but also the shifting nature of truth in wake of so much upheaval – gave rise both to a fundamental, pervasive skepticism about the very possibility of arriving at truth at all, particularly on the part of the Crown and the royal ministers charged with adjudicating the resulting petitions and litigation. 

The authors have assembled a truly remarkable assortment of examples from their own exhaustive and punctilious archival research and existing scholarship, which range from the centers of former Mesoamerican and Andean empires, where petitioners fought to establish their purported descent from the Aztec and Incan nobility, respectively, to peripheral regions, such as the mining zones of northwest Mexico and high Andean site of Potosí, where “deracinated commoners” such as one sixteenth-century Otomi man named Nicolás de San Luis, were transformed by their descendants into model Christian conquistadors and upright administrators through forged documents.  These forgeries were then used to write new, idealized histories that buttressed local claimants’ privileges and power, based of course on counterfeit sources which continue to circulate and “fool scholars to this day” (154).  In these efforts, petitioners were attentive to the strategic and evidentiary value of non-European scripts and cultural sources, which, they hoped, would be seen as inherently ancient and authentic.  Native lords, including descendants of Moctezuma and the various contenders to the title of Inca, drew on oral traditions and the testimony of quipus, respectively, to buttress their claims.  Mesoamerican cacique-claimants registered purportedly ancient traditions in pictographic codices in truly remarkable and complex documents, which were indeed “among the most creative of the era” – if not quite among the most creative in all “of human history” – in which their authors “strategically use[d] as many non-Spanish conventions as possible to persuade officials that claims faithfully reflect[ed] customs derived from the ancient past” (188). 

Don Nicolás de San Luis. Museo Regional de Queretaro. INAH

In the seventeenth century, the accumulation of documents qua documents – which the authors conceptualize as “the archive” – became more important than oral testimony and other, older sources of historical or ancestral memory.  In this context, “forgery flourished,” and a wave of would-be Inca descendants descended on the Andes in the seventeenth century.  These included several who, based on their spurious claims of royal or aristocratic descent, which they supported with forged privileges and genealogies, convinced Spanish authorities to empower them to convert and/or conquer indigenous populations in the untamed peripheries of Southern Cone.  It is in this context that the authors reevaluate the efforts of Felipe Guaman Poma, the Andean author of the massive illustrated chronicle known as El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, which they describe as the work of a rather incompetent forger and failed self-fashioner, a text produced in part to vindicate Guaman Poma’s own fraudulent claims of noble ancestry.  Through this extended history-cum-petition, the author fabricated an image of himself as the lone surviving legitimate heir to the Inca (338) and the ideal royal servant: a master auditor and memorialista, the sole reliable source of the truth about the Andes.  “Like so many petitioners before him,” the authors note, “he also stressed his distinguished pedigree and his parents’ service against the tyrant Pizarros.”  As such, “[t]his canonical work is incomprehensible outside the wider context of struggles over privilege” (203).  “Guaman Poma presented the new social order as a bottom-up regime in which every group continued to manipulate the truth…wreaking havoc” (339), and giving rise to the manifold abuses, disorder, and injustices he denounces in the Andes.  The irony, of course, is that Guaman Poma was one of those upstarts, and, if Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters are correct, a forger to boot, and not even a particularly good one (340). 

Of particular interest and import is the authors’ claim that the culture of invention and forgery tacitly encouraged by the culture of invention, petitioning, and uncertainty generated “vernacular-administrative skepticism” – that is, a widespread conviction that Indies petitioners were not telling the whole truth, and that perhaps the very distance of the Indies, as well as its alterity, made the nature of the place and its people inherently incomprehensible.  This is a skepticism that did not remain in the colonies, but extended to the metropole, where “contradictions and incomplete truths fostered a rich culture of skepticism at the royal court” (267).  Since forgery and fabrication were inherent to the logic of the lawfare system – when there was a perceived vacuum, paperwork appeared to fill it – this inevitably led to doubts about the possibility of arriving at truth.  This was true both among petitioners, who often despaired about the king’s ability to apprehend it, as well as of the king and his councilors, who agreed with one assessment that the act of reading petitions and memoriales was like reading chivalric novels (257-8), the fanciful and wildly popular texts that had driven Don Quijote to lose his grip with reality.  Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters are keen to demonstrate that this pervasive sense that truth was elusive, and maybe impossible to grasp, decidedly altered imperial governance: “Doubt was therefore a fundamental force in shaping the empire,” as the earlier more freewheeling period gave rise to a more hierarchical and fixed regimen in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which “kings, viceroys, bishops, and inquisitors” took “increasingly assertive roles in ascertaining and determining the truth” (278), even if readers may not be convinced by the claim that these effects represented veritable “intellectual earthquakes,” as the authors claim in a bit of characteristic overstatement (273). 

The Radical Spanish Empire provides a convincing case for continuing to tease out the distinctive ways that doubt and skepticism worked in early modern Iberian worlds, and often raises more questions than it can answer.  It would be worth asking, for example, whether the fact that “vassals … reflected on the truth constantly, regarding it as another weapon in the great bureaucratic battlefield” (278) actually reflected pervasive skepticism, or if such uncertainty might be more accurately described as pragmatic and self-interested cynicism.  Either way, it is worth remembering that forgeries and inventions in the Indies had important parallels in Spain, most infamously in a spate of historical forgeries that also generated skepticism about the integrity of archives as repositories of truth.  These were historical forgeries, produced and promoted by antiquaries and learned clerics all over Spain, in which they codified oral traditions, unearthed or forged material artifacts, and knit together new narratives that portrayed their specific locality as the home of the most ancient, most pious, and most continuously Christian populace.  In the process, of course, these local partisans of the sacred were forced to efface, convert, or otherwise reshape inconvenient truths about the existence of pagan, Jewish, and Muslim periods.  In several instances, this led these authors to fabricate their own archives of purportedly ancient texts, as in the infamous case of the ‘lead books’ of Granada, outright forgeries promoted by Archbishop Pedro de Castro (who appears in The Radical Spanish Empire as friend and mentor to Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, another self-fashioner, p. 321).  In another, a Jesuit priest named Jerónimo Román de la Higuera confected an entire canon of historical texts, which, he hoped, would effectively retrofit and solidify a pious narrative of Spanish sacred history from the time of Christ through the Christian “Reconquest” of Islamic Spain, and which generated both skepticism and enthusiasm.  The latter attitude persevered in spite of the former, as evidenced by the more than 164 works of ecclesiastical and local history which drew on Higuera’s canon between c.1600-c.1800.[i]

One of the Sacromonte Lead Books (Libros Plúmbeos), forged texts claiming Morisco-Arabic origins for Spanish Catholicism. Engraving by Francisco Heylan (1624), reproduced in Diego Nicolás Heredia Barnuevo, Mystico ramillete historico (Granada: Imprenta Real, 1741).

In short, The Radical Spanish Empire’s provocative contributions suggest that there is still more to the rich and complex histories of invention and fabrication on both sides of the Atlantic than scholars have yet managed to grasp.  As Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters note, scholars have traced a history of Iberian doubt and skepticism to centuries of Iberian religious plurality which gave rise to a conviction, one that seems to have risen to the level of a commonplace, that all faiths were basically the same – that “all could be saved,” whether Muslim, Christian, or Jew.[ii]  These sentiments reflected a rough and ready tolerance that, notwithstanding its persecution by ecclesiastical officials, remained a strong and vigorous current in late medieval and early modern Iberia and its territories, and which often extended to general skepticism about the validity of several Christian moral dictates, such as the popular conviction that simple fornication was not a sin.[iii]  Rather than necessarily attempting to yoke these developments to historiography on the development of the public sphere and philosophical skepticism in the Anglo-American ambit, as Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters are keen to do, it might be more productive – and true to the sources – to further pick out the connections, both explicit and tacit, between the wave of forgeries and fabrications in Spain and those produced in the Indies, and among the various cultural registers in which Iberians at home and the Americas litigated and imagined ‘truth’.  For example, historians of the book and of reading might deepen our understanding of how literary texts like chivalric novels and Don Quijote were used as metaphors for doubt, skepticism, and illusion, not just among elite readers like the king, but also by everyday intellectuals.[iv]  In order to further elucidate shifting definitions of ‘truth,’ we would also be well served by further examination of how knowledge of the genre and conventions of petitions for privileges was communicated to “radical commoners” in the Indies in the first place, as well as how these norms may have evolved or varied across the empire and over time.[v]  Ultimately, while The Radical Spanish Empire’s more expansive and provocative claims would sometimes benefit from greater nuance and context, they do prove timely and productive, particularly in helping to imagine how we might rewrite the social and intellectual history of early modern truth, doubt, and skepticism.

Katrina Olds is Professor of History at the University of San Francisco.  Her book, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (Yale, 2015) was recognized by the American Catholic Historical Association with its John Gilmary Shea Prize.  Her articles on neo-Latin forgeries; the unruly process of authenticating saints’ relics in the Counter Reformation; the eclectic methods of Spanish antiquaries; and relics, saints, and memory in Spain and the Americas have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Catholic Historical Review, and various edited volumes.  Most recently, she is the co-editor, with Emily Michelson and Jan Machielsen, of The Cambridge Companion to Counter-Reformation Sanctity (Cambridge University Press), 2026. 

[i] Katrina B. Olds, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)., 259.  For a recent analysis of Higuera’s lesser-known manuscripts, Miguel Betti, La otra cara del falsario: Jerónimo Román de la Higuera y la ilusión del origen, Biblioteca Áurea Hispánica (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2026).

[ii] Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

[iii] Barbara Fuchs and Mercedes García-Arenal, eds., The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe: From Inquisition to Inquiry, 1550-1700 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2020); Mercedes García-Arenal, ed. After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Stefania Pastore, “Doubt and Unbelief in the Early Modern Era: Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and the Spanish Tradition,” in Formations of Belief: Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular, ed. Philip G. Nord (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

[iv] I analyze one such example in a forthcoming journal article.  

[v] The not insignificant role of notaries in the paperwork and lawfare culture is relegated to a footnote (fn 146, p. 413).

Works Cited:

Betti, Miguel. La otra cara del falsario: Jerónimo Román de la Higuera y la ilusión del origen. Biblioteca Áurea Hispánica. Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2026.

Fuchs, Barbara, and Mercedes García-Arenal, eds. The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe: From Inquisition to Inquiry, 1550-1700. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2020.

García-Arenal, Mercedes, ed. After Conversion: Iberia and the Emergence of Modernity. Leiden: Brill, 2016.

Olds, Katrina B. Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

Pastore, Stefania. “Doubt and Unbelief in the Early Modern Era: Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and the Spanish Tradition.” In Formations of Belief: Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular, edited by Philip G. Nord, 67–84. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Schwartz, Stuart B. All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

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.

Iberian Subaltern Political Philosophies and The Radical Spanish Empire

This essay is part of The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below.

In The Radical Spanish Empire, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters offer an intriguing interpretation of the formation of the Spanish Empire across the Americas. They contend that from 1492 to the 1570s, the violence of conquest and the fall of pre-Hispanic rulers created openings for widespread questioning of social order and hierarchies. In this disordered period, various forms of political action emerged, which Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters describe as “radical.” This radicalism stemmed from wide-ranging and forceful critiques of the social order, the push for increased political participation across diverse social groups, and the rise of a “culture of doubt” unmatched in Europe at the time.

This was a period marked by intense political experimentation, in which multiple possibilities coexisted and the final outcome remained uncertain for a long time. As the Crown struggled to assert authority over the newly conquered lands, various forms of lordship emerged, the most notable led by conquistadors. Simultaneously, religious orders pursued their own project. Committed to “protecting” Indigenous peoples who had been Christianized, missionaries gained significant influence, while also becoming agents of far-reaching cultural change and of the destruction of Indigenous practices, beliefs, and institutions.

Within this context, numerous Indigenous, Ladino, and Spanish voices made themselves heard, each advancing its own vision of the society emerging from the violence and devastation of conquest. Critiques of established authorities, social hierarchies, new elites, and prevailing orthodoxies likewise proliferated. Many of these accusations employed the language of “tyranny,” a longstanding political idiom in Western Europe for criticizing abuses of power and illegitimate rule. Conquistadors and missionaries increasingly faced harsh criticism, as did native lords who had risen to prominence through their alliances with the Spanish.

Those opposing “tyranny” turned to the legal structures established by the Spanish and used officially recognized tools of opposition and resistance. This involved what the authors call “paperwork”: a range of practices for producing and circulating documents, which served both to expose injustices to the Crown and to seek reward for services. This bottom-up communication system enabled people from extremely diverse social and ethnic backgrounds to participate in political debates, thus contributing to the emergence of complex political factions.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters’s book thus makes a bold contribution to discussions of the formation of colonial Latin America. A key aspect of the study is its shift of focus toward the political participation driven by what they describe as “paperwork” and “lawfare” politics. The impact of accusations of tyranny, a central element of Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’s argument, takes on greater significance when understood in the wider legal and political context of the time. “Lawfare” was highly effective because of the pervasive importance of justice, a concept that occupied a central place in both lettered discourse and wider understandings of political order. Although its meaning could vary across contexts, justice and its associated language were omnipresent, as were ideals of governance directed toward the so-called “common good.” Conversely, tyranny was widely conceived as the antithesis of just rule.

In the context of the Spanish Empire, local populations adopted and adapted this language, thereby becoming coproducers of a society as legalistic as its European counterpart. Their primary aim, as Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters make clear, was to employ the language of justice as a strategic tool in conflicts. Furthermore, they used it to develop new conceptions of governance, ranging from complete independence to arrangements for coexistence under Spanish rule.

The authors of The Radical Spanish Empire appropriately use the term “vassals” to refer to the population that engaged in “lawfare.” In early modern Spanish legal thought and practice, the term “vassal” broadly described individuals, mostly men—not women—from diverse backgrounds, who were generally Christians, recognized the authority of the Spanish king, and were subject to his law. As in any lord–vassal relationship, this status entailed both obligations and rights. Among the latter, a key entitlement was the right to petition the Crown. It is precisely this dimension that Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’s book explores extensively.

Giving center stage to manuscript ‘paperwork’ and building on the work of Fernando Bouza Álvarez, Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters offer a new interpretation of the political significance of communication. In their view, the most “radical” features of the Spanish Empire were articulated and circulated chiefly through manuscript records rather than printed texts. In their relationship with the Crown, the “vassals” used the language of justice in manuscript communication to seek privileges, defend their autonomy, or involve royal officials in factional conflicts. Simultaneously, they sought to limit the Crown’s interference in local matters, preserving significant self-government in matters of justice, economic affairs, and defense.

Portugal unido y separado: Felipe II, la unión de territorios y la condición política del reino de Portugal by Pedro Cardim (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 2014).

The Radical Spanish Empire also shows that the destruction wrought by conquest opened opportunities for political participation distinct from those in Europe. Compared with Europe, where communities enjoyed long-standing autonomies, the post-conquest Americas saw the establishment of many new political institutions. The concrete experience of establishing new communities produced fresh perspectives on politics. A distinctly local worldview emerged, challenging the assumption that social and political structures naturally reflected divine creation. This is closely linked to the authors’ broader emphasis on the rise of a culture marked by skepticism, administrative uncertainty, and the persistent questioning of authority. The experience of colonization demonstrated that institutions and systems of governance were fundamentally human creations and therefore subject to change. People from diverse social backgrounds came to understand, in concrete ways, that collective life could be transformed through human action. Among the results were the foundation of many local self-governing bodies and episodes of intense republican experimentation.

This perspective is particularly important for reconsidering the role of ordinary actors in the production of knowledge about politics. As the authors acknowledge, archival sources largely preserve the viewpoints of authorities and elites. They often portray popular political action as disorderly and depict non-elite groups as incapable of developing coherent political ideas, let alone of executing rational, orderly political movements. Yet the cases studied by Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters show that larger segments of society reflected on the political order they inhabited, challenged it, acted strategically within it, and transformed it.

The book also stresses that participatory politics should not be equated with a political order based on equality. Its eventual outcome was a corporate and hierarchical society of orders that remained fundamentally elitist. Collective life continued to be shaped by a long-standing conception of the political community in which social order rested on inequality. Political power remained largely concentrated in the hands of local elites, while women, enslaved people, and other groups were effectively excluded from meaningful political participation. What emerged, therefore, was a form of participation aimed at preserving the influence of local elites and reinforcing their authority. Not surprisingly, the Crown sanctioned it.

This book also offers novel perspectives on the ongoing debate about how royal authority was strengthened. Traditionally, the strengthening of royal power in America has been attributed to several factors: the absence of intermediary powers comparable to those of Europe; the presence of populations even more disenfranchised than the popular classes in Europe; the prevalence of slavery and other forms of unfreedom among Indigenous peoples, Africans, and their descendants, which encouraged a more authoritarian form of rule that permitted more frequent recourse to brute violence; and a greater reliance, compared with Europe, on extraordinary forms of governance grounded in the delegation of authority to military officials. The Radical Spanish Empire offers a more nuanced explanation for why royal authority became more “absolute” in the “New World” earlier than in Europe. The authors suggests that the move toward an “absolute” form of power was the Crown’s reaction to the capacity of local populations in the Americas to produce their own knowledge about social order. The argument would gain still greater force if Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters were to weave their insights into ongoing debates about the reality of the “absolutist” project – an ideology that many early modern observers associated with the perils of unchecked rule, characteristic of tyrants. That association extended to the use of “absolute” itself as a pejorative label for rulers.  

Otomí neighborhood contracts from Cutzio, recording negotiated tribute obligations to both a seigneurial lord and the Spanish Crown. Códice Huetamo, Biblioteca Francisco Xavier Clavijero, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico. Public domain.

Comparing the picture presented in this book with that of colonial Brazil helps us evaluate how broadly this interpretative framework applies to other American contexts. Devastation, violent dispossession, and seigneurialization – mainly, but not only, in the form of donatary captaincies – were also early features of Portuguese conquest and colonization. However, the donatary captaincies were not merely a temporary stage soon superseded by royal authority. In many places, conquest was followed by prolonged seigneurial arrangements, with the Crown only gradually assuming a limited degree of control over the lands and their inhabitants. In some parts of Brazil, the seigneurial framework endured into the later colonial period, as illustrated by the Garcia d’Ávila family, whose extensive landed domain made them one of the principal regional powers in the Bahian hinterland well into the eighteenth century. Also noteworthy is the establishment of new captaincies throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in newly conquered territories in the deep backlands of South America.  

Naturally, the diversity and characteristics of Indigenous societies and cultures were crucial in shaping the distinctive historical trajectory of Portuguese America compared to that of the Spanish Empire. Factionalism within Indigenous groups was present in colonial Brazil from the very beginning. The first Portuguese settlements on the Piratininga plateau are a case in point: a complex political landscape, based on “alliances” with local Indigenous peoples, took shape there, and the settlement of São Paulo exemplifies such “alliances.” As John Manuel Monteiro, José Carlos Vilardaga and many others have shown, São Paulo sustained one of the most protracted experiences of autonomous self-government and resistance to missionary (Jesuit) and royal authority of the colonial period. Crucially, both Indigenous populations and mamelucos were not merely subject to this volatile environment but active participants in articulating distinct ideas of social order.

Additional patterns emerged in different parts of Atlantic South America. The Temiminó and Tupiniquim peoples, who allied with the Portuguese to expel the French and their Indigenous allies from Guanabara Bay in the mid-sixteenth century, rapidly adopted the Portuguese language of graça e mercê. As Regina Celestino de Almeida has noted, some Temiminó and Tupiniquim leaders even labeled themselves “conquistadors” in petitions to the Portuguese king seeking recognition and privileges. In doing so, the Temiminó and Tupiniquim were among the first Indigenous groups to enter a broader culture of “paperwork” akin to that highlighted by Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters. João Fragoso and Nuno Monteiro have likewise shown that the Portuguese Atlantic world became the setting for intense “paperwork,” involving petitions, confirmations of privileges, and efforts to draw the Crown into local disputes. However, both in Brazil and in Maranhão-Pará, Indigenous involvement in “lawfare” was much more limited and occurred later than across the Spanish Empire, mostly from the late seventeenth century onward. As for the creation of Indigenous municipalities in Portuguese America, this occurred only in the latter half of the eighteenth century, in the context of the “Indian Directorate” policy, which rested on a rationale entirely different from that of the cabildos de indios. Nonetheless, several of the so-called vilas de índios established at the time assembled some of the most comprehensive collections of legislation in Portuguese America. As Vânia Losada Moreira has shown, their goal was to use this legal material in “lawfare” to secure their lands against settler encroachment.

Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’s remarks regarding the instrumental role of history writing also apply to Brazil. From the early seventeenth century onwards, and especially after the end of the Dutch Wars in 1654, Brazilian elites sponsored chronicles that emphasized their loyalty to the Crown while simultaneously asserting their privileges and autonomy. Similar dynamics emerged in the aftermath of local rebellions against missionaries or royal officials in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, São Luís do Maranhão, Recife, Belém, and other colonial centers. In the eighteenth century, as Iris Kantor has shown, Brazilian history writing tended to soften the violence of the early conquest, commemorate the leading conquering families in each region, downplay the rebellions that had occurred in the meantime, and exoticize Indigenous peoples and their role in colonization.

Eighteenth-century Brazil, particularly Minas Gerais, was also the scene of many riots and intense debates over political rights, mostly due to the Crown’s aggressive fiscal and surveillance policies. Luciano Figueiredo and Kirsten Schultz, among others, have shown that Minas witnessed demands for more participatory forms of governance, broader consent in fiscal matters, and the articulation of political ideas that bear comparison with the “radicalism” identified by Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters.

Additional issues worth considering include the massive presence of Africans and their descendants (whether enslaved, freed, or free) in colonial Brazil. This raises significant questions about how political languages circulated and were adopted in a society where their presence was so widespread, especially from the late sixteenth century onward. What ideas of tyranny, justice, and political order arose from maroon experiences – the best-known example in colonial Brazil being the Quilombo dos Palmares, studied by Silvia Hunold Lara and others? How should we understand Jesuit concerns, examined by Ronaldo Vainfas or Carlos Zeron, regarding the political ideas and institutional arrangements developed within maroon communities? What forms of political thought took shape within Black brotherhoods and other Afro-Brazilian organizations through the manuscript communication studied by Luiz Geraldo Silva? Although the archival records sometimes make these questions difficult to answer, surviving traces in archives point to diverse and sophisticated vernacular political traditions.

A 1769 royal decree declaring all slaves from America, Africa, & Asia free once they reach Portuguese ports

As noted above, Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’s book highlights the diffusion of languages of contestation and cultures of doubt, thus converging with themes explored by Stuart Schwartz in All Can Be Saved. Importantly, Schwartz provides numerous examples of skepticism and questioning of contemporary order not only across the Americas but also in the Iberian Peninsula itself. His work is thus an important inspiration for reexamining the many riots of early modern Castile, Aragon, and Portugal, moving beyond the traditional view of these episodes as merely “anti-fiscal” protests. Historians should instead follow Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters’s approach and examine the broader political claims and ideas that both fueled and emerged from these collective actions. Such an approach necessarily requires a critical reading of the archive, which has consistently portrayed these uprisings as chaotic, irrational, and devoid of political order.  

One thing is certain: by emphasizing the creative aspect of “lawfare” and its broad social engagement, The Radical Spanish Empire illuminates forms of republicanism cultivated across the Americas, often missing from narratives that portray republican thought as mainly European. Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters correctly argue that the local knowledge produced in the context of “paperwork” should be incorporated into the history of republican thought. This would help undermine the diffusionist views that see the evolution of political ideas as originating in Northern European lettered milieus and spreading outward. Such a move would also call into question the traditional contrast between Spanish and British colonization in the Americas, and would align the book with recent research that critically questions the image of early English America as the stage for the development of a representative political system built from below by allegedly virtuous settlers through a straightforward bottom-up process.

Equally certain is that we still have limited knowledge about the political languages produced by the majority of the population. This applies both to the colonial Americas and the Spanish Monarchy’s European territories. Very little is known, for instance, about the political thought produced in craft guilds across the Iberian Peninsula. James Amelang’s work, among others, has shown that these labor organizations developed their own discourses challenging social inequality, unequal taxation, and aristocratic privileges. They also advocated expanding political participation and fiercely criticized prevailing practices of consent and representation that excluded them. Some went further, contesting the ideas of consensus populi, arguing that they were a means of effectively disenfranchising the majority of the population.

Another productive line of inquiry would be to revisit moments of acute political crisis, during which archives, despite their many filters and limitations, often preserve a broader range of voices than in periods of relative stability. Records produced during episodes of upheaval, including in the Iberian Peninsula, contain not only numerous denunciations of tyranny or appeals to the right of resistance against unjust rulers but also recurrent traces of political thought, including republican ideas. In Portugal during the crises of 1580 and 1640, in Aragon in 1591, and in Catalonia both in 1640 and again during the War of the Spanish Succession, many took advantage of political turmoil to articulate – and in some cases attempt to implement – republican-leaning ideas, including proposals for regime change. It is highly significant that royal authorities, together with members of the high nobility and the clergy, invariably became deeply alarmed whenever they detected signs that republican ideas were gaining traction among broad sectors of the population. Overall, The Radical Spanish Empire’s key achievement is to highlight that Spanish imperial expansion, despite its violent methods of imposing power, also promoted a particular style of politics, negotiation, and conflict. By giving center stage to Indigenous and Ladino actors and focusing on the use of “lawfare,” accusations of tyranny, and a culture of doubt, Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters offer a compelling and innovative view of how colonial American societies took shape.

Pedro Cardim is Professor of History at NOVA University Lisbon. He is the author of Portugal unido y separado: Felipe II, la unión de territorios y la condición política del reino de Portugal (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 2014), and co-editor, with Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro, of Political Thought in Portugal and its Empire, c.1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). His research focuses on early modern Iberian political thought, imperial governance, and colonial Brazil.

Bibliography

Albareda Salvadó, Joaquim. 2023. Vençuda Pero No Submisa: La Catalunya Del Segle XVIII (Barcelona: Edicions 62).

Almeida, Regina Celestino de. 2001. Metamorfoses Indígenas. Identidade e cultura nas aldeias coloniais do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional).

Bandeira, Luiz Alberto Moniz. 2000. O feudo. A Casa da Torre de Garcia d’Ávila: da conquista dos sertões à independência do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira),

Bouza Álvarez, Fernando. 2001. Corre manuscrito: Una historia cultural del Siglo de Oro. (Madrid: Marcial Pons).

Figueiredo, Luciano. 2003. “Narrativas das rebeliões – linguagem política e ideias radicais na América portuguesa moderna»,” Revista da Universidade de São Paulo, 111 (mar/maio 2003): 6-27.

Fragoso, João & Nuno Monteiro, (eds.). 2017. Um reino e suas repúblicas no Atlântico. Comunicações políticas entre Portugal, Brasil e Angola nos séculos XVII e XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Record).

Gil Pujol, Xavier. 1998. “El discurs reialista a la Catalunya dels Àustries fins al 1652, en el seu context europeu,” Pedralbes, 18 (1998), vol. II: 475-487.

Gil Pujol, Xavier. 2002. “Republican Politics in Early Modern Spain: the Castilian and Catalano-Aragonese Traditions,” in Martin Van Gelderen & Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism. A Shared European Heritage, vol. I – Republicanism and Constitutionalism in Early Modern Europe. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 263-384.

Kantor, Iris. 2004. Esquecidos e Renascidos. Historiografia Acadêmica Luso-Americana, 1724-1759. São Paulo-Salvador: Hucitec).

Lara, Silvia Hunold. 2007. « Marronnage et pouvoir colonial. Palmares, Cucaú et les frontières de la liberté au Pernambouc à la fin du XVIIe siècle, » Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, vol. 67, n. 3, 2007: 639-662.

Monteiro, John Manuel. 2018. Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Moreira, Vânia Losada. 2014. “Cartografia de um conflito: reformas pombalinas e sobreposição de direitos em sesmarias de índios” in R. Chambouleyron & K.H. Arenz (eds.), Anais do IV Encontro Internacional de História Colonial. Terra e império: os direitos de propriedade na América portuguesa em perspectiva comparada (Belém: Açaí): vol. 2, 228-234.

Schultz, Kirsten. 2023. From Conquest to Colony. Empire, Wealth & Difference in 18th century Brazil. (New Haven-London: Yale University Press).

Schwartz, Stuart B. 2010. All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press).

Silva, Luiz Geraldo. 2001. “Esperança de liberdade: Interpretações populares da abolição ilustrada (1773-1774),” Revista de História, São Paulo, (144-2002): 107-149.

Vainfas, Ronaldo. 2011. Antônio Vieira, Jesuíta do rei (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras). 

Vilardaga, José Carlos. 2014. São Paulo no império dos Felipes. Conexões na América Meridional (1580-1640). São Paulo: FAPESP- Intermeios.

Zeron, Carlos. 2011. “O governo dos escravos nas constituições primeiras do arcebispado da Bahia e na legislação portuguesa: separação e complementaridade entre pecado e delito,” in E. S. Souza & Bruno Feitler (eds.), A Igreja no Brasil. (São Paulo: Editora Unifesp): 323-354.

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.

Lawfare and the Legal Construction of Race in The Radical Spanish Empire

This essay is part of The Radical Spanish Empire Roundtable, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below.

Reading The Radical Spanish Empire made me reflect on the experience of two historical subjects. The first subject is Domingo, a natural of Goa in the Portuguese Indies who sued for his freedom in Lima’s royal court in 1561. The second is Manuel Quintín Lame, an indigenous, self-taught lawyer from southern Colombia who rose to fame in the early 20th century. Though separated by three centuries and across different lands, both men deployed the strategies of lawfare to demand freedom (in Domingo’s case), and communal land rights (in Lame’s case) through recourse to creative interpretations of property law and equity. In 1562, Domingo claimed that he had been wrongfully enslaved by the regent of Trujillo. Domingo put forth multiple and overlapping identitarian arguments: free soil, free womb, and the absence of bodily marks that would have designated his enslaved status.[1] Centuries later, Manuel Quintín Lame (1880-1967) penned numerous petitions to Colombian authorities demanding communal land rights. Lame based his demands on an idiosyncratic corpus of ideas about justice, statutory law, neo-scholastic jurisprudence and his visions and hallucinations.[2] His photo (reproduced in the Radical Spanish Empire, p.359), and his elaborate signature evoking the florid royal seal of Yo el rey paperwork, have become symbols of the contemporary indigenous movement and popular icons of resistance to unjust rule.

Domingo is less well known in the historical record. Yet his case is important for the insights about the foundational role of paperwork and race-making that the authors articulate in The Radical Spanish Empire. Domingo, a natural, subject of Goa, distanced himself from the enslaveability or personal service that accompanied African or indigenous (American) birth. In asserting a hybrid, oblique, free-soil-free womb claim, Domingo in fact created and demarcated a racialized legal space of wrongful enslavement and inter-imperial harm. His inter-imperial, Christian claim of wrongful enslavement would have made more sense in Oran than it did in 16th century Lima, and one wonders whether his notary had rescate (ransom) on his mind when he wrote Domingo’s petition. Ultimately, plaintiffs protesting their enslavement throughout the Spanish empire marshalled whatever arguments they hoped would resonate within the casuistic jurisprudential canon in order to prevail in their cases.[3] While Domingo’s case serendipitously fits into the five-decade timeline set out by the authors in the Radical Spanish Empire, it unfolded three years before the Spanish crown officially launched its transpacific enterprise in 1565. What was Domingo doing in Lima three years before the Manila Galleon sailed across the Pacific in 1565? What racialized and juridical category would have authorized his presence in the City of Kings besides enslavement?

Race, as we think about it today, was infrequently deployed in the sixteenth century. Historians and scholars of colonial racial formations have settled on casta and calidad, despairing of finding equivalent terms for racialization in the early modern world and the colonial Americas. Calidad, religious virtue, status, and gender also intersected powerfully with racialized identities. These intersections afforded individuals a measure of autonomy to choose among permissible racial identities—between the ascribed and the self-imposed.  Caste, more than race, determined one’s legal subjecthood and influenced an individual’s life options. Caste could predict where one lived, the sodality to which one belonged, the trade or profession one engaged in, and played an outsized role in social mobility. But did paperwork create race or caste?

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 by Michelle A. McKinley, Cambridge University Press, 2016.

In responding to the Radical Spanish Empire, I have been tasked with discussing whether the historiography of racial categories and caste mirrors a kind of ontological Spanish racism. Extensive scholarly debates about Iberian notions of difference have largely pivoted around race before racialization. Scholars, particularly in literary and cultural studies acknowledge that the fields of Black Studies and Early Modern Studies are long overdue for an Afrocentric accounting of early modern studies of race. Other scholars of early modern Iberia insist that race is a modern construct that arose in tandem with the Atlantic slave trade. In my view, this latter temporal argument is insufficient. Afro-descendant people were active cultural agents driving a host of artistic, literary, and religious innovations in the Renaissance, and these innovations were foundational to race and difference in the early modern world. While the authors of the Radical Spanish Empire wisely refrain from wading into the minefield of racialization, presentism, whiteness and early modern studies, the questions they raise regarding ethnogenesis and documentary racial production highlight the limits of conventional accounts of race in the Iberian Americas.

The authors articulate two metanarratives: the cultural-civilizationist and the Hispanist, that have produced important, groundbreaking scholarship on racial formations in the Americas. The top-down culturalist view is that mestizaje affirmed racial mixing, but maintained white superiority through taxonomies of racial fractions, and encouraged social mobility through whitening (which was achieved through assimilation, religious conversion, and inter-marriage. What bothers me about this rendition is that whitening is assumed without darkening. A worms-eye-view in the dross of paperwork shows how ordinary men and women negotiated these classifications, how they dealt with each other, how they procreated, loved, hated, and fought both up and down the socio-racial scale. The mundane cases of ordinary men and women reveal how their understandings of their status reinforced and challenged elite notions of ordered hierarchies given the ambiguities of lived experience. As such, neither the cultural-civilizationist nor the Hispanist metanarratives account for Domingo as a racialized subject. So how could he emerge as a legal subject? Both authors would agree that both cultural and Hispanist metanarratives are insufficient. According to the culturalist model, Domingo would be a hybrid subject born out of a civilizational clash between Europeans and indigenous or African peoples. Yet, as a legal subject, Domingo was not arguing for his hybrid identity. Rather, he adamantly articulated a legal identity as a subject from another place and another empire who was illegitimately enslaved. Domingo used an idea of birthplace (naturaleza) that was favored by many litigants in the 16th and 17th century Philippines who argued that all indios were loyal vassals and that therefore they should be considered free.[4] However, Philippine litigants did not extend their privileged identity to include people from Goa. Thus, had Domingo tried that argument in situ it probably would have backfired. But the legal bricolage he demonstrated could only have emerged through the lawfare paperwork on display in the Radical Spanish Empire.

This does not mean that Domingo had no place within the heady hybridity of mestizaje and ethnogenesis. A famous 1613 census commissioned by viceroy Montesclaros to track down tax and tribute evading indigenous people did in fact equate indios from Goa with indigenous Andeans.[5] However, Domingo would not have identified himself as a hybrid mestized subject, especially since claiming that identity would have imperiled his case for freedom. Domingo’s claim to racial distinctiveness may sit more comfortably with contemporary Hispanists. Loosely organized under the theoretical umbrella of comparative studies of race, ethnicity, and citizenship, scholars examine a Spanish empire that “embraced racial mixing, allow[ed] manumission of slaved through self-purchase, and gave political rights to both Indigenous and free Black subjects” (p. 18). While I would locate my own scholarship in this stream, the authors take issue with its top-down emphasis on “civilizing harmonization…. and the inspiring story of integration and collaboration” (18). The authors are careful to acknowledge the breadth of nuanced scholarship that accounts for colonial violence that emerged in tandem with Indigenous and non-elite agency. However, they are concerned with the omission of politics from these two particular metanarratives. I don’t find myself persuaded by the currency of the other two metanarratives as I think the scholarly conversation has long moved on from the Black Legend or the liberal top-down frameworks. Scholars and students of the 16th century will be more interested in the book’s claims about paperwork and the making of race.

Petition to the Archbishop of Lima requesting a divorce, 1789.

The Radical Spanish Empire exhaustively traces the bottom-up usage of four types of paperwork: gracia, justicia, gobierno, and their respective offshoots that literally and figuratively joined the Americas with the peninsula. Each of these administrative processes generated reams of associated paperwork. One genre relied on (or mutually constituted) the other— criminal and civil lawsuits were integral to subsequent audits, gobierno petitions spawned administrative or ecclesiastical visits to extirpate undesired (tyrannical, heretical, fraudulent) behavior. As the authors point out, “Spanish imperial justice was deeply socially unequal by design, but it was also extraordinarily participatory” (p.8 my emphasis). Gracia petitioning was so “participatory and intuitive that virtually anyone could attempt a reinvention” (p.227). This emphasis on participatory, bottom-up petitioning “transformed paperwork into a raucous, radical affair” (p.9). To show how paperwork was both legal and lethal, the authors invoke the polysemic term “lawfare” that has been deployed in other martial and settler colonial contexts to link sovereign violence with legal forms of dispossession.[6] More often than not, the Radical Spanish Empire falls along the insubordinate side of lawfare rather than on the side of sovereign violence. As a reader, I prefer the lawfare framing over (yet) another empirical narrative of indigenous resistance or accommodation. Yet sometimes I wondered what paperwork was doing in the book—it was everything and everywhere all at once. The requerimiento was paperwork. It was also the harbinger of incredible violence.[7] The procedural omission of reading the Requerimiento was far more available as a remedy to religious dissidents than it was to Indigenous peoples. Native disputants did catch on that procedural omissions were arguments they could muster in their complaints, but they used different arguments about corporal punishment and overwork. Enslaved Africans also complained when their owners and overseers forced them to work on Sundays, framing their grievances in the register of faithful Catholics denied the sacraments by sacrilegious warlords. The requerimiento seemed far from their minds.

The fact that a complainant filed paperwork did not make their problems go away and could aggravate them. Often when people filed complaints it was for far more modest purposes than the authors suggest. True, most of the book focuses on much grander actors with genealogical and financial claims that interested the Crown. However, the authors query whether actions can be simultaneously “radical” and “traditional (p.166).” Can supplicants be radical? A case in point was the petition filed by a group of mulatos in 1570 in Mexico to establish a hospital where they could seek treatment.[8] Led by the tailor Juan Bautista, their petition called the King’s attention to the fact that Mexico City’s population of more than 6,000 mulatos did not have a hospital where they could receive treatment. In contrast, Spaniards and naturales (Indigenous) subjects had their own designated (segregated) hospitals and clinics. They used a merit-based argument as loyal vassals to legitimate their claim for a hospital on consecrated ground and strategically framed their petition to appeal to King Philip’s sense of spatio-racial order. The petitioner’s plea for a hospital makes sense in a world of disease and violence. But I do not think Juan Bautista’s petition “sustained the radical dismemberment of conquistador power” (p.73). Juan Bautista’s petition conformed to the medieval register of pleading, favors, and grace, but the petitioners’ potentially subversive status as mulatos needed to be overcome by establishing loyal vassalage. In the vein of invented traditions, radicalism could be traditional in that petitioners “mobilized tradition to their own ends” (p.166).

The authors acknowledge the problematic designation of the term “Indian” in the documents. Like the frustrated census taker in 1613 Lima, the distant Crown depended on paperwork to define who was Indio, what dispensation came with the term, and what privileges accrued to those designated as naturales after 1542. According to the authors, “Much hinged on how petitioners and litigants framed this legal construct; life or death issues like tribute, labor, slavery, and self-government were contingent on officials’ understanding of Indio-ness” (p.264). Once again, we should ask whether paperwork made race or created racial loopholes? In numerous divorce petitions that I have reviewed for 16th and 17th century Lima, ecclesiastical authorities decried Indigenous complainants as masquerading “mestizas en hábito de india.” Other Spanish defendants seeking to discredit their opponents in the nasty tactics of tacha lawfare claimed that enslaved or Indigenous status prevented deponents from understanding the solemnity of oath-taking. At times, peninsular-born Afro-descent petitioners were denounced as too “ladino” by Jesuits and other would-be confessors who sought to prevent African-born (bozal) parishioners from developing intra-ethnic solidarities.

Indigenous woman petitioning an Indigenous council (cabildo) after being accused of adultery by a priest, from Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615/1616). Det Kongelige Bibliotek (Royal Danish Library), GKS 2232 4°, p. 668.

Given how frequently racial anxieties surface in the judicial and legislative record, the authors claim that “In Mexico, Peru, and beyond, the result of archivalization was the rise of self-described communities of mestizos, mulatos, negros, and the Nacion indiana. … These terms …. did not come from prefigured and inevitable Hispanic racial traditions rooted in medieval and Reconquista privileges or from the logic of capitalism as it transplanted itself into the Indies’ tropical soil. Rather they emerged from factional petitioning” (p.285-288). This account of racial archivalization is a unique contribution of the Radical Spanish Empire. In many 16th century accounts, Domingo and Juan Bautista would occupy indeterminate Indigenous and Black identities. As many contemporary scholars of racial formations in Latin America point out, Black sovereign identity has only succeeded when it is tied to land. Indeed, don Francisco de Arobe could claim the privileges of territorial sovereignty in the same way that Afro-Ecuadorians and Afro-Colombians in contemporary Chocó can invoke land title in an indigenous register. This brings us back to our auto-didact jurisprude, Manuel Quintín Lame who used the law to reclaim communal land. Lame, like many of the historical subjects in the Radical Spanish Empire destabilized hegemonic legal thinking with subaltern interpretations of law and justice, grounded in the experience of suffering, and a claim to reparation. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters have provided a sweeping account of the administrative history of the 16th century Spanish empire that shifts our thinking to the important role of legal and political thought from below. The Radical Spanish Empire highlights the power of the pen as it worked in tandem with the sword.

Michelle McKinley is the Bernard B. Kliks Professor of Law at the University of Oregon Law School. McKinley has extensively published work on public international law, Latin American legal history, and the law of slavery, including her monograph, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

[1] Archivo General de la Nación Real Audiencia-CI 1 Leg.6 Doc. 34, año 1561: Autos seguidos por Domingo, natural de la ciudad de Goa, en la India Portuguesa contra Francisco Pérez Lazcano, regidor y vecino de la ciudad de Trujillo porque siendo hijo de padres libres como lo son todos los naturales de aquella ciudad, Pérez Lazcano lo había privado de su libertad y se servía de él como esclavo; y lo había enviado al secretario de la real audiencia en la ciudad de los reyes Francisco de Carvajal para que lo vendiese como tal. El testigo Pedro Díaz, natural de los Algarves en Portugal decía que Domingo era libre, porque de otro modo estaría marcado con una cruz en el carrillo, como lo estaban todos los esclavos en Goa.

[2] The source of Lame’s knowledge of law remains a mystery. See, Fabio Gómez Cardona, “Manuel Lame en la confluencia del mito y la historia,” Historia y espacio 38 (Jan-June 2012), Joanne Rappaport, “Manuel Lame hoy.” In Los pensamientos del indio que se educó dentro de las selvas colombianas. Universidad del Cauca 2004: 51-109. Hallucinations are now de rigeur as sources of jurisprudence. See, Christopher Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History, Princeton University Press, 2020.

[3] See. e.g. Karen Graubart, “Pesa más la libertad, Legal claims and the history of Afro-Latin American ideas,” William & Mary Quarterly 78:3 (2021): 427-58; Casey Schmitt, The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking and Captivity in the Seventeenth Century Caribbean, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025, Chloe Ireton, “Black Africans Freedom Suits to Define Just War and Just Slavery in the Early Spanish Empire,” Renaissance Quarterly 73:4 (2020), 1179-1234.

[4] See, Stuart McManus and Rômulo Ehalt, “Regimes of Bondage: The Encounter between Early Modern European and Asian Slaveries,” Itinerario 47:3 (2023), 289-296.

[5] See, Michelle McKinley “The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Black): Racial Constructions of Culture and Cultural Constructions of Race in Latin America.” In Racial Formations in the 21st Century, Daniel Martinez-Hosang, Oneka LaBennett, & Laura Pulido, eds., University of California Press, 2012), 116-42. See also, Diego Javier Luis, The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, Harvard University Press, 2024, Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians, Cambridge University Press, 2014.

[6] See eg. Jean and John Comaroff, “Law and Disorder in the Postcolony,” Social Anthropology 15:2 (2007), 133-152. The term “lawfare” is particularly popular among scholars and practitioners of the law of armed conflict. A well-established blog “Lawfare” provides commentary for “hard national security choices.” The term is also commonly used in alternative, Global-south histories of international Law and empire. See, e.g. Anthony Anghie, “Rethinking International Law: A TWAIL Perspective,” European Journal of International Law 34:1 (2023) 7-112.

[7] See Yanay Israeli, “The Requerimiento in the Old World: Making Demands and Keeping Records in the Legal Culture of Late Medieval Castile.” Law & History Review   40:1 (2022) 37-62.

[8] Si saben q[ue] en esta çiudad y fuera della ay mas de seys myll mulatos y muchos dellos estan pobres y necesitados q[ue] q[uand]o adoleçen y les çubçeden algunas enfermedades no tienen donde yrse a curar por no los querer recoxer los hospitales que en esta d[ic]ha çiudad ay porque tienen solamente de recoger en ellos españoles e yndios digan. AGI, Juan de la Peña, Petición de mulatos, 1568. See, Miguel Valerio, “The Spanish Petition System, Hospital/ity and the Formation of A Mulato Community in 16th-Century Mexico,” The Americas 78:3 (2021): 415-37.

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.

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

Banner for We the King book review

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.

Book cover for We the King

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

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Native Drinking Cups of the New World by Riley Reynolds

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Ancient Zapotec Chocolate Vessel (Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art)

Syncretism and Marian Representations by Lily Folkerts

our-lady-of-the-rosary-of-pomata

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

bolsas

Manuscript showing syncretism of African and Portuguese Catholic representations

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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
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
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.

Guasco Front Cover

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
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

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You may also like:

Samantha Rubino’s review of An African Slaving Port on the Atlantic by Mariana Candido (2013)

and Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: Angola and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade by Roquinaldo Ferriera (2012)

Ernesto Mercado Montero discusses Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, by Kristen Block (2012)

Mark Sheaves reviews Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution 1750-1816, by Karen Racine (2002)

Bradley Dixon, Facing North From Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Ben Breen recommends Explorations in Connected History: from the Tagus to the Ganges (Oxford University Press, 2004), by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Christopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) by Barbara Fuchs

Jorge Esguerra-Cañizares discusses his book Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-170 (Stanford University Press, 2006) on Not Even Past.

Renata Keller discusses Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2007) by J.H. Elliott

Outlaws of the Atlantic, by Marcus Rediker (2014)

By Kristie Flannery

Outlaws of the AtlanticHow 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)

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)

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

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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You may also like:

Marcus Rediker’s wonderful explanation of the Frantz Zéphirin painting he used on the book cover.

Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History

Kristie Flannery, Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat

Ernesto Mercado-Montero reviews Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profits (The University of Georgia Press, 2012) by Kristen Block

Ben Breen recommends Explorations in Connected History: from the Tagus to the Ganges (Oxford University Press, 2004), by Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Christopher Heaney reviews Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) by Barbara Fuchs

Jorge Esguerra-Cañizares discusses his book Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-170 (Stanford University Press, 2006) on Not Even Past.

Renata Keller discusses Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in the Americas, 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2007) by J.H. Elliott

 

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