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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.

The Intra-American Slave Trade Database: A Review and Interview with Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki

banner image for The Intra-American Slave Trade Database: A Review and Interview with Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki

In honor of the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, the 2022 Lozano Long Conference focuses on archives with Latin American perspectives in order to better visualize the ethical and political implications of archival practices globally. The conference was held in February 2022 and the videos of all the presentation will be available soon. Thinking archivally in a time of COVID-19 has also given us an unexpected opportunity to re-imagine the international academic conference. This Not Even Past publication joins those by other graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.  The series as a whole is designed to engage with the work of individual speakers as well as to present valuable resources that will supplement the conference’s recorded presentations. This new conference model, which will make online resources freely and permanently available, seeks to reach audiences beyond conference attendees in the hopes of decolonizing and democratizing access to the production of knowledge. The conference recordings and connected articles can be found here.

En el marco del homenaje al centenario de la Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, la Conferencia Lozano Long 2022 propició un espacio de reflexión sobre archivos latinoamericanos desde un pensamiento latinoamericano con el propósito de entender y conocer las contribuciones de la región a las prácticas archivísticas globales, así como las responsabilidades éticas y políticas que esto implica. Pensar en términos de archivística en tiempos de COVID-19 también nos brindó la imprevista oportunidad de re-imaginar la forma en la que se llevan a cabo conferencias académicas internacionales. Como parte de esta propuesta, esta publicación de Not Even Past se junta a las otras de la serie escritas por estudiantes de posgrado en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. En ellas los estudiantes resaltan el trabajo de las y los panelistas invitados a la conferencia con el objetivo de socializar el material y así descolonizar y democratizar el acceso a la producción de conocimiento. La conferencia tuvo lugar en febrero de 2022 pero todas las presentaciones, así como las grabaciones de los paneles están archivados en YouTube de forma permanente y pronto estarán disponibles las traducciones al inglés y español respectivamente. Las grabaciones de la conferencia y los artículos relacionados se pueden encontrar aquí.

In 2018, Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki published the Intra-American Slave Trade database to the Slave Voyages project, which now records more than 27,000 slave voyages across the Americas.[1] After enslaved people disembarked from their forced Trans-Atlantic journeys, many more were re-shipped and dispersed across the Americas to French, Dutch, English, Spanish, and Portuguese outposts and ports. Each unit in the database is composed of a single vessel’s voyage between its place of embarkation and disembarkation of captives. Sources such as port logs, merchant papers, and the logs of import duties record the arrival and departure of slaving vessels. The database includes records on voyages dating from the mid-sixteenth century to the later end of the mid-nineteenth century.

Screenshot of the homepage of the Intra-American Slave Trade Database which reads: This database contains information on more than 11,000 maritime voyages trafficking enslaved people within the Americas. These slave trades operated within colonial empires, across imperial boundaries, and inside the borders of nations such as the United States and Brazil. Explore the forced removals, which not only dispersed African survivors of the Atlantic crossing but also displaced enslaved people born in the Americas.

In line with the theme of the 2022 Lozano Long Conference, “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives,” O’Malley and Borucki’s project sheds light on the significance of Latin America in the broader interconnected development of Atlantic Slavery throughout the Americas. Those visiting the database will find that the bulk of the intra-American slave trade was directed predominately towards the Spanish American mainland and Caribbean colonies. Indeed, the mainland Spanish colonies alone received 38% of the total volume of the Intra-American slave trade that crossed colonial boundaries.[2]

Notable re-export colonies included Portuguese Brazil and British Jamaica, where local merchants transshipped many thousands of enslaved people to other colonies. Such data illuminates the importance of what scholars have referred to as the entangled and integrated nature of the broader Atlantic world. Moreover, the data presented by the database illustrates the centrality of Latin America in broader conversations about the Atlantic concerning archives, slavery, and the African diaspora.

In my interview with O’Malley and Borucki, I asked a series of questions, encouraging them to reflect on some of the project’s significant challenges, insights, and contributions. In what follows is a brief introduction to their work through an abridged recap of our engaging conversation.[3] Borucki’s initial research examined enslaved people working on cattle ranches along the borders between Uruguay and Brazil. While working on his dissertation under the supervision of David Eltis, who was then compiling the first online iteration of the TAST (Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade) database, Borucki came across extensive documentation of trans-imperial slave trafficking leading to the colonies in the Rio de la Plata and Venezuela. Since that time, his focus has been on slave trafficking and the routes enslaved people took, shaping their experiences and identities in Latin America (particularly Montevideo and Buenos Aires). O’Malley’s interest in the intra-American slave trade was also sparked after encountering a profuse body of records documenting inter-imperial slave trafficking between different British imperial colonies.

This court register is an example of the resources available through the Slave Trade database. The photo shows the first page of the court’s register of "Liberated Africans" taken from the "Felicidade The Brigantine," a ship captured at sea by British cruisers and adjudicated at a court established at Sierra Leone under international anti-slave trade treaties. The register was kept as a formal record of emancipation that helped protect the individual from subsequent re-enslavement.
This court register is an example of the resources available through the Slave Trade database. The photo shows the first page of the court’s register of “Liberated Africans” taken from the “Felicidade The Brigantine,” a ship captured at sea by British cruisers and adjudicated at a court established at Sierra Leone under international anti-slave trade treaties. The register was kept as a formal record of emancipation that helped protect the individual from subsequent re-enslavement. The image is reproduced courtesy of the British National Archives. Source: British National Archives, Foreign Office, ser. 84, vol. 231, p. 177.

Among the many challenges O’Malley and Borucki faced compiling the database, perhaps the most significant was accounting for the issue of the intra-American contraband slave trade. While scholars have widely acknowledged evidence of the commonplace and ubiquity of illicit slave trafficking, accounting for the phenomena in the database posed a methodological challenge. The difficulties in acquiring and assessing records of clandestine slave trafficking challenge the ability to quantitatively account for it since a single slave voyage constitutes a unit in the database. Furthermore, Borucki notes that in many instances, the records that account for enslaved people as contraband lack sufficient details and information necessary for the identification of a slave voyage.

For example, he explains that in Venezuela, the records for the enslaved people who entered as contraband, as documented in individual records, show that they become legalized property through a regulated process called indulto. However, these sources lack information to connect these individuals to a specific slave voyage. Like the issue of accounting for the illicit slave trade, O’Malley notes the lack of data on the intra-American slave trade to the French Caribbean, which he and Borucki recognize as being vastly underrepresented in the database. Throughout much of the colonial period, the French colonies were on the receiving end of this contraband trafficking however, as Borucki observed, the French seldom produced records detailing these networks from their vantage point.

Nevertheless, in tracing the trafficking of enslaved people across imperial boundaries, O’Malley stated that “building the database forced me to reckon with how entangled empires were.” “I thought when I was starting out that I was mostly working on a project of movements of people within the British Empire and especially from the Caribbean to the North American colonies,” he explains. “But during the quantitative work of tracking all of these movements, I came across all of these voyages going out from Jamaica and other places, to Spanish colonies and French colonies.”

In Borucki’s research on Black social organizations and Catholic confraternities in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, he found that many enslaved people were not African-born but were born and trafficked from Brazil. Such communities had forged networks and connections between the Rio de la Plata and Brazil, further illustrating the importance of intra-American slave trading. Likewise, Borucki explains that this project raises questions about the trafficking of slaves and the trans-imperial formation of Black communities––their movement, experiences, and ideas that flow between imperial borders.  Together these complicate our idea of trans-imperial connections.

Enslaved people disembarking for sale at harbor in Brazil at some time in between the 1820s and 1830s
Enslaved people disembarking for sale at harbor in Brazil at some time in between the 1820s and 1830s. Source: “Debarquement”, Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora

For O’Malley, “the thing that’s most striking with the intra-American database, specifically, is the sense of the scope of slavery in the Americas.” Indeed, while the Trans-Atlantic slave trade gives you the immense scale of transatlantic trafficking, “those voyages tend to go to a relatively small number of ports over and over again.” However, the Intra-American database draws our attention to those far-flung outposts, colonial backwaters, and ports, that when viewed together with the TAST data, truly illustrate the ubiquity of slavery across the Americas. In particular, Borucki points out that there was “a very active traffic in slaves in the Pacific “from Panama going down to a Lima, Peru, also across South America, from Buenos Aires going down to the Magellan straits and then north into Lima, and also from Central America going north as well.”

It is his hope that future historians will be able to capture this data, “to have some kind of representation really––– each little archive in Oaxaca, in Michoacán, in the western parts of Mexico have records on enslaved people of African ancestry being moved around to the confines of the Americas.” As new research continues to come to the fore adding new perspectives to the way we understand the broader history of the African diaspora and slavery across the Americas, the intra-American database will continue to be of importance to a wide variety of educators and scholar.

Borucki is a contributor to the upcoming 2022 Lozano Long Conference, honoring the centennial of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, entitled “Archiving Objects of Knowledge with Latin American Perspectives.” Readers interested in learning more about their work are encouraged and invited to attend their panel at the conference entitled “Public, Access, and the Archival Dimensions of Digital Humanities.” For more information, stay tuned for updates at PORTAL, the Llilas Benson Latin American Studies and Collections official online magazine. 

Clifton E. Sorrell III is a third year History PhD student at the University of Austin at Texas. He earned a B.A in both African American Studies and History at the University of California, Davis, and is currently studying Atlantic Slavery and the African Diaspora under Professor Daina Ramey Berry. He is broadly interested in the politics of African Diaspora Freedom practice in the Anglophone-Spanish Caribbean in between the 17th and 18th century. His research covers a broad set of questions concerning African diasporic resistance in the inter-imperial geo-politics of the circum-Caribbean, gender, diasporic cultural politics and social recreation.

[1] “Intra-American Slave Trade,” Slave Voyages. Accessed November 10th, 2021. https://www.slavevoyages.org/american/about#methodology/0/introduction/0/en/

[2] Ibid

[3] I would like to thank Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki for taking the time to meet with me to conduct this interview. Clifton Sorrell in Conversation with (Authors) Gregory O’Malley and Alex Borucki (Conducted Nov. 9, 2021).

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 Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (2019) by Camila Townsend

2021 marks the five-hundred-year anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs, the arrival of the Spanish to the New World, and the clash of cultures that happened in Tenochtitlan on 12 August 1521 (in the Western calendar) have long captured the world’s attention. It has given shape to how we think of adventure, discovery, history, and time. It also taught humanity a valuable yet painful lesson: if societies do not document their histories, their memory is bound to disappear. When faced with this truism after all the plagues and wars, a small but important number of Aztec intellectuals born in New Spain wrote down the history of their people as it had been told and lived by their elders. They did so in the Nahuatl language and, as Camila Townsend argues, with the explicit intention of conserving Aztec memory. These documents are called the “Nahuatl Annals,” and they are the main source from which the history of this book is told. Townsend’s use of the Nahuatl Annals laid the foundation for a new history of the Aztecs. 

The Nahuatl Annals tell the history of the Conquest and rely on Nahuatl sources for these narrations. Indigenous intellectuals, who had recorded their experiences with the intention of preserving Aztec history, wrote these sources. In doing so, they recollected Aztec memory by recording the voices of their elders and their communities both through narration and song and by placing them in dialogue with their new reality. Because these sources were written in Nahuatl, the intended audiences were Nahuatl speakers. 

A facsimile of the Aztec Codex Borbonicus, a compilation of monthly celebrations, painted with natural materials on amatl bark paper.
A facsimile of the Aztec Codex Borbonicus, a compilation of monthly celebrations, painted with natural materials on amatl bark paper. Source: Xuan Che

For Townsend, writing a new history of the Aztecs means two interrelated things. First, it means changing the analytical perspective from Spanish-language sources to Nahuatl-language documents. The latter, the author argues, have been neglected as non-reliable source materials, while the former has been exalted as the model for truth in this historical narrative. Furthermore, Nahuatl-language documents interpretation, relevance, and reliability has long been a subject of contestation. By using them to tell the story, Townsend makes an argument for their use as useful and reliable historical sources. She argues that they are valuable sources of information that contain coherent narratives of pre-conquest and conquest processes in Central Mesoamerica.

This is not an isolated scholarly insight, but rather is the result of a historiographical process of interpretation of Nahuatl-language sources that goes back to the mid-twentieth century. Fifth Sun engages fully with debates on how to understand the sources in “their own terms” alongside the arguments presented by the school of New Philology. Ultimately, the book functions as a call for historians of Mesoamerica to translate and transcribe their sources themselves. Second, Fifth Sun aims to broaden the readership of Aztec history without overwhelming the non-specialist public with historiographical and highly technical debates on how to approach the sources. Instead, the author leaves room for the interested reader to approach this metadiscourse in the footnotes or in the superb Appendix “How Scholars Study the Aztecs.” 

book cover for Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs

Anyone who has read Townsend’s work knows that she is, above all, a very talented writer. Fortunately for all of us, Fifth Sun proves to be another beautifully written publication that keeps her readers engaged with the story from beginning to end. Each chapter begins with a small, fictionalized vignette that opens the way to the history encapsulated within each of the book’s ten chapters. As I heard her explain in a graduate zoom-course this semester, (one of the truly valuable things of zoom-graduate-school) these descriptions flow from her imagination but have a material basis in the repertoire of sources the author has read. Given that the objective of the book is to make public history socialize this strategy proves to be successful. Townsend’s style of writing history allows her to present the voices of the individuals she has encountered in the sources with a fuller narrative body, inviting readers to find and seek representation in the humanity of these historical characters. 

This invitation extends to the historically contingent experiences of women. This episode holds an important place in how western thought conceptualizes its historical time. However, due to the highly militaristic, and political approach to its study, the telling of this history has overwhelmingly been told through the actions and participation of masculine figures. In the mainstream writing of this history, “la Malinche” appears as the only female character of this episode only because her role was undeniable fundamental to the process of conquest. However, and as has been documented in relation to Hernán Cortes, attempts to erase her from the sources were made. “Some later said it was a woman who first saw them and shouted aloud, sounding the alarm” (117), Townsend writes when describing the escape of Cortés from Tenochtitlan the night of the 1st of July of 1520, a night remembered in history as la noche triste. When highlighted, small episodes, such as this one, reframe the readers appraisal of the social composition of Aztec society and of the active participation and involvement of women throughout the process of conquest. We, like the author, can now hear the voice of this anonymous Aztec woman living in Tenochtitlan bursting through the pages of history, a history that had erased her. 

Drawing of la Malinche, looking forward
Donna Marina (La Malinche). Source: “The Mastering of Mexico” by Kate Stephens (1916) New York: The MacMillan Company

Throughout Fifth Sun, the reader will encounter both small interventions like this and larger examples of participation of women’s participation. This emphasis on women’s roles gives a refreshing and most needed additional dimension of analysis to one of the most studied historical episodes in history. Furthermore, through these women and gender history perspectives, Townsend engages deeply with sexual and social relations and the problems that the change in paradigm brought on, such as the highly contested debates and confrontations around the issue of monogamy and polygamy. The reader will also find information on the history of homosexuality in Aztec culture—an overlooked (or ignored) subject.

Townsend explains that her book explores the tension between those who argue that the contemporary reader is trapped in their own particular anachronistic positionality and can never fully interact with the past, be it because of the language of the sources or because of the passing of time itself; and between those who argue that, in the end, and no matter our differences, we are all humans after all. If this is true, the argument goes, by reading the sources in their own language and relating to historical people in this way, some part of their persona can be reincarnated through the written word. The author aligns her research along the lines of the latter point. Thus, her ultimate goal is to vivify these characters and their histories from a different and as yet untold perspective that embellishes their existent multiple facets with new historical contour. Fifth Sun makes a big historical argument on the uses of sources and on the way to write history while remaining accessible to the general public. No doubt, Fifth Sun sets the bar very high, and its method should be replicated.  

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.

On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden by Elizabeth Hennessy (2019)

On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden. By Elizabeth Hennessy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xx + 310. 20 illustrations, notes, 4 maps, bibliography, and index. $30.00.

Located about 400 miles off the coast of Ecuador, the Galápagos Islands hold profound cultural importance as symbols of conservation, wild nature, and biodiversity. Charles Darwin visited the islands in 1835 and his encounters with the fauna of the Galápagos went on to shape his 1859 work On the Origin of Species. In contemporary times, statues of Charles Darwin await tourists in almost all of the small settlements on the islands. Scientists with UNESCO, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and the Charles Darwin Research Station on the archipelago, architects of the current conservation project, present conservation as a continuation of Darwin’s legacy. However, in many ways, by seeking to reconstruct a pure “state of nature,” the conservation efforts that started to take shape in the 1930s have led to a contradictory project of stripping the islands of past traces of humanity through far-reaching and sometimes violent intervention.

book cover

In On the Backs of Tortoises, Elizabeth Hennessy frames the lumbering, armored reptilians of the Galápagos as “boundary objects”—material points of convergence between different spheres of action—that have been encoded with seemingly bottomless layers of meaning over time. First encountered by desperate sailors or pirates in the South Pacific as a live-saving source of food and water, turtles have been transformed by scientists, international mass media, and tourism into conservation icons and the recipients of legal protections. Simultaneously, local fishermen, often demonized by international media, despise the turtles as a metonym of the broader conversation project.

Drawing from extensive fieldwork conducted in the Galápagos working alongside scientists, as well as archival research using a mix of unpublished correspondence and published scientific articles and books, Hennessy weaves together a lively and engaging historical narrative that shines a light on the contradictions inherent in the current discourse of biological conservation. While conservation is often misrepresented as apolitical, Hennessy shows how the movement to establish the islands as nature preserves represented a continuation of imperial power dynamics. The Ecuadorian state had a vested political interest in developing the archipelago, which clashed directly with the interests of American and European scientists who wished to prevent species like the giant tortoises from going extinct. Although the local economy depends on tourism and the conservation industry, living in a nature preserve subjects galapagueños to increased policing and restriction. In fact, many of the leading scientists at the research station openly discuss the very presence of people in the Galápagos as a nuisance.

Galápagos Giant Tortoises at the Charles Darwin Research Station
Galápagos Giant Tortoises at the Charles Darwin Research Station, Isla Santa Cruz, the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador. Source: Elias Rovielo

In this way, Hennessy’s work inserts itself into well-established historiographical conversations about colonial conservation initiatives in environmental history. Others works along similar lines include Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism or Ramachandra Guha’s The Unquiet Wood. At the same time, the book is also well-grounded in methodologies from the history of science. This shows through particularly well in Hennessy’s fieldwork with the scientists and fishermen of the Galápagos. Bringing these two fields into conversation, combined with interventions drawn from political ecology and animal history, she destabilizes hegemonic assumptions about the difference between “nature” and “culture,” which have informed the development of the conservationist discourse. Though she acknowledges that the consciousness of the tortoise lies beyond human comprehension and biologists know very little about their sensory or cognitive faculties, she nonetheless effectively shows their ability to transform local landscapes and vegetation patterns. More significantly, she demonstrates their semiotic function as a multifaceted “object” deeply embedded in political and cultural discourse. Rather than a tortoise-eye view of history, this remains a history centered on human interactions with and perceptions of tortoises.

A well-written and engaging book on a topic that many students will have at least some cultural knowledge (and likely many misconceptions) about, On the Backs of Tortoises would make excellent reading for any class on the history of science, environmental history, or the history of tourism. Due to the accessible style and the captivating narrative, the book will also appeal to many members of the general public, especially anyone who works in or has an interest in biology or conservation. The questions Hennessy raises about the fraught, entangled relationships among scientists, society, and the non-human world, as well as her treatment of the tortoises as historical actors, will surely help drive interesting and productive discussions. This book deserves praise for so effectively presenting the history of a place popularly constructed to lie outside the domain of human affairs to readers in an accessible, coherent way.

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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.

Conspiracies, Fear, and the Dutch Empire in Asia

By Adam Clulow

On  February 23, 1623, a Japanese mercenary called Shichizō in the employ of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) was arrested for asking questions about the defenses of one of the company’s forts on the remote island of Amboina in modern day Indonesia.  When he failed to provide an adequate explanation, he was waterboarded, a cloth “put before his face and fastened behind his head, hanging upon under his chinne, [and] after this the water was poured upon his head.”   The result of this “torture of water,” or waterboarding as we would call it today, was a confession, that Shichizō had joined a plot orchestrated by a group of English merchants to seize control of the fortification and ultimately to rip the spice-rich island from the company’s grasp.

The Arms of the Dutch East India Company and of the Town of Batavia, Jeronimus Becx (II), 1651 (SK-A-4643, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Armed with this information, the VOC governor proceeded to arrest, interrogate, and ultimately to torture the remaining ten Japanese mercenaries in the garrison, all of whom admitted to signing onto the plot in return for a substantial reward.   A few days later, attention turned to the English, who also confessed, also under torture, to a role in a conspiracy aimed at the “taking of the castle, and the murdering of the Netherlanders.”   On March 9, an improvised tribunal of VOC employees with the governor at their head convened to render judgment on the conspirators.  The result was an emphatic guilty verdict and shortly thereafter ten English merchants and ten Japanese mercenaries were executed in the public square outside the fortress.

When news of what had happened on Amboina reached London at the end of May 1624, it sparked immediate outrage from the directors of the English East India Company, from the monarch, James I, and by all accounts from the general public.  Passions were further inflamed by the publication of a slew of incendiary pamphlets on both sides that sought either to damn the Dutch as bloody tyrants or condemn the English as faithless traitors. All of these were accompanied by ubiquitous images of torture and execution at the hands of Dutch officials.

The result was that, despite occurring thousands of miles away in an unfamiliar part of the world, the trial on Amboina swiftly escalated to become one of the most famous legal cases of the age and the subject of a long-running dispute between the Dutch and English governments, which clashed bitterly over the twin issues of blame and compensation.  It took close to a decade for the initial uproar to die down but the case remained prominent throughout the seventeenth century, generating a continuous flow of publications including pamphlets, sermons, broadsheet ballads and even a stage play penned by John Dryden in 1673.   So famous was the case that its remnants are scattered in archives across the world including the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, which preserves a remarkable set of pamphlets related to Amboina.

Things did not end in the seventeenth century.  The controversy was periodically resuscitated in subsequent centuries, reappearing, for example, in the Boer War (1899-1902) when it used by English writers to illustrate the essential villainy of not only the Dutch but also, more tenuously, their Afrikaner descendants in South Africa.  It resurfaced even more recently in Giles Milton’s hugely popular history of these events, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg (1999), which repeated some of the standard charges made against the VOC.

For hundreds of years now, scholars and popular writers have fought over just what happened on Amboina in 1623.  Across this long period, the debate has split along remarkably static national lines.  For their part, English writers insist that no plot existed and hence that VOC actions on Amboina was nothing more than the judicial murder of innocents.  In contrast, Dutch historians are clear that some sort of conspiracy existed, even if it was still inchoate, and hence that the legal proceedings were essentially justified.

My book was born from a sense of frustration with standard approaches to the case. It aims to move beyond the conventional debate over English guilt or innocence by looking instead at the territory where the trial took place and what was happening there in the weeks and months before Shichizō first appeared on the walls of the fort.

The book starts by shifting the spotlight away from the standard focus on the accused English conspirators to the three Asian parties, local polities on Amboina, Japanese mercenaries, and slaves primarily from South Asia, supposedly implicated in the plot. While the involvement of such different groups raises questions about the likelihood of such an expansive conspiracy, it also reveals something about how the Dutch East India Company was changing in this period. As it dove deeper and deeper into the region’s politics, the organization turned increasingly to Asian settlers to populate its colonies, Asian slaves to provide labor, and Asian fighters to wage war alongside its troops.

Image of Japanese soldiers around 1600.
Column of Japanese Soldiers, Anonymous, 1600 (RP-P-OB-75.407, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Exploring each of these groups in turn, Amboina, 1623 argues that while this process of what one scholar calls “Asiafication” allowed the Company to set down roots in the region, it also created a deep well of colonial anxiety.   By working through each element of the supposed plot, the book sets out to trace how the questions of a single young Japanese soldier morphed into a sprawling conspiracy and how the case was driven forward by a potent combination of genuine crisis, imagined threat, and overpowering fear that propelled a rapid escalation from suspicion to torture and finally to mass execution.

In 2006, then prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende called in an impromptu address to the Dutch House of Representatives for a revival of what he described as the “VOC mentality” (VOC- mentaliteit).  What he meant, as far as we can make out, was a revived dynamism, optimism, and above all confidence that permitted the Dutch to dominate global commerce in the seventeenth century and which would enable the modern-day Netherlands to recover, in his view, some of its luster by harnessing this spirit.  And we are all familiar with the images of Dutch confidence and success from the seventeenth century that are scattered across museums in the Netherlands and beyond.

VOC senior merchant. Aelbert Cuyp, c. 1640– 1660 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. SK- A- 2350)

Such depictions show a familiar image of the confident, conquering European standing in a transformed landscape surrounded by the technologies of power and looming over colonial subjects. In fact, and despite such representations, VOC officials and merchants lived in a world filled with terrors. As they moved into the region, Dutch agents were plunged into an alien landscape that was crowded with sophisticated societies, long-established political and economic networks, and powerful states capable of mustering vast military resources. Clinging to the coast, they felt acutely and constantly vulnerable. Recognizing the pervasive role of fear helps explain the frequently chaotic nature of the Amboina trial. It also tells us something about the Dutch empire in a period still commonly referred to as the Golden Age. Looking closely at the Amboina trial is a reminder that the “VOC mentality,” if we can use such a term, was dominated as much by fear as by confidence, and that this fear dictated how Company officials interacted with the world around them. It is, in other words, something to be studied and understood, certainly, but not emulated.

Adam Clulow, Amboina, 1623: Fear and Conspiracy on the Edge of Empire  (2019)

Online Resources

In the process of writing the book, I developed an interactive website, The Amboyna Conspiracy Trial (www.amboyna.org), designed to take students into the heart of the Amboina trial. The site allows you to work through the details of the case guided by commentary from historians and barristers and come to a final verdict as to guilt or innocence.

Further Reading

Learn more about the Amboina conspiracy and related seventeenth-century imperial encounters:

Alison Games, Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory (2020)
Brilliantly explores how the case entrenched itself in English history and memory across a period of several centuries.

W. Ph. Coolhaas, “Notes and Comments on the so-called Amboina,” in M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz, M.E. van opstall, and G.J. Schutte, eds. Dutch Authors on Asian History: A Selection of Dutch Historiography on the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (1988), 198-240.
Perhaps the best article ever written on the case by one of the giants of Dutch empire scholarship. Concludes that there was a plot but is critical of the way the case was handled.

Anthony Milton, “Marketing a Massacre: Amboyna, the East India Company and the Public Sphere in Early Stuart England,” in Steve Pincus and Peter Lake (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (2007).
A fascinating examination of how the English East India Company attempted to mobilize public and elite opinion around the case.

Giles Milton, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg (1999)
A popular account detailing the English push into Asia.

Connected pages on Not Even Past

Adam Clulow and Tom Chandler, Building a Virtual City for the Classroom: Angkor

Image Credits

Banner credit:  Andries Beekman, The Castle at Batavia, c. 1661 (detail, SK-A-19, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).


Review of The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (2017), by Cyrus Schayegh

Cyrus Schayegh addresses the spatial formation of the modern world in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World. He uses the history of Bilad al-Sham from 1830 to 1945 as his case study. Bilad al-Sham, also known as the Levant or Greater Syria, is roughly bordered by the Mediterranean to the west, Anatolia to the north, the Euphrates to the east, and the Arabian Peninsula to the south. It is comprised of the modern states of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. Schayegh describes Bilad al-Sham as a “meso-region,” a relatively uniform area that is larger than a single nation but smaller than a continent.  Although the meso-region of Bilad al-Sham is not homogenous, with ill-defined and fluctuating borders, it is comprised of interlinked cities and rural areas with a shared history.

Schayegh sees the meso-region of Bilad al-Sham as an ideal candidate for his central concept, “transpatialization,” which he defines as the “socio-spatial intertwinements” of cities, nation-states, regions, and global networks. He prescribes transpatialization as a remedy to histories that overemphasize a single scale of history, whether global, regional, national, or municipal. Transpatialization is a way to consider multiple scales of history simultaneously, providing a more complete picture of modern developments. Schayegh implements it to study the individuals, cities, and nation-states of Bilad al-Sham and connect the entire region to global trends. He argues that applying this concept to meso-regions, like Bilad al-Sham, is the most effective means of understanding developments in modern history.

Map of Bilad al-Sham (via Wikimedia Commons)

Applying transpatialization to the making of the modern Bilad al-Sham, Schayegh argues that there were two stages in its modern history. During the first stage, from the 1830s to 1910s, there were three primary socio-spatial intertwinements: Bilad al-Sham and the Eurocentric world economy, Shami cities and their inter-urban ties, and interregional transformation. Schayegh’s first stage is conceptually cogent, effectively explaining the economic and cultural development of the region. Although Schayegh notes the role of individuals living in Bilad al-Sham, cities are the primary characters and Beirut is arguably the most important character. Schyageh’s application of transpatialization is most apparent with Beirut. The city came to prominence during the nineteenth century for its role as a port city, connecting the interior cities of Damascus and Aleppo to the Eurocentric maritime economy. Likewise, the city benefited from its interregional relationship with Anatolia and the Ottoman capital of Istanbul, leading to its assignment as the capital of its own providence in 1888. Schayegh also notes individuals living in Beirut during this period such as Butrus al-Bustani (1819-1883) who was instrumental in the Arab Nahda, a cultural and linguistic renewal founded in the publication houses of Beirut. Bustani, like the city he inhabited, developed his ideas at the confluence of different scales of history. Schayegh points to the city of Beirut, its residents, its inter-urban ties, and its economic development to describe the first stage of modern Shami history as one of rapid transformation.

The second stage of modern Shami history is the primary focus of the book, where Schayegh applies transpatialization to the transitional period of the Ottoman Empire during the 1920s and the development of nation-states during the 1930s and 1940s. He argues for the development of a “national umbrella” out of what was previously described as a “patchwork region.”  Instead of attributing the rise of nation-states to globalization, the decisions of powerful individuals, or any other singular narrative, Schayegh ties together all relevant factors—the Great Depression, Jewish migration, European geopolitical strategy, Arab nationalism, and more. During the second stage, Schayegh records the accentuated build-up of nation-states in the region, which were influenced by innumerable factors. One particularly influential factor was the development of economic competition between the port cities of Haifa and Beirut. Schayegh notes the individuals, communities, cities, and nations that influenced this competition. He argues that this contest, primarily between Syrian and Yishuv communities, played a significant role in the development of competing national identities in the region. Schayegh’s concept of transpatialization convincingly entwines global, regional, national, and municipal histories to provide a nuanced account of nation-state development in Bilad al-Sham.

View of Beirut, 1934 (via Library of Congress)

Schayegh’s concept of transpatialization weaves together Bilad al-Sham like a tapestry. The intertwinement of local, urban, regional, and global fields presents views of the modern Middle East that are otherwise unapparent. For example, transpatialization brings new meaning to consequential topics like the development of Arab nationalism. It captures the fluctuating values of qawmiyya (pan-Arab nationalism) and Wataniyya (individual state nationalism) as individuals, cities, nation-states, and regions appropriated them. This leads to novel formulations like Syrian president Shukri al-Quwatli’s: “I am a son of Damascus including all its neighborhoods, its different quarters and houses, I am a son of Syria, and I am a son of the Arabs.”

Schayegh uses transpatialization to effectively trace some historical developments like Arab nationalism, but his attempt to offer a definitive history of Bilad al-Sham’s spatial formation is incomplete. For instance, he misses opportunities to address global networks. He mentions diasporic communities and individuals, like the Homsis in Sao Paolo and Khalil Sakakini in New York, yet fails to significantly develop these global connections into his argument. Most of his analysis remains within the bounds of Bilad al-Sham despite his global ambitions.

Schayegh pulls together a magisterial account of the modern formation of Bilad al-Sham and sets a precedent for the use of transpatialization in global history. While the argument of the book is often specific to Bilad al-Sham, it is a useful work for a broad audience seeking conceptual tools to make sense of the modern world. The concept of transpatialization is viable and should be employed in future studies of Bilad al-Sham, the modern Middle East, and the modern world.

Carter Barnett studies the history of medical institutions in the 19th/20th-century Middle East. He received his BA in History and Arabic from Baylor University and an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. His MA thesis examined the ambivalent interaction between missionary medicine and Palestinian society, politics and law. In 2022, he joined Johns Hopkins History of Medicine doctoral program. His present research takes interest in the history of (post)colonial medical institutions in the Middle East, focusing on the intersections between religion, international health organizations and changing medical practices.

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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.

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