You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The principal protagonists of this history of the Enlightenment are non-literate, poor, and enslaved colonial litigants who began to sue their superiors in the royal courts of the Spanish empire. With comparative data on civil litigation and close readings of the lawsuits, The Enlightenment on Trial explores how ordinary Spanish Americans actively produced modern concepts of law.
Between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of dictatorship changed drastically, leaving back the ancient Roman paradigm and opening the way to a rule with extraordinary powers and which was unlimited in time. While the French Revolution produced an acceleration of history and created new narratives of dictatorship, with Napoleon Bonaparte as its most iconic embodiment, the Latin American struggle for independence witnessed an unprecedented concentration of rulers seeking those new nations’ sovereignty through dictatorial rule. Starting from the assumption that the age of revolution was one of dictators too, this book aims at exploring how this new type of rulers wh...
This book offers a new perspective on the concept of modernity. Since its invention as a contrast to Antiquity or the Middle Ages, modernity has been tied to ideas of superiority, progress, and efficiency. As a counterpart to the Marxist “history of class struggle”, “modernization theories” have transformed modernity into an almost teleological concept of historical development. These strong connotations obstruct a clear look at other forms of modernity. The contributions of the volume will show in a comparative perspective how modernity can also be understood and analyzed as multiple responses of societies and polities to organize themselves in facing ever more complex and integrated interactions at ever larger scales.
This volume proposes new ways of understanding the historical semantics of the relationship between humans and nature in South America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The authors in this volume use the notion of asymmetry to discuss the representations of and forms of knowledge about nature circulating in, and about, colonial and postcolonial South America. They argue that the production of knowledge about the American natural space widened the power gap between the Europeans colonizers and the local population. This gap, therefore, rests on what we call 'asymmetric ecologies': Eurocentric epistemic orders excluded forms of indigenous, mestizo, and Creole knowledge about nature. By looking at literary as well as non-literary sources, such as natural histories, travel narratives, encyclopaedias or medical writing, the essays in this volume trace the origins of new theoretical paradigms (ecocriticism, biopolitics, transarea studies, etc.), and examine the regional cultural, identity, and epistemic conflicts that undercut the Eurocentric narrative of enlightened modernity.
This book traces the history of Indigenous mining in southern Bolivia from Inka times to the present using archaeological and historical sources. It argues that small-scale mineral production can only be understood in relation to large-scale mining in the context of colonialism and its aftermath.
An exploration of the Spanish colonial reaction to the threat of Napoleonic subversion A Great Fear: Luís de Onís and the Shadow War against Napoleon in Spanish America, 1808–1812 explores why Spanish Americans did not take the opportunity to seize independence in this critical period when Spain was overrun by French armies and, arguably, in its weakest state. In the first years after his appointment as Spanish ambassador to the United States, Luís de Onís claimed the heavy responsibility of defending Spanish America from the wave of French spies, subversives, and soldiers whom he believed Napoleon was sending across the Atlantic to undermine the empire. As a leading representative of ...
Spanish monarchs recognized the jurisdictions of many self-governing corporate groups, including Jews and Muslims on the peninsula, indigenous peoples in their American colonies, and enslaved and free people of African descent across the empire. Republics of Difference examines fifteenth-century Seville and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lima to show how religiously- and racially-based self-governance functioned in a society with many kinds of law, what effects it had on communities, and why it mattered. By comparing these minoritized communities on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic world, this study offers a new understanding of the distinct standings of those communities in their urba...
Bringing together experts across Latin America, North America, and Spain, The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Independence innovatively revisits Latin American independence within a larger regional, temporal, and thematic framework to highlight its significance for the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The volume offers a synthetic yet comprehensive tool for understanding and assessing the most current studies in the field and their analytical contributions to the broader historiography. Organized thematically and across different regions of the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish and Luso America, the essays deepen well-known conclusions and reveal new interpretations. They offer analytical interventions that produce new questions on periodization, the meaning of anti-colonialism, liberalism, and republicanism, as well as the militarization of societies, public opinion, the role of sciences, labor regimes, and gender dynamics. A much-needed addition to the existing scholarship, this volume brings a transnational perspective to a critical period of history in Latin America.
"A transnational approach to the history of a key Latin American border region"--Provided by publisher.
In the sixteenth century, in what is now modern-day Peru and Bolivia, Andean communities were forcibly removed from their traditional villages by Spanish colonizers and resettled in planned, self-governed towns modeled after those in Spain. But rather than merely conforming to Spanish cultural and political norms, indigenous Andeans adopted and gradually refashioned the religious practices dedicated to Christian saints and political institutions imposed on them, laying claim to their own rights and the sovereignty of the collective. The People Are King shows how common Andean people produced a new kind of civil society over three centuries of colonialism, merging their traditional understand...