We, the King

Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World

AvAdrian Masters

Häftad, Engelska, 2025

Del 127 i serien Cambridge Latin American Studies

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Beskrivning

We, the King challenges the dominant top-down interpretation of the Spanish Empire and its monarchs' decrees in the New World, revealing how ordinary subjects had much more say in government and law-making than previously acknowledged. During the viceregal period spanning the post-1492 conquest until 1598, the King signed more than 110,000 pages of decrees concerning state policies, minutiae, and everything in between. Through careful analysis of these decrees, Adrian Masters illustrates how law-making was aided and abetted by subjects from various backgrounds, including powerful court women, indigenous commoners, Afro-descendant raftsmen, secret saboteurs, pirates, sovereign Chiriguano Indians, and secretaries' wives. Subjects' innumerable petitions and labor prompted - and even phrased - a complex body of legislation and legal categories demonstrating the degree to which this empire was created from the "bottom up". Innovative and unique, We, the King reimagines our understandings of kingship, imperial rule, colonialism, and the origins of racial categories.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2025-11-27
Mått:216 x 21 x 151 mm
Vikt:535 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Serie:Cambridge Latin American Studies
Antal sidor:338
Förlag:Cambridge University Press
ISBN:9781009315401

Utforska kategorier

Etnicitet inom Samhälle och politik
Centralt styre och förvaltning inom Samhälle och politik
Rättshistoria inom Juridik

Mer om författaren

Adrian Masters is Director of the University of Trier's GloVib: Global Entanglements Project. Raised in rural Costa Rica, he has written several award-winning articles on Spanish imperial history.

Recensioner i media

'Meticulously researched and beautifully written, We, the King unveils the labyrinthine petitioning process involved in enacting thousands of legislative decrees and reveals how diligent vassals shaped colonial policies and categories of difference. It dismantles the standard view of the Spanish colonial state as the architect of legal rule that was all-seeing and all-pervasive. This outstanding work should be required reading for all colonial Latin Americanists.' Nancy E. van Deusen, author of Global Indos: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain

Innehållsförteckning

List of figures; List of tables; Acknowledgments; Prelude: A Peruvian pestizo at the Spanish Court; Introduction: the collective making of an empire; 1. Paper ceremonies for a global empire: Gobierno petitions and the collective work of Voluntad; 2. The co-creation of the Imperial Logistics Network; 3. Distant kings, powerful women, prudent ministers: the gendered creation of the Council of the Indies; 4. Lawmaking in a portable council: Gobierno decision-making technologies before 1561; 5. 'Bring the Papers:' Royal decision-making and the power of archives in Madrid, 1561–1598; 6. Creating the royal decree: format, phraseology, and petitioners' transformation of Indies law; 7. Pedro Rengifo's epilogue: subjects of chance; Conclusions; Index.