The Radical Spanish Empire

A century of scholarly shibboleths fall with the publication of this book. Advancing their innovative research and synthesizing recent scholarship on the Spanish imperial state, Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters force us to, well, radically rethink our interpretation of the Catholic Empire, to understand it as a territorially enormous experiment in representation and governance. A masterpiece that will change the way scholars study the relationship of Spanish colonialism and political modernity. -- Greg Grandin, author of America, América
An explosive, myth-busting, and revelatory book. Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters portray the sixteenth-century Spanish Americas as they really were: dominated by Indigenous political initiatives and changing in favor of those who leveraged paperwork to wage 'lawfare' against elites. -- Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of 1492: The Year the World Began
Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters shatter the myth of Spanish absolutism, revealing that radical social upheaval in the sixteenth century was driven by Indigenous commoners and enslaved people through petitions, lawsuits, and 'paperwork riots.' This bold thesis is a true paradigm shift—one that this and future generations of historians must contend with. The gauntlet is thrown down not only to scholars of Latin America but to all who study tyranny, democracy, and the early modern world. -- S. Elizabeth Penry, author of The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics
This book is a bomb waiting to go off in our field, and I am here for it. Fundamentally, it will force many people to rethink important questions about ethnogenesis, liberal and decolonial narratives of sixteenth-century Spanish America, the role of law in colonial social hierarchies, and paperwork itself. The mind-blowing scope of the research is something to behold. -- Martin Austin Nesvig, author of The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico
A creative and engaging history of political struggle in the New World. It has long been known that lawyers and notaries made possible—or rendered impossible—the aspirations of conquistadors, colonizers, and even the colonized. But until now, nobody has thought to place paperwork at the center of a new scholarly vision of the early Spanish American Empire. -- Matthew Restall, author of The Nine Lives of Christopher Columbus
An original and provocative history, illuminating the creation of Spain’s American empire from the bottom up. As Cañizares-Esguerra and Masters show, both native peoples and Spanish commoners strategically employed Spanish law to defend their interests against elites. This innovative and erudite book demonstrates how radical challenges to the existing social order ultimately initiated a new kind of colonial society. -- Stuart B. Schwartz, author of Blood and Boundaries: The Limits of Religious and Racial Exclusion in Early Modern Latin America