Download or read book Contested Legalities in Colonial Mexico written by Christopher Peter Albi and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Contested legalities in colonial Mexico : Francisco Xavier Gamboa and the defense of Derecho Indiano" explores the legal culture of late colonial Mexico through the lens of Francisco Xavier Gamboa, the most celebrated Mexican jurist of his era. Born in Guadalajara in 1717, Gamboa practiced in the courtrooms of Mexico City, represented the merchants guild of Mexico in Madrid from 1755 to 1764, analyzed mining legislation in the 1761 Comentarios a las Ordenanzas de Minas, and served three decades as an Audiencia judge until 1794. His long career encompassed the most salient features of the legal culture of his time. The central argument of this dissertation is that the legality Gamboa embodied and defended, known to historians as Derecho Indiano, came under attack in the period of the so-called Bourbon Reforms during the reign of Charles III. Led by José de Gálvez, the visitor-general of New Spain in the 1760s and later the secretary of state for the Indies from 1776 to 1787, the crown sought to streamline the legal order in order to root out corruption, restrict local autonomy, and strengthen royal authority. Gamboa and many other experienced officials opposed this effort. They argued that the old legal order, which recognized local customs and guaranteed judicial autonomy, provided the flexibility needed to maintain the Spanish empire in America. This contest in legalities marked the emergence of a centralized state in Spanish America and the moment when the Spanish legal order began to lose its legitimacy in America.

Download or read book Justice by Insurance written by Woodrow Borah and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Western Europe expanded its empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it came to dominate many peoples, especially in America, whose cultures and legal systems differed dramatically from its own. The resulting conflicts of both law and custom posed difficult problems: How could these conflicting laws and customs be adjusted within a common political administration? And, in particular, how could legal remedy be provided for groups of lesser political weight? Woodrow Borah vividly depicts one of the more unusual institutions that arose in response to these problems--the General Indian Court of New Spain. In what is today Mexico, the conquering Spaniards had at first attempted to preserve such Indian customs as were deemed not contrary to reason or Christianity. However, as interpreted by Spanish judges, so much turned out to be "contrary" to these standards that native customs were soon recast in largely Spanish norms. At the same time, the conquered Indians discovered the uses of the Spanish courts, unleashing a flood of litigation. The ensuing social and economic upheaval sparked great concern among Spanish administrators and jurists. The result was the establishment of the General Indian Court, a remarkably innovative special jurisdiction vested in the viceroy and corps of legal aides. Expenses were paid from a small contribution by each Indian family--in effect, legal insurance. Woodrow Borah analyzes the kinds of cases that came before this court, the decisions it reached, and the policies underlying these decisions. He enriches this study by examining the separate but parallel structures in the Yucatan peninsula and on the seigneurial estate of Hern�n Cort�s, and by comparing the General Indian Court to the tribunals of Guadalajara, which had no similar special arrangements. The development of the General Indian Court and the relation of the legal aides to their Indian clients and to other lawyers form a complicated story of both service and exploitation and contribute an important chapter to the history of colonial Mexico.

Download or read book Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico written by Brian P. Owensby and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico shows how Indian litigants and petitioners made sense of Spanish legal principles and processes when the dust of conquest had begun to settle after 1600. By juxtaposing hundreds of case records with written laws and treatises, Owensby reveals how Indians saw the law as a practical and moral resource that allowed them to gain a measure of control over their lives and to forge a relationship to a distant king. Several chapters elucidate central concepts of Indian claimants in their encounter with the law over the seventeenth century--royal protection, possession of property, liberty, notions of guilt, village autonomy and self-rule, and subjecthood. Owensby concludes that Indian engagement with Spanish law was the first early modern experiment in cosmopolitan legality, one that faced the problem of difference head on and sought to bridge the local and the international. In so doing, it enabled indigenous claimants to forge a colonial politics of justice that opened up space for a conversation between colonial rulers and ruled.

Download or read book Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico written by Brian Philip Owensby and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brian P. Owensby is Associate Professor in the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History. He is the author of Intimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil (Stanford, 1999).

Download or read book For Better Or Worse written by Jonathan Bartholomew Bird and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For Better or Worse: Divorce and Annulment Lawsuits in Colonial Mexico (1544-1799)" uses petitions for divorce and annulment to explore how husbands and wives defined and contested their marital roles and manipulated legal procedure. Marital conflict provides an intimate window into the daily lives of colonial Mexicans, and the discourses developed in the course of divorce and annulment litigation show us what lawyers, litigants and judges understood to be appropriate behavior for husbands and wives. This dissertation maintains that wives often sued for divorce or annulment not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to quickly escape domestic violence by getting the authorities to place them in enclosure, away from abusive husbands. Many wives used a divorce or annulment lawsuit just to get placed in enclosure, without making a good faith effort to take the litigation to its final conclusion. "For Better or For Worse" also argues concepts of masculinity, rather than notions of honor, played a strong role in the ways that husbands negotiated their presence in divorce and annulment suits. This work thus suggests a new way to interpret the problem of marital conflict in Mexico, showing how wives ably manipulated procedural law to escape abuse and how men attempted to defend their masculine identities and their gendered roles as husbands in the course of divorce and annulment lawsuits.

Download or read book The Enlightenment on Trial written by Bianca Premo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-19 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a history of the Enlightenment--the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing, freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern Western law. But rather than members of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, its principal protagonists are non-literate, poor, and enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic world's contributions to Enlightenment science, the writing of history, and statecraft, the region is conventionally believed to have taken an alternate route to modernity. This book grapples with the contradiction between this legacy and eighteenth-century Spanish Americans' active production of concepts fundamental to modern law. The Enlightenment on Trial offers readers new insight into how Spanish imperial subjects created legal documents, fresh interpretations of the intellectual transformations and legal reform policies of the period, and comparative analysis of the volume of civil suits from six regions in Mexico, Peru and Spain. Ordinary litigants in the colonies--far more often than peninsular Spaniards--sued superiors at an accelerating pace in the second half of the eighteenth century. Three types of cases increased even faster than a stunning general rise of civil suits in the colonies: those that slaves, native peasants and women initiated against masters, native leaders and husbands. As they entered court, these litigants advanced a new law-centered culture distinct from the casuistic, justice-oriented legal culture of the early modern period. And they did so at precisely the same time that a few bright minds of Europe enshrined new ideas in print. The conclusion considers why, if this is so, the Spanish empire has remained marginal to the story of the advent of the modern West.

Download or read book Crime and Punishment in Latin America written by Ricardo D. Salvatore and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2001-09-20 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVEssays in collection argue that Latin American legal institutions were both mechanisms of social control and unique arenas for ordinary people to contest government policies and resist exploitation./div

Download or read book A Companion to Early Modern Spanish Imperial Political and Social Thought written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers an account from a legal, theological and philosophical point of view of the historical and conceptual intricacies of the debates about the imperial expansion of the early modern Spanish monarchy.

Download or read book Pious Imperialism written by Cornelius Conover and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes Spanish rule and Catholic practice from the consolidation of Spanish control in the Americas in the sixteenth century to the loss of these colonies in the nineteenth century by following the life and afterlife of an accidental martyr, San Felipe de Jésus. Using Mexico City–native San Felipe as the central figure, Conover tracks the global aspirations of imperial Spain in places such as Japan and Rome without losing sight of the local forces affecting Catholicism. He demonstrates the ways Spanish religious attitudes motivated territorial expansion and transformed Catholic worship. Using Mexico City as an example, Conover also shows that the cult of saints continually refreshed the spiritual authority of the Spanish monarch and the message of loyalty of colonial peoples to a devout king. Such a political message in worship, Conover concludes, proved contentious in independent Mexico, thus setting the stage for the momentous conflicts of the nineteenth century in Latin American religious history.

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism Volume 2 Nationalism s Fields of Interaction written by Cathie Carmichael and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-31 with total page 951 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This major new reference work with contributions from an international team of scholars provides a comprehensive account of ideas and practices of nationhood and nationalism from antiquity to the present. It considers both continuities and discontinuities, engaging critically and analytically with the scholarly literature in the field. In volume II, leading scholars in their fields explore the dynamics of nationhood and nationalism's interactions with a wide variety of cultural practices and social institutions – in addition to the phenomenon's crucial political dimensions. The relationships between imperialism and nationhood/nationalism and between major world religions and ethno-national identities are among the key themes explained and explored. The wide range of case studies from around the world brings a truly global, comparative perspective to a field whose study was long constrained by Eurocentric assumptions.

Download or read book New Horizons in Spanish Colonial Law written by Thomas Duve and published by Max Planck Institute for European Legal History. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/gplh3 http://www.epubli.de/shop/buch/48746 "Spanish colonial law, derecho indiano, has since the early 20th century been a vigorous subdiscipline of legal history. One of great figures in the field, the Argentinian legal historian Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, published in 1997 his Nuevos horizontes en el estudio histórico del derecho indiano. The book, in which Tau addressed seminal methodological questions setting tone for the discipline’s future orientation, proved to be the starting point for an important renewal of the discipline. Tau drew on the writings of legal historians, such as Paolo Grossi, Antonio Manuel Hespanha, and Bartolomé Clavero. Tau emphasized the development of legal history in connection to what he called “the posture superseding rational and statutory state law.” The following features of normativity were now in need of increasing scholarly attention: the autonomy of different levels of social organization, the different modes of normative creativity, the many different notions of law and justice, the position of the jurist as an artifact of law, and the casuistic character of the legal decisions. Moreover, Tau highlighted certain areas of Spanish colonial law that he thought deserved more attention than they had hitherto received. One of these was the history of the learned jurist: the letrado was to be seen in his social, political, economic, and bureaucratic context. The Argentinian legal historian called for more scholarly works on book history, and he thought that provincial and local histories of Spanish colonial law had been studied too little. Within the field of historical science as a whole, these ideas may not have been revolutionary, but they contributed in an important way to bringing the study of Spanish colonial law up-to-date. It is beyond doubt that Tau’s programmatic visions have been largely fulfilled in the past two decades. Equally manifest is, however, that new challenges to legal history and Spanish colonial law have emerged. The challenges of globalization are felt both in the historical and legal sciences, and not the least in the field of legal history. They have also brought major topics (back) on to the scene, such as the importance of religious normativity within the normative setting of societies. These challenges have made scholars aware of the necessity to reconstruct the circulation of ideas, juridical practices, and researchers are becoming more attentive to the intense cultural translation involved in the movement of legal ideas and institutions from one context to another. Not least, the growing consciousness and strong claims to reconsider colonial history from the premises of postcolonial scholarship expose the discipline to an unseen necessity of reconsidering its very foundational concepts. What concept of law do we need for our historical studies when considering multi-normative settings? How do we define the spatial dimension of our work? How do we analyze the entanglements in legal history? Until recently, Spanish colonial law attracted little interest from non-Hispanic scholars, and its results were not seen within a larger global context. In this respect, Spanish colonial law was hardly different from research done on legal history of the European continent or common law. Spanish colonial law has, however, recently become a topic of interest beyond the Hispanic world. The field is now increasingly seen in the context of “global legal history,” while the old and the new research results are often put into a comparative context of both European law of the early Modern Period and other colonial legal orders. In this volume, scholars from different parts of the Western world approach Spanish colonial law from the new perspectives of contemporary legal historical research."

Download or read book Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico 1650 1755 written by Christoph Rosenmüller and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-02 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides the first detailed analysis of the evolution of the concept of corruption in colonial Mexico.

Download or read book Disrupting Africa written by Olufunmilayo B. Arewa and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the digital era, many African countries sit at the crossroads of a potential future that will be shaped by digital-era technologies with existing laws and institutions constructed under conditions of colonial and post-colonial authoritarian rule. In Disrupting Africa, Olufunmilayo B. Arewa examines this intersection and shows how it encompasses existing and new zones of contestation based on ethnicity, religion, region, age, and other sources of division. Arewa highlights specific collisions between the old and the new, including in the 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria, which involved young people engaging with varied digital era technologies who provoked a violent response from rulers threatened by the prospect of political change. In this groundbreaking work, Arewa demonstrates how lawmaking and legal processes during and after colonialism continue to frame contexts in which digital technologies are created, implemented, regulated, and used in Africa today.

Download or read book Negotiation Within Domination written by Ethelia Ruiz Medrano and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2011-05-18 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Negotiation within Domination examines the formation of colonial governance in New Spain through interactions between indigenous peoples and representatives of the Spanish Crown. The book highlights the complexity of native negotiation and mediation with colonial rule across time, culture, and place and how it shaped colonial political and legal structures from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Although indigenous communities reacted to Spanish presence with significant acts of resistance and rebellion, they also turned to negotiation to deal with conflicts and ameliorate the consequences of colonial rule. This affected not only the development of legal systems in New Spain and Mexico but also the survival and continuation of traditional cultures. Bringing together work by Mexican and North American historians, this collection is a crucially important and rare contribution to the field. Negotiation within Domination is a valuable resource for native peoples as they seek to redefine and revitalize their identities and assert their rights relating to language and religion, ownership of lands and natural resources, rights of self-determination and self-government, and protection of cultural and intellectual property. It will be of interest primarily to specialists in the field of colonial studies and historians and ethnohistorians of New Spain

Download or read book Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico written by Tatiana Seijas and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-06-23 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a history of Asian slaves in colonial Mexico and their journey from bondage to freedom.

Download or read book The Church in Colonial Latin America written by John F. Schwaller and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2000-03-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Church in Colonial Latin America is a collection of essays that include classic articles and pieces based on more modern research. Containing essays that explore the Catholic Church's active social and political influence, this volume provides the background necessary for students to grasp the importance of the Catholic Church in Latin America. This text also presents a comprehensive, analytic, and descriptive history of the Church and its development during the colonial period. From the evangelization of the New World by Spanish missionaries to the active influence of the Catholic Church on Latin American culture, this book offers a complete picture of the Church in colonial Latin America. The Church in Colonial Latin America is ideal for courses in the colonial period in Latin American history, as well as courses in religion, church history, and missionary history.

Download or read book Into the Archive written by Kathryn Burns and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-27 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing has long been linked to power. For early modern people on both sides of the Atlantic, writing was also the province of notaries, men trained to cast other people’s words in official forms and make them legally true. Thus the first thing Columbus did on American shores in October 1492 was have a notary record his claim of territorial possession. It was the written, notarial word—backed by all the power of Castilian enforcement—that first constituted Spanish American empire. Even so, the Spaniards who invaded America in 1492 were not fond of their notaries, who had a dismal reputation for falsehood and greed. Yet Spaniards could not do without these men. Contemporary scholars also rely on the vast paper trail left by notaries to make sense of the Latin American past. How then to approach the question of notarial truth? Kathryn Burns argues that the archive itself must be historicized. Using the case of colonial Cuzco, she examines the practices that shaped document-making. Notaries were businessmen, selling clients a product that conformed to local “custom” as well as Spanish templates. Clients, for their part, were knowledgeable consumers, with strategies of their own for getting what they wanted. In this inside story of the early modern archive, Burns offers a wealth of possibilities for seeing sources in fresh perspective.