|
|
Product Description
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.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press)
- Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America (Cambridge Latin American Studies)
- Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court
- Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain
- The Experiential Caribbean
- Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico
- Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America
- Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Afro-Latin America)
- Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition
- Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Gender and American Culture)
*If this is not the "The Enlightenment on Trial" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link
.
Details were last updated on Oct 29, 2024 22:18 +08.
