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The Enlightenment on Trial - Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Hardcover)
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The Enlightenment on Trial - Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (Hardcover)
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This is a history not of an Enlightenment but rather the
Enlightenment-the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing,
freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern
Western law. Its principal protagonists, rather than members of a
cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, 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, it 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 book is intensely empirical even as it is sly situated within
current theoretical debates about imperial geographies of history.
The Enlightenment on Trial offers readers new insight into how
legal documents were made, 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
them 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.
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