IAS Book Launch: Political Culture in the Early Modern Iberian Worlds

ABOUT THE BOOKS

In his book, Jurisdictional Battlefields: Political Culture, Theatricality, and Spanish Expeditions in Charcas in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, Mario Graña Taborelli examines three expeditions by the Spanish to the borders of Charcas, in present-day Bolivia, in the second half of the sixteenth century, challenging views that framed them as part of a gradual top-down process of centralisation driven by the Spanish monarchy to extend and consolidate its grip and build a ‘colonial state’ in the Americas, suggesting an interpretation that sees them as part of a long process of installation, expansion, and consolidation of royal jurisdiction, understood as the authority to establish law and deliver justice, in a remote area, perceived as lawless. This was done through coercion and violence, as well as negotiation and consensus, involving both the Spanish and indigenous peoples, and frequently creating overlapped jurisdictions. It was done not through centralisation and territorial control but via downscaling of politics and dispersion of power. Jurisdictional politics were decided in battlefields and courts and involved the display of rituals and imagery in a theatricalization of power, to make a distant monarch present, which paradoxically, made such absence the more evident. The book is an invitation to rethink traditional ideas about empire building and re-dimension the scope of Spain’s vast global empire.

Jurisdictional Battlefields: Political Culture, Theatricality, and Spanish Expeditions in Charcas in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century was published by Liverpool University Press (2024). For more information, visit the publisher's website here.

Adrian Masters's We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World challenges the traditional top-down view of the Spanish Empire, demonstrating that ordinary subjects wielded significant influence in governance and law-making. Analysing over 110,000 royal decrees from between 1492 and 1598, Masters reveals that diverse actors petitioned for even phrased legislation. The Empire was, in fact, a great dialogue. Some stood in dialogue's way - saboteurs, powerful court women, pirates, mosquitos - while others, including notaries, indigenous commoners, Afro-descendant raftsmen, and enslaved women, acted as essential instruments. This bottom-up perspective reveals, moreover, that subjects could even phrase legislation; forcing us to rethink the genesis of discriminatory categories in a crucial era of early modern racialisation.

We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World was published by Cambridge University Press (2023). For more information, visit the publisher's website here.

ABOUT THE EVENT

The evening will comprise presentations by the authors and a panel consisting of Alexander Samson (UCL Early Modern Exchanges), Karoline Cook (Royal Holloway) and Adolfo Polo y La Borda (University of Nottingham).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Mario Graña Taborelli is Visiting Research Fellow at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. He is a historian of the Early Modern Iberian Worlds who works on political cultures, law and social history.

Adrian Masters is a scholar of Spanish Colonial history who studies early modern Spanish colonial law, racialisation, petitioning, religion, and mobility and teaches at the University of Trier in Germany.