Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico [Hardcover]

Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexicoshows 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 centuryroyal 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. This book should become required reading for anybody wishing to make sense of legal relations, adaptation and resistance in the early New World and similar colonial contexts. It is a truly major tour de force. Brian P. Owensby is Associate Professor in the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History. He is the author ofIntimate Ironies: Modernity and the Making of Middle-Class Lives in Brazil(Stanford, 1999). Owensby's careful research, lively writing, and persuasive argument make this book a real winner, suitable for specialist and student alike. This book is a 'must read' for those interested in Latin American history, comparative colonialism, or indigenous studies. This is the best study I've seen of how justice actually functioned in colonial Mexico. The key to Owensby's achievement is that he does not treat the law as an impartial and impersonal set of rules, but rlcv