Synopses & Reviews
In the sixteenth century hundreds of thousands of indiosandmdash;indigenous peoples from the territories of the Spanish empireandmdash;were enslaved and relocated throughout the Iberian world. Although various laws and decrees outlawed indio enslavement, several loopholes allowed the practice to continue. In
Global Indios Nancy E. van Deusen documents the more than one hundred lawsuits between 1530 and 1585 that indio slaves living in Castile brought to the Spanish courts to secure their freedom. Because plaintiffs had to prove their indio-ness in a Spanish imperial context, these lawsuits reveal the difficulties of determining who was an indio and who was notandmdash;especially since it was an all-encompassing construct connoting subservience and political personhood and at times could refer to people from Mexico, Peru, or South or East Asia. Van Deusen demonstrates that the categories of
free and
slave were often not easily defined, and she forces a rethinking of the meaning of indio in ways that emphasize the need to situate colonial Spanish American indigenous subjects in a global context.
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Review
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Global Indios shatters and resignifies the category of indio, a term that has providedandmdash;along with and#39;Spaniardand#39;andmdash;the foundations of scholarship on colonial Latin America. It forces readers to rethink Spanish America as something that extends beyond the Western Hemisphere and that can really only be adequately comprehended in the context of the movement of peoples and the clash of empires.andquot;
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Review
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Global Indios makes very important contributions to literatures of slavery, the history of indigenous peoples, and transatlantic and global history. Nancy E. van Deusen contributes to our understanding of the emergence of a key colonial category, indio/india, and its repercussions. She helps us see how the legal struggles of those held in slavery contributed to the winding down of decades of unchecked enslavement of hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples in the Americas. This is slavery as many readers wonand#39;t have imagined it.andquot;
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Synopsis
Nancy van Deusen examines over one hundred lawsuits that indio slaves brought to the Spanish court in the mid-sixteenth century to gain their freedom. The category indio was largely constructed during these lawsuits, and van Deusen emphasizes the need to situate colonial indigenous subjects and slavery in a global context.
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About the Author
Nancy E. van Deusen is Professor of History at Queenand#39;s University in Kingston, Ontario. She is the author of
Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima and
The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesanduacute;s.
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Table of Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1. All the World in a Village: Carmona 34
2. Crossing the Atlantic and Entering Households 64
3. Small Victories? Gregorio Landoacute;pez and the Reforms of the 1540s 99
4. Into the Courtroom 125
5. Narratives of Territorial Belonging, Just War, and Ransom 147
6. Identifying Indios 169
7. Transimperial Indiosand#160; 192
Conclusions 219
Notes 231
Bibliography 289
Indexand#160; 319