(Source: NYU Press)
NYU Press has
just published a new book on the interaction between settler and indigenous
laws in the New World.
ABOUT THE BOOK
A historical and
legal examination of the conflict and interplay between settler and indigenous
laws in the New World
As British and
Iberian empires expanded across the New World, differing notions of justice and
legality played out against one another as settlers and indigenous people
sought to negotiate their relationship. In order for settlers and natives to
learn from, maneuver, resist, or accommodate each other, they had to grasp
something of each other's legal ideas and conceptions of justice.
This ambitious
volume advances our understanding of how natives and settlers in both the
British and Iberian New World empires struggled to use the other’s ideas of law
and justice as a political, strategic, and moral resource. In so doing, indigenous people and settlers
alike changed their own practices of law and dialogue about justice. Europeans and natives appealed to imperfect
understandings of their interlocutors’ notions of justice and advanced their
own conceptions during workaday negotiations, disputes, and assertions of
right. Settlers’ and indigenous peoples’
legal presuppositions shaped and sometimes misdirected their attempts to employ
each other’s law.
Natives and
settlers construed and misconstrued each other's legal commitments while
learning about them, never quite sure whether they were on solid ground. Chapters explore the problem of “legal
intelligibility”: How and to what extent did settler law and its associated
notions of justice became intelligible—tactically, technically and morally—to
natives, and vice versa? To address this
question, the volume offers a critical comparison between English and Iberian
New World empires. Chapters probe such
topics as treaty negotiations, land sales, and the corporate privileges of
indigenous peoples. Ultimately, Justice
in a New World offers both a deeper understanding of the transformation of
notions of justice and law among settlers and indigenous people, and a dual
comparative study of what it means for laws and moral codes to be legally
intelligible.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian P. Owensby
is Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. He is
the author of Intimate Ironies: Making Middle-Class Lives in Modern Brazil
(1999) and Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (2008).
Richard J. Ross
is Professor of Law and History at the University of Illinois
(Urbana/Champaign) and Director of the Symposium on Comparative Early Modern
Legal History. He is the editor, with Lauren Benton, of Legal Pluralism and
Empires, 1500-1850 (2013).
The table of
contents can be found here
More information
here
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