BOOK: Michelle MCKINLEY, Libertades fraccionadas. Esclavitud, intimidad y movilización jurídica en la Lima colonial, 1600-1700 (Valencia: Tirant lo Blanch, 2021). ISBN: 9788413365565, pp. 372, $ 449.00 MXN

 

(Source: Tirant lo Blanch)

ABOUT THE BOOK

‘Libertades fraccionadas’ explora el modo como miles de esclavas en el Perú colonial aprovecharon los instrumentos jurídicos a su disposición para asegurar su libertad, mantener intactas sus familias, negociar precios bajos para auto-comprarse y planificar transferencias de propiedad. Mediante una extensa investigación en archivos, Michelle McKinley explora las experiencias de mujeres esclavizadas cuya huella histórica es apenas visible en los registros oficiales y demuestra hasta qué punto los esclavos podían actuar por voluntad propia, a pesar de estar atrapados en las redes del tráfico de seres humanos del mundo Atlántico. La autora presenta a las mujeres esclavizadas como actores legales con identidades superpuestas: esposas, madres, amantes, nodrizas y sirvientas que recibían un jornal, y muestra cómo esas experiencias en el ambiente laboral urbano condicionaron su identidad como esclavas. Si bien los procesos judiciales no siempre eran exitosos para las esclavas, en ‘Libertades fraccionadas’ se demuestra la forma en que estas mujeres utilizaron los canales del afecto y la intimidad para presionar y obtener su libertad, y evitar así la transmisión generacional de la esclavitud a sus hijos.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michelle A. McKinley es catedrática en la Escuela de Derecho de la Universidad de Oregon. Ha publicado numerosos trabajos sobre legislación internacional, globalización e historia jurídica, y en el año 2011 fue galardonada con el Surrency Prize de la American Society for Legal History. 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contenido

Agradecimientos        9

Prólogo        13

Bianca Premo

Introducción        17

1    Litigando por la libertad        49

2    Cadenas conyugales        109

3    Dependencias peligrosas        153

4    Libertad en la pila bautismal        195

5    Hasta que la muerte nos separe        237

6    Comprador, cuidado        271

Conclusión        313

Nota sobre las referencias y la bibliografía        327

Índice        353

More information with the publisher.

BOOK REVIEW: Richard Jeffrey ROSS and Brian Philip OWENSBY (eds.), Justice in a New World : Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America (New York: NYU Press, 2018), by Christopher TOMLINS.

(Source : NYU)

THE REVIEW : Christopher TOMLINS (Professor, Berkeley Law Faculty, University of California) is the author of the book review, published in The American Historical Review, Volume 125, Issue 2, April 2020, Pages 642–643, online access : https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhz858

ABOUT THE BOOK :

Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross’s interesting collection Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America seeks to advance the history of European Atlantic empires by subjecting the legalities of colonizing to comparative assessment, specifically how encounters between Indigenous peoples and Iberian and Anglophone intruders were refracted by their idiosyncratic legal cultures. Comparison, say the editors, promises broadened conceptual purchase for historians of encounter wishing to interrogate the extent and limits of cross-cultural comprehension. Comparison will open up “new vistas on issues of jurisdiction, sovereignty, legal inclusion and exclusion, the quality and role of intermediation in structuring legal encounters and producing legal outcomes, and the intellectual foundation of justice as a guiding idea for legal engagement”.

Richard Jeffrey ROSS and Brian Philip OWENSBY (eds.), Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America. New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. viii, 330. Cloth $89.00, paper $30.00. 

More information here.

WORKSHOP PRESENTATIONS : Stanford Center for Law & History (Stanford, 27 Jan. to 9 Mar. 2020)

Source :  Stanford Law School

Stanford Center for Law and History announces four great legal history workshop presentations that will be taking place there. Coordinated by Professors Amalia Kessler and Robert Gordon.

 
Where :  Room 272 of the Law School's Crown Building, (Stanford, California).

When : on the following Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 PM.

Programme:

January 27—Allison Powers, Assistant Professor of History, Texas Tech University: “The Specter of Compensation: Mexican Claims Against the United States, 1923-1941.”

February 10—Fahad Bishara, Assistant Professor of History, Assistant Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies, University of Virginia: "Rethinking the Bazaar: Law and the Documentary Infrastructures of Economic Life in the Indian Ocean."

February 24—Lauren Benton, Nelson O. Tyrone, Jr. Professor of History and Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University: “Law in Small Wars, circa 1750: Peacetime Violence and European Legal Regimes.”

March 9—Sam Erman, Professor of Law, University of Southern California Law: “Inventing the Rules of Blood and of Soil: Nineteenth-Century Origins of Birthright Citizenship.”  

More information and registration:  here

BOOK: Christoph ROSENMÜLLER, Corruption and Justice in Colonial Mexico, 1650-1755 [Cambridge Latin American Studies] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). ISBN 9781108477116, £ 75.00

(Source: CUP)

Cambridge University Press has published a new book on corruption in colonial Mexico during the period 1650-1755.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Corruption is one of the most prominent issues in Latin American news cycles, with charges deciding the recent elections in Mexico, Brazil, and Guatemala. Despite the urgency of the matter, few recent historical studies on the topic exist, especially on Mexico. For this reason, Christoph Rosenmüller explores the enigma of historical corruption. By drawing upon thorough archival research and a multi-lingual collection of printed primary sources and secondary literature, Rosenmüller demonstrates how corruption in the past differed markedly from today. Corruption in Mexico's colonial period connoted the obstruction of justice; judges, for example, tortured prisoners to extract cash or accepted bribes to alter judicial verdicts. In addition, the concept evolved over time to include several forms of self-advantage in the bureaucracy. Rosenmüller embeds this important shift from judicial to administrative corruption within the changing Atlantic World, while also providing insightful perspectives from the lower social echelons of colonial Mexico.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christoph Rosenmüller, Middle Tennessee State University

Christoph Rosenmüller is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University. His publications include the edited volumes Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks (2017), 'Dávidas, dones y dineros': aportes a una nueva historia de la corrupción en América Latina desde el imperio español a la modernidad (2016), and the book Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710 (2008).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of maps, Tables and figures

Acknowledgments

A note on terms

List of abbreviations

Introduction

1. Empire of justice

2. From judicial to administrative corruption

3. 'This custom or better said corruption': legal strategies and the native trade with the Alcaldes Mayores

4. 'Vile and abominable pacts': the sale of judicial appointments and the great decline of viceregal patronage

5. Criminal process and the 'judge who is corrupted by money'

6. Guilt and punishment for fraud, theft, and the 'grave offense of bribery or corruption'

7. The politics of justice: Francisco Garzarón's Visita (1716–1727)

Conclusion: approaching historical corruption

Appendix

Glossary

Bibliography

Index.

More information here

BOOK: Allan GREER, Property and Dispossession : Natives, Empires and Land in Early Modern North America [Studies in North American Indian History] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). ISBN 9781316613696, £ 22.99

(Source: CUP)

Earlier this year, Cambridge University Press published a book on the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Allan Greer examines the processes by which forms of land tenure emerged and natives were dispossessed from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries in New France (Canada), New Spain (Mexico), and New England. By focusing on land, territory, and property, he deploys the concept of 'property formation' to consider the ways in which Europeans and their Euro-American descendants remade New World space as they laid claim to the continent's resources, extended the reach of empire, and established states and jurisdictions for themselves. Challenging long-held, binary assumptions of property as a single entity, which various groups did or did not possess, Greer highlights the diversity of indigenous and Euro-American property systems in the early modern period. The book's geographic scope, comparative dimension, and placement of indigenous people on an equal plane with Europeans makes it unlike any previous study of early colonization and contact in the Americas.

Provides a comparative approach to the colonization of North America, including a study of French, English, and Spanish colonies

Considers colonization in an indigenous America, contrary to the prevailing Eurocentrism of the history of early modern imperialism

Focuses on property formation as a central dimension of colonization

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allan Greer, McGill University, Montréal

Allan Greer is a professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Colonial North America at McGill University, Montréal. He has published seven books, including Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (2005) and La Nouvelle-France et le monde (2009).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction: property and colonization

Part I. Three Zones Of Colonization:

2. Indigenous forms of property

3. Early contacts

4. New Spain

5. New France

6. New England

Part II. Aspects of Property Formation:

7. The colonial commons

8. Spaces of property

9. A survey of surveying

10. Empires and colonies

Part III. Conclusion and Epilogue:

11. Property and dispossession in an age of revolution.

More information here

ARTICLE: "The Rhetoric and Reality of English Law in Colonial Maryland, Part 1 - 1632-1689", by Jeffrey K. Sawyer

Jeffrey K. Sawyer, University of Baltimore - School of Law, The Rhetoric and Reality of English Law in Colonial Maryland, Part 1 - 1632-1689, Maryland Historical Magazine, Vol. 108, No. 4, Winter 2013, pp. 392-409

All information here

Abstract

The rule of English law in the English-speaking colonial world is at once obvious and puzzling. Along with language, the law anchored the Englishness of life in colonial America, At the same time, warring states and rival investors used law and diplomacy as weapons in their arsenals of global competition, and so the law of nations provided an unstable and frequently contested framework for exploration and settlement. The governance of struggling Atlantic settlements (especially before 1660) rose, fell, and was reconstructed with the various fortunes of each. In these early settlements there was much law-making, but law was perhaps negotiated as often as it was applied; local officials frequently adjusted English rules to local circumstances. The more historians investigate this world, the harder it is to be sure, exactly, how colonial law worked.

This article examines why a perennial contest over the precise authority of English law was so central to the rule of law in early Maryland. Two new perspectives will help further this inquiry, which has long interested colonial historians generally and historians of Maryland in particular. The first is a heightened appreciation of the fact that early American legal history unfolded in distinct phases. The second is a recognition that the contest over English law in the colonies developed along different but overlapping dimensions, a political or rhetorical dimension and an operational dimension. This latter world of law was the reality of lawsuits, debt collection, inheritance, criminal prosecutions, judgments, and so on.