Description
Book SynopsisExplores the profound cultural transformations triggered by Spain's efforts to colonize the Andean region, and demonstrates the continuing influence of the Inquisition to the present day.
Trade Review“
Modern Inquisitions is a superb inquiry into the obscured American origins of modernity. With exceptional lucidity and judicious indignation, Irene Silverblatt persuasively argues that the Spanish Inquisition in colonial Peru was a modern institution that intimately intertwined race-thinking and bureaucratic rationality. By illuminating the subterranean currents shaping the modern world, this outstanding book renders the violent civilizing hierarchies they have carved at once more comprehensible and more intolerable.”—Fernando Coronil, author of
The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela“
Modern Inquisitions is an extraordinary work of research and interpretation. Based on painstaking archival research in the Lima Inquisition records, it makes crucial contributions to the debates about race, state-formation, and colonialism.”—Barbara Weinstein, author of
For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920–1964Table of ContentsAbout the Series ix
Acknowledgments xi
Prologue 3
Three Accused Heretics 29
Inquisition as Bureaucracy 55
Mysteries of State 77
Globalization and Guinea Pigs 99
States and Stains 117
New Christians and New World Fears 141
The Inca’s Witches 161
Becoming Indian 187
Afterword 217
Appendix: Notes on Bias and Sources 227
Notes 235
Bibliography 283
Index 293
