Description
Book SynopsisSpanish monarchs recognized the jurisdictions of many self-governing corporate groups, including Jews and Muslims on the peninsula, indigenous peoples in their American colonies, and enslaved and free people of African descent across the empire. Republics of Difference examines fifteenth-century Seville and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lima to show how religiously- and racially-based self-governance functioned in a society with many kinds of law, what effects it had on communities, and why it mattered. By comparing these minoritized communities on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic world, this study offers a new understanding of the distinct standings of those communities in their urban settings. Drawing on legal and commercial records from late medieval Spain and colonial Latin America, Karen B. Graubart paints insightful portraits of residents'' everyday lives to underscore the discriminatory barriers as well as the occupational structures, social hierarchies, and networks in which they flourished. In doing so, she demonstrates the limits, benefits, and dangers of living under one''s own law in the Spanish empire, including the ways self-governance enabled some communities to protect their practices and cultures over time.
Trade ReviewRepublics of Difference is an ambitious and compelling study of the Iberian republic as a tool for managing religious and cultural difference and as a unit of self-governance for legal minorities. Through meticulous transatlantic analysis across a broad swath of time, Graubart reveals the fungibility of the republic as imperial strategy while underscoring how leaders and residents of diverse republics mobilized notions of difference for their own ends. Her argument that republics catalyzed early modern legal pluralism and racial thinking in the Atlantic world represents a landmark contribution to multiple fields of history. * Yanna Yannakakis, Emory University *
Jurisdiction is the fabric of power. Graubart's book delves into the question of what happens when two jurisdictions—for instance, one of Indian laborers and officials living in a walled city, another one founded in colonial rule and Jesuit ideas of work—overlap. Republics of Difference demonstrates both the jurisdictional and institutional creativity of imperial subjects and the ways in which colonial rule kept such creativity at bay. * Jesús R. Velasco, author of Dead Voice: Law, Philosophy, and Fiction in the Iberian Middle Ages *
Republics of Difference is a fascinating transatlantic discussion of the role of self-governing republics as a tool not only for managing distinctive subgroups within the Iberian empire, but also for self-preservation for racial and religious minorities...Using an impressive array of legal and commercial records from both sides of the Atlantic, Graubart demonstrates how disenfranchised groups in Seville and Lima employed the distinction and legal status of a republic to preserve their own identity and exert agency within the Spanish Empire at the same time that the empire attempted to use republics to reinforce imperial control. This work is enhanced through the extensive use of GIS to cartographically present...statistical analysis. This well-written study makes important contributions to discussions of race, identity, and self-governance in the Spanish Empire, as well as to broader discussions within Atlantic studies. * Choice *
Those of us interested in the connected histories of Spain and the Americas have intuited a historical and ideological link between the republics of Muslims and Jews of the Iberian peninsula and the republics of Indians of the overseas territories. Grounding this long awaited and ingeniously documented study in the aljamas of late medieval Seville and the cabildos of Indians of the Lima valley in the early colonial period, respectively, Karen B. Graubart recovers a series of parallelisms and counterpoints that clarify this relationship... One of the most significant methodological innovations is Graubart's reconstruction of the jurisdiction of these republics, despite the near total lack of internal notarial and judicial records. * José Carlos de la Puente Luna, Hispanic American Historical Review *
The greatest strength of Republics of Difference is its impressive breadth, bringing together and drawing out the commonalities and cleavages of Spanish institutional and spatial structures and experiences of difference from the thirteenth to the early seventeenth century. The work stitches together a wealth of sources, stories, and places... Many of the communities studied are often the focus of nationally bound historiographies; thus the book sheds light on how race, status, and local context profoundly remade the legal, economic, and social worlds of Spanish subjects whom the early modern church and state defined as 'different' across the empire. This impressive book will be of great interest to scholars and students of race, religion, law, and politics in late medieval Spain, colonial Latin America, and the early modern African diaspora. * Bethan Fisk, H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews *
