Petitions, Collective Claims, and Ideologies of Justice in the Spanish Empire

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

How was justice conceptualized and claimed in the Spanish Empire? The royal ideal maintained that the King was the great equalizer who gave all of his subjects their due. Drawing upon petitions of enslaved “indios” from Castile, mestizos from Peru, native villagers from Oaxaca, and Indian nobility from central Mexico, this interdisciplinary panel asks how diverse colonial subjects shaped imperial justice through collective claims to freedom, privileges, education, and local power from the sixteenth through late eighteenth centuries. How can we read petitions for competing notions of justice, and how did time, place, and identity matter in the imperial context?

Sub Track

• History and Historiography

Session Organizer

• Yanna P Yannakakis, Emory University

Chair

• Alexander S Dawson, Simon Fraser University

Individual Presentations

• Indigenous Slave Networks and Notions of Legal Justice in Sixteenth-Century Castile - Nancy E van Deusen, Queen's University

• Mestizo Petitions, Narratives of Justice and the Notarial Record in Sixteenth-Century Colonial Peru - Felipe E Ruan, Brock University

• “Abuse of Authority” and “Disobedience”: Local Ideologies of Justice in Petitions from 18th Century Oaxaca - Yanna P Yannakakis, Emory University

• Native Petitions in Mexico: Justice and Education for All - Mónica Díaz, University of Kentucky

Discussant

• Frank T Proctor, Denison University