Owning Ideas, or How Slave Owners, Husbands and Caciques Denied the Spanish Colonial Enlightenment in Court

• In Event: Outside In? Plebeian Exclusion and Participation in Dominant States from the Enlightenment to the Era of Positivism

Abstract

This paper is the concluding chapter to a book manuscript, “The Enlightenment On Trial,” which shows that ordinary, sometimes illiterate colonial Spanish Americans brought to life an intellectual movement long considered the exclusive property of educated Europeans: the Enlightenment. They did so from within a colonial court system, where the odds, we have been told, were stacked against them.

Using a comparative research design, the book demonstrates that at the end of the 1700s, colonial Spanish Americans began to sue one another with a fervor unseen in the European mother country. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative analyses of civil suits heard in the royal tribunals of Spain, Peru and Mexico, the book delves deeply into three types of civil cases that increased at a rate even faster than the general increase in colonial suits in the second half of the 1700s: those that slaves, Indian peasants and women initiated against masters, native leaders and husbands. The arguments these colonial subordinates used against their superiors generated new concepts of equality, legal subjectivity, and natural rights. In short, when these subordinate litigants entered court, they produced the Enlightenment.

Yet if there was an Enlightenment among colonial subordinates, how can it be that the version that privileges Europe as epicenter became foundational for liberal notions of modernity and post-modern and post-colonial thought? How can be that illiterate slaves, abused wives and indigenous peasants enacted a historical movement that is said to have been the exclusive domain of educated elite men? This chapter answers these questions by showing how the lawsuits subordinates brought provoked defendants into denying the historical subjectivity of their legal opponents. Masters claimed slaves worked under the sinister influence of “directors;” caciques portrayed rebellious native subjects as vulnerable to the legal predations of priests; husbands accused their wives of sleeping with their lawyers. Defense arguments turned on the notion that ideas have owners and definite origins, and that colonial subalterns could not be the legitimate owners of arguments about rights or equality. Such exclusive notions about ideas, originality and subjectivity are, I argue, still with historians of Latin America today.

Author

• Bianca Premo, Florida International University