← New Books Network
New Books Network
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters, "The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World" (Harvard UP, 2026)
01:44:11
Loading summary
Transcript66 lines
- [00:00]
A
I was groomed to become one of his wives. This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her. I want to see action, and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk. You need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:35]
B
Hello, everyone. This is Freddy Dominguez with the New Books Network. And I'm excited today because I get to conduct this interview alongside Fabien Moncher, who is professor of history and director of the center for Iberian historical studies at St. Louis University. He's also the author of Mercenaries of Knowledge, Vicente Nogueira, the Republic of Letters, and the Making of Late Renaissance Politics. We'll be talking with the authors of the Radical Spanish How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World, Jorge Canisares Esguerra and Adrian Masters. Adrian Masters is project leader in the Department of History at Trier University and the author of we the Creating Royal legislation in the 16th century Spanish world. And Jorge Canizares Esguerra has written many things, among them, how to Write the History of the New World, Pure Inconquistadors and the Nature and Nature, Empire and Nation. And he is Alice Drysdale Sheffield professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. So thank you for being here with us. I will start, and we'll start broadly, sort of going down memory lane. Thinking back to archive office, library, where you were doing your work, you're reading stuff. What were you reading that suggested to you, there's a book here? This book needs to be written.
- [02:04]
A
I was born in Jorge's office. I think I remember I used to come and pester him quite a lot as I was his graduate student. And I always felt like, I don't really know, what does this document mean? What am I doing here? And I was. I was sort of moving through writing this book about how vassals could petition the crown and shape laws. And Jorge kept saying, you know, I like the book, but I think you should make it about, like, petitioning in general. You know, you're just talking about vassals talking to the king. But, like, what about vassals talking to the viceroy and talking to the municipality and talking to the bishop and talking to the inquisitor? And I'm going, man, man, man, man, that's way too much work. We're never going to be able to do this. And then he says to Me in one way or another. I don't remember the exact phrase. He says, well, what if we wrote that book together and that's more or less the origin story? Of course. I said, oh, sounds pretty cool. And then we had to really sit down and think about what the heck we were doing. And this is probably early 2017.
- [03:05]
C
No, this is earlier.
- [03:06]
A
Even earlier.
- [03:07]
C
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you began, I mean, he began coming to my office earlier, obviously since 2013, 2013, etc. So there's a point in which you began to surprise me with this issue of petitions and laws. And I said, this makes no sense. Are you sure that you are really telling. Are you sure this is really true? Makes no sense. I was used to this idea that decrees came from the top down. And he was telling me, no, decrees are not coming from the top down, they're coming from petitions. And many of these decrees are actually verbating copies of petitions. So this is odd and crazy. So you're telling me that the royal decrees, these millions of royal decrees, are actually written by petitioners and the crown is very passive. Adrian said, yes. And so that was the first surprise. And then. So if this is true, if this holds true, then what about these other petitions? And then as we were discussing all these petitions and all these decrees and requirimientos and sign outs in the case of the church, all these different expressions of decrees that were always presented from the top down, not from the bottom up, we began to realize that this is actually coming from the, from the bottom up. Even synods, church synods and church councils, there is a room for individuals to kind of write into bishops and to kind of participate in the making of all these ideas. And so things began to. So I remember that surprise early on and St. Louisian to kind of articulate an idea of what this means. Vi a vis all these understandings of the monarchy, Spanish monarchy as a top down scholastic, neo scholastic structure, and so on, so forth. That is kind of clear in John Eliot's Atlantic History of the British and the Spanish empires. If there's anything in that treatise is that there is, yes. Empires kind of diverge out of serendipity. The fact that one found mining and indigenous peoples in one center and the others did not. And so even though that is true in John Elliott, in John Elliott, it's clear that towards the middle and the end, he has two different empires. One is kind of democratic, bottom up and the other is top down, neo scholastic, centralized and bureaucratic and so on and so forth. So that comes back to Prescott. Comes back to Prescott. It's kind of an old tradition, 19th century, even earlier. But the point is that if what Adrian was finding is true, then we have to reframe a number of things. So it's in that process of reframing that we began to kind of question the whole idea of public sphere, the whole idea of print culture, the whole idea of politics, the political. Where is the political emerging? I mean, you have a lot of politics going on here with petitioning. This is not top down, this is bottom up. And so paperwork is a manifestation of politics from the bottom up. Excuse me. Yes, from the bottom up. And so what does it mean? And I remember by 2017, after two good years of having all these discussions that we articulated a project that had to do with this kind of questioning, all these liberal. By then we had very clear that our target was this liberal narrative that we discuss in the introduction of the book. Now eventually became a questioning of three other narratives, not only the liberal narrative, but in 2017, I have the book project that we sent to Harvard. It's a questioning of the entire narrative of the liberal tradition when it comes to, I mean, the birth of the public sphere, the birth of the political, the birth of the republic of letters, of knowledge, scientific revolution and so forth. So we took on all those categories in our first book proposal and Harvard picked it up in 2017 already. And so we have this proposal, we have this allegedly this book in our minds. And so Harvard gave us a year, so it took seven more years to pull it off.
- [07:39]
D
I really like this idea of reframing the two of you really working intensively, not so much as a noisy story of a book, but really as a constant work in progress. Because one thing that the book does, and does it very well, and this is a coup, it provides us with an entire new framework whether you are upsetting the liberal, decolonial, Hispanist narrative that you mentioned in the book. So I had a follow up question in relation with this framework because you too, as historians, you are deeply well versed and you are reading across fields. And I'm thinking of Jorge in particular, you mentioned John Elliot. And you yourself in your work, you have been thinking in comparative terms, in connected terms between the British Empire and Spain, obviously. And at the very beginning of the book, the two of you are bringing into the picture the English, the mid 17th century English Revolution. And one of the key book that emerged from your references is Christopher Hill, the World Turned Upside Down. So my question is, how do you See hills, radicals, commoners, in some ways being very similar to the people you engage with. And what differences, like key differences between these commoners and your commoners, who are obviously very into the management and the creation of paperwork.
- [09:21]
C
Very brief. And I let Adrian answer this question actually fully, because this is Adrian's very, very. He kept telling me that this is radical, that this is a radical Spanish empire, and said, are you nuts?
- [09:38]
A
What?
- [09:40]
C
I don't see the radicalism here. What do you mean by radicalism? So we kept these back and forth, and I was suggesting different titles. I wasn't really that comfortable with the whole idea of radicalism. And I couldn't find a freaking radical myself, to be honest. It took me years to find the radicalism until I did. But this is all Adrian. So, Adrian, your answer.
- [10:05]
A
Well, thank you very much. So.
- [10:08]
C
Right.
- [10:08]
A
I mean, we were grasping at a way of talking about this upheaval, right. And that people are actively thinking this system needs to be overhauled. Not necessarily all is one voice. And it wasn't like a social class thing necessarily. Wasn't so simple and straightforward. It wasn't proto Marxism or something, but it was indigenous commoners, really, blasting indigenous lords and friars, blasting conquistadors, and conquistadors blasting the crown, and everyone sort of taking turns blasting each other. And it's very participatory. And initially we played with the idea of modernity, right? This was sort of one of the things that was on our mind. And I thought, you know, modernity, you could. You could sort of wing it, but it's a very contested category. And then radical came around, and I thought, well, okay, radical is a little easier. It's a little bit less loaded in the sense that people can imagine there's a root in society, and there are people who are blasting away at the root of society. And we really wanted this to be a social history. It's not supposed to. I mean, it merges communication history and intellectual history, conceptual, legal, all of those things. But it's fundamentally about structural change and how that happens. And so we settled ultimately on radical. I mean, I pushed for it because I felt that what was being critiqued were the foundations of society. And there was a belief that it could be reorganized and that this wasn't just a sort of matter of reading the Bible and really getting to the point of what the Bible was saying or getting into what's really fair or what's really not fair. It was like, no, no, no, no, no. This system has to be uprooted down to the Last little particle or the bad weeds are going to grow back. And everyone is saying this now. It took us a long time, I think, to really settle into what exactly our position on radical was. And, and Hill came in later. So it wasn't really born from. We read Hill and we said, wait a second, that's what's happening in the Spanish Empire. It's more like we described and described and described and read about early modern radicalisms and, and eventually sort of in a spiraling manner came to Hill. So I would say Hill was added rather late in the, in the conception, which, which isn't to say that he isn't important or that he hasn't inspired a very important series of reflections. But this isn't sort of Hill flipped upside down and done in the Spanish Empire, so to speak. That being said, I mean, I think there are some illuminating elements and Jorge and I really, I think, sharpened the sociological critique towards the end of the writing process. I mean, we were always thinking all of the things that people say about print culture, for example, the same thing happens with manuscripts, right? I mean, this is a totally false dichotomy. You can do a lot of the same things. We're not saying they're identical, but, but you. There's just as many manuscripts going around as there are books, right? I mean, and, and so in Hill's version, you know, it's much more 17th century England and we're talking about pamphlets and we're talking about, you know, sort of more marginal characters who really propose some things like, you know, we have to get rid of the monarchy and stuff like that. And we slam on the brakes and we say, well, actually we're not talking about people who tried to get rid of the monarchy, although those people that exist, a lot of the conquistadors wanted to get rid of the monarchy. They were very angry at the Crown. But we're not talking about those people. We're talking about the people who are critiquing the actors who are in front of them, who had the power of violence and who accumulated labor. Right. I mean, we're not using like a real Marxist, you know, structuralism here, but, but we're thinking about the conquistadors or the native lords or the friars who have big sticks in their hands and beat people over the head. And those are the people being critiqued. And really the crown is 12 people across the ocean. And that's quite different from the British version because the British are critiquing oftentimes, I don't know, the Anglican Church. They're critiquing the King of England. And that's a very big difference in this book. So the book is there, it's in the background. I'd say it's more of a cognate. This isn't sort of Christopher Hill directly teleported into the new World. It's sort of more like this song flows into this other song and Christopher Hill is on the playlist, if that makes sense.
- [14:25]
D
I like the idea of, I mean, your language of uprooting, rooting, rerouting. It's telling to us. I mean, we discussed this with Freddy earlier because it speaks to the current need to read against this stereography, which is another term you use toward the end of the book in order to read along the archives. And we can go back to this point. So it seems that at the beginning of this podcast there is a need to revise a little bit this liberal narrative. Some big names in the field, John, Jorge, you mentioned John Elliott. That appears some kind of Antonio de Herrera as well. In the book we mentioned Christopher Hill and I know that we were interested with Freddie. And I will let Freddie maybe develop this question further about your how do you see, moving forward and when writing this book, the Cambridge School fitting into the pictures and how different your proposition is with respect to this tradition. But Frederick, the British.
- [15:38]
C
The British.
- [15:40]
B
So along those lines, I know this is a social history and not necessarily an intellectual history, but it seems to me that especially early on when you talk about tyranny, but throughout the book, in many ways obvious and not obvious, you talk about intellectual history in some way or another, or you're speaking to it. And in particular, and you do mention this specifically, the Cambridge School of Political Thought. And I was wondering how you think your work in general, not only the discourse on tyranny, but in general, the various discourses you pick up throughout the book, how it speaks to that historiography, to the kind of, from my point of view anyway, the kind of elitist, exclusivist narrative of intellectual history and political thought.
- [16:26]
C
This is intellectual history of the best kind. This is social history of ideas. So there are many, many things that make this book an intellectual history, a vernacular intellectual history. So chapter one that is about tyranny, then I let Adrian explain it better. But what you have is a tradition of anti tyranny radicalism that percolates every single sector of society. So you find that in indigenous lords, in indigenous commoners, in friars, in commenderos, in conquistadors, in bishops, in viceroy, everywhere and it's a way of articulating factionalism and opposition throughout the 16th century. Without the category of tyranny, you don't have all these radicalism and all these structural change. The category continues into the late 16th and 17th century. It continues. I mean, there is petitioning and unrest that doesn't stop. But it's no longer radical in terms, in that it's no longer seeking structural reform. There is an order, hierarchical order, new social order that is attained towards the end of the 16th century. And that is what the book seeks to explain structurally, why that radicalism stops. But in the process, you have this trope of tyranny that organizes everything. And then there are other elements of history of knowledge and history of ideas that are the. Throughout the entire book. So chapter three, for instance, is about massive production of knowledge. Massive production of knowledge and how petitioning, especially Gracia petitioning, explains that massive production of knowledge by everyone. I mean, it's only. I mean, we're talking the other day with Adrian. How is it possible? I was postulating to him this question that I presented in class weeks ago. I said, okay, listen, you have Ptolemaic cartography, right? Ptolemaic cartography. It's 1500 years of trying to figure out Euro Asia, and you begin without an Atlantic and Indian Ocean connecting. You have an Africa that is kind of. We don't know where the end of South Africa is and whether the Atlantic and Indian Ocean connects. You don't know by the time of the Mongol invasion, where exactly is the Red Ocean, Red Sea? Where is India in relationship to the Southeast Asia? You don't know where China is in relationship to India, and so on and so forth. And it's only with Italian travelers and the Pax Mongolica that eventually you have Eurasia emerging, as categorically speaking, right? And that is 15. Again, I want to emphasize this. 1500 years, right? Now, Go to the Indies, go to Columbus. 1492, there is an idea that there is something islands in between Europe and Asia, right? And China, whatever ideas, he has India and Japan in his mind, Cipango and India. And so he finds Cuba or Hispaniola and says, oh, well, here I am in India. 1492, you begin to see the mapping of these places. 1492, 1400. And all of a sudden you begin to see the emergence of the eastern coast all the way from Greenland to probably Brazil. 1500, 1510, by 1570 or 1560, you see these mapa mundis, in which 2/3 of the Earth that were missing emerged. 2/3 of the Earth are missing in 70 years and they are mapped out. So how is it possible that you have this immense amount of knowledge, this immense body of knowledge that allowed for the sketching out of 2/3 of the Earth that were missing in 70 years? That is a question worth exploring. That massive amount of knowledge comes from this type of expectation of small companies, of small entrepreneurs, bottom up companies we call conquistadors, shareholding companies with contracts that begin to explore all these different regions because they are expecting upward social mobility. Commoners, I don't know, carpenters, shoemakers, whatever, they are not soldiers. Most of these conquistadors are not soldiers. They are just commoners somewhere in rural or urban Spain or Portugal that are kind of assembling this massive amount of knowledge through these expeditions. And so what is true of cartography is true of everything else. It's true of mining. Mining is a bottom up system that transforms places in which there's nothing literally Potosi or Zacatecas, to the largest city in the Spanish monarchy, Potosi, 150,000 people in a matter of 20 years, with 30 artificial lakes, miles and miles of aqueducts, and I mean massive amounts of engineering and hydraulic engineering. How is it possible? The explanation is this system that we sketch out in chapter three and then chapter four is about. It's all about skepticism, right? It's about this massive vernacular skepticism. It's not about Montagne, it's not about Descartes, but it is. And so in the Americas recently we had this forum on Juanampo made Ayala, whom we present as this commoner, whose Novachronica. It's ultimately not only a version of Martin Guerre, but it's actually a version of Martin Guerre and Montagne. A reflection on skepticism, a reflection on, on commoners that are constantly lying and presenting all these narratives about themselves that are fictions, including his. And so how do you describe, how do you articulate an understanding of knowledge and truth and credibility in this world in which everybody is making up genealogies through charisma and testimony? And that is what Woman Poma is about. It's kind of a profound reflection of 16th century skepticism, vernacular skepticism. So it's a history of knowledge and ultimately the last chapter about the archive is also a history of knowledge throughout, but a social history of knowledge in which commoners and people, common people, including indigenous commoners, get to make a reflect on knowledge. So this is not a top down history of knowledge, it's a bottom up history of knowledge, but it's history of Knowledge. Nevertheless, close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax, and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast.
- [24:20]
A
And breathe.
- [24:21]
C
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [24:29]
A
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts.
- [24:34]
C
It's tax season, and at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear.
- [24:40]
A
Billions. That's the amount of money in refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud.
- [24:46]
C
Now, here's another big number.
- [24:48]
A
100 million.
- [24:49]
C
That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second.
- [24:52]
A
If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it, guaranteed.
- [24:55]
C
One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year.
- [24:59]
A
Visit lifelock.com podcast for the threats you can't control. Terms apply. And if I can just build on that. You know, I think, you know, I'm no super great expert on the Cambridge School, but one thing that I know about is that it is sort of doing a sort of social contextualization of the intellectuals who we know and love, right? I mean, you can't just study Locke in outer space or make him have an artificial dialogue with Kant or something. You need to know Locke in his environment and Kant in his environment. And that's all fine and good. I mean, we're all about lowering things a little bit and, and saying, hey, you know, Kant never left his, you know, 100 meter square meter zone. And that's important for understanding who he is. And these are his social networks. That's all great, but what we're really doing is breaking down the floor between Locke and the sort of people at the market, right? We're, we're not, we're, we're arguing that, you know, it's possible to see these people as different. In a way, they're different, but just the same way that we are part of society as intellectuals in this conversation, so is everybody else. And so this idea, I mean, we, there was a talk I went to, it was interesting. We received a little bit of pushback. I did. When I presented the book, the question was, is this really skepticism? You know, when a native lord throws sand in the eyes of a bishop, metaphorically, and sort of plays these games of, is the bishop telling the Truth or am I telling the truth? Can we ever know in order to sort of trip the bishop up? This is a real story that we deal with in Guatemala in the 1580s. This indigenous lord actually wins the argument because he sort of casts doubt on the bishop. And there's billions of cases like this. It's sort of just every day, everybody is denouncing everyone else. And we're saying, you know, the history of skepticism sometimes struggles. If you're not directly arguing with ancient Greek skeptics or something, then it's not skepticism, but this. It's been. You know, the tradition of skepticism is so broad, it didn't come from the skeptics necessarily. That's just a word that we give this because we have to give it a name. But doubting the truth and doubting that we can ever fully attain the truth and believing things anyway is a part of everyday life. And so we're trying to also rescue that and say all of these commoners who resist their lords, they're doing that because they can use doubt. Because otherwise, if. If dogma was really how the Spanish Empire ran, then it would be case closed. And that's an important point, I think, is that the Spanish Empire in the historiography appears as dogmatic. And, you know, the authorities know what's true and the commoners have to obey. And the Inquisition is sort of the symbol of that. Don't go questioning things. And we don't deny that the Inquisition ran after people for being heterodox and so on and so forth. That's definitely part of the story. But we're trying to say is that these paperwork channels were. You could play a lot of games with doubt and really had a hugely destabilizing effect on society. You could say, that guy's not a lord, that's not a commoner. This town doesn't belong as part of that town. The king is. Shouldn't exist. That's not. That guy's not a friar. That friar is not good. And you can just do that to everyone. And it has a hugely caustic impact on society. And so in that way, we sort of break down the Cambridge school's walls in a lot of ways. And that's also, I would say what we're doing in the Guaman Poma article is, is to say, why don't we consider this guy instead of being like an ethnic informant, like a perfect Andean native who's here to tell us what life used to be like before the Spanish? No, no, no, no. This guy's just as much an intellectual as anyone. And he, he only represents the Andeans as well as Montana represents the French.
- [28:38]
D
I think it's. It's very striking in what you say, Adrian, what you say, Jorge, that you are, of course, with his book broadening categories such as the one of Skep, One reaction would be, oh, are these categories then too broad, too loose? But when one goes through the book, one realize that instead of loosening the category, you are just making them more capacious, more multidimensional. And you are doing that with a very deep work on some of the most exciting work during these last 20 years done across the field of Iberian studies, acknowledging the contribution by historians like Mercedes Garcia Ernal. I'm thinking about skepticism right now, Stuart Schwartz, going all the way back to Richard Popkin. So you are bringing to us like these five key fields, subfields of urban history, anti tyranny, borderland petitions, skepticism, archival term. And you are thinking about the different knowledge, strategy, tactic, creation happening within this category. And in addition to that, putting everything into another concept, which is the key concept of the book, from my perspective, which is love, fair, in addition of a radical. So can you comment a little bit more on how you arrive to this concept? How do you see it functioning not only in each of the chapter of the book, but across these chapters, when thinking about the big picture of the radical empire that might exceed also the Atlantic world, might exceed Europe and the New World, and might be living its life elsewhere as well?
- [30:28]
C
Well, that is a good question. The architecture. The architecture. Well, we had the architecture. I mean, I was reviewing our proposal to Harvard. The architecture is there already. We have the five chapters. Right. And it comes out of. I mean, we had already kind of explored certain things. For instance, I have an article on this indigenous lore that goes to from Potosi, goes to Spain, to Madrid, to the court with these manuscripts on machines, machinery, hydraulic technologies. 1600, his name Bartolomenga. Bartolomega arrived. So the court kind of the secretary of secrets Secretary, the expert on secrets, kind of takes a manuscript and tries to break down the code. Kind of a performance in court, because the guy was kind of the great brake coater. And so that whole thing kind of revealed the nature of public sphere. See, knowledge that is not created in the public sphere, because it's a petition that comes from the bottom up is grace. And yet it's producing this knowledge. And then we had other stuff already there. Can we. I mean, what is public sphere? How the public sphere is kind of hiding this things that we are seeing here, but are not acknowledged. Once you acquire the idea of print and public sphere and the history of the book and all that stuff that is kind of very well crafted, right? Chartier and Darden and all those guys, Anthony Grafton, all this literature, Avian Johns that has us revolution of print culture, the disorder created by print culture, wars of religion a mess, there is no authorship. The notion of truth goes to hell and so on and so forth. And all of a sudden, mid 17th century scientific revolution that kind of brings order back. Hobbes, Leviathan and their pomp, right? So brings order back. New notions of truth making through peer review and vetting and civility. And all of a sudden there is a new understanding, a new social order emerges that leads to the public sphere, the republican letters and eventually the political.
- [33:09]
A
The political.
- [33:10]
C
The political that is ultimately Habermas and the French Revolution and Benedict Anderson, the nation that is also on print culture. Its on print culture. Identity is on print culture, nations on print culture. And we kept on seeing that this is all happening before our eyes somewhere else four centuries before or three centuries before. So why don't we have the categories to deal with this? And in that struggle for categories that the architecture of the book emerges not just from this critique of liberalism, but a critique of older traditions. And this is important. It's a critique of the decolonial that is worse than liberalism when it comes to politics, when it comes to acknowledging bottom up politics and indigenous politics. And then there's a critique of Hispanism that yes, it's capacious in its understanding or participation of many people in the creation of the monarchy, but it's also very teleological and kind of erodes the conflict. I mean, it's also bottom up, excuse me, top down. And there are all sorts of problems with Hispanism. And then this is a major category that we are taking on, which is the category of culturalism and civilizationalism, which is kind of this idea of mestizaje and hybridity. And indigenous peoples are kind of struggling to preserve their culture. And codices become all indigenous codices of the 16th century, kind of revealed, this. Indigenous tradition that has to be unearthed and so on and so forth. So once you acknowledge the existence of the political in paperwork, then all these ideas about culture become irrelevant, become just an expression of the political. I mean, as is in 18th century France or anywhere else.
- [35:23]
A
Sorry, that's where the conflict of lawfare comes in, right? Is that so? We acknowledge that there's always politics in the Spanish Empire. The king Always listens to petitions all the way until the end. But in the very first couple decades, about five, there's been disease, enormous conquests, total upheaval, and then there's this very nasty style of litigation that sort of. Everybody's really into. Everybody believes that through sort of testimonies, secret reports, petitions, lawsuits, privilege petitions that they're going to fight back. And it's very uncivil, and it's very nasty. And it almost takes the form of sort of rival gangs grouping together. And. And. And sometimes it actually gets violent. And we have some cases where litigation is preceded by, like, people bashing each other's heads in or spitting on friars or worse. Right. There's all sorts of violence in this. In this sphere. It's not about civility. Right. It's not about, I'll circulate my ideas and you circulate yours. It's everybody just smashing as hard as they can against each other. And really important in this, what we call lawfare, because it's. It's not really. It's not exactly. The discovery of justice isn't the goal. The conquest of the other is the goal. Right. The friars want to destroy the conquistadors. The conquistadors want to destroy the friars. They're trying to get justice, yes, but they're trying to uproot something else. They don't just want their neighbor to move their fence over one more meter. They want to destroy the house and pour salt on the ground. I mean, this is. This is really extremely aggressive, so stuff. And then important here is that we really lay a lot of emphasis that a lot of the people engaging in lawfare are ladinos, that is, they're from cultural backgrounds which are not necessarily Hispanic, but they become extremely proficient in using this style of lawfare to get out of slavery, to found new towns, to destroy their enemies. And it becomes a sort of art form, which is a big factor of how the empire stays together in spite of all of this turbulence and violence, is that indigenous people get extremely good at playing these games, and they play them against each other, mainly, and they also play them against Spaniards. And it. And it loosens the fabric of society to the extent that these mining towns have wage labor because all the lords have been bruised and destroyed. They've lost all their lawsuits. And then you have, you know, silver starts to flow to China through these new mining centers, which exist in places where people didn't even used to really live, where there might have been a few small groups. But now we're talking 50,000, 100,000 people. And so we really view lawfare as central and this Leninization of this empire as being. As having a lot of explanatory power because. And perhaps we should have said this from the very beginning. We don't believe that 2000 conquistadors took over the New World, and we don't believe that 2000 friars did it either. Right. And we're strongly rejecting that. And then the other narrative is that the Crown does it all. And so somehow 12 people, sometimes six people in Madrid, sort of, we don't know, like, throw this pixie dust in the air and it travels over to the New World and it grows order. That's not how it happens. Right. The Crown has no violence. There's no violence at its disposal. Even when the viceroys go over, they're the ones getting smacked around by the conquistadors, by the friars, by indigenous groups. They don't have armies, really. There are some moments where they raise an army in the civil wars in Peru, but it's very expensive and very difficult. And so instead, we suggest that participation in this lawfare is the only way to explain how you get from outright violence to a society of orders. It's sort of a middle point that's
- [39:14]
D
very enlightening in the sense that when one goes back to the book, I mean, I have many questions, one being, okay, can we see in this model the possibility also not only on relying on mechanism of genealogical mechanism, but finding an alternative. So it's not only about learning the language, it's about developing a new vernacular language. And what form will you take? Another question would be related, for example, to the resources of lawfares. How much money is involved in accessing Love Fare? What does it mean? What kind of resources beyond money are necessary? But one question that I had, you are focusing on the New World. The New World is Spanish, it's Iberian, it's Ladino. But do you see some of your actors trying to petition? And that's the formula I have default to a better one, petitioning across empires with other powers that are not exclusively contained within the Iberian, the Spanish. Because when one moved away from the Atlantic world, even the Pacific world, for example, in looking at what was happening at the same time in the Mediterranean, we see many subject moving across the sea, through coastline for tribunals, and they're often doing that between languages. They are doing a lot of forum shopping across different legal systems. So I wanted to ask the two of you if you can comment a little bit more on these resourceful Petitioners in the New World and back in Spain doing some forum shopping themselves and petitioning across empires.
- [41:10]
C
Forum shopping is everywhere. Everywhere. I mean, this is the essence of welfare. And you kind of go to different mediators and judges, either the church or the friars or the indigenous lords or the Viceroy or the corregidor or whoever is available. So that is, that is constitutional to the new jurisdictional history and the new history of the law from the bottom up. But across empires, that is something else. Across empires, what you have is all these individuals who have local resources and kind of pitting against each other and a lot of factionalism. But when you cross the boundary of empire, you are in trouble. I think so. So in the case of the Peruvian civil war, when these individuals, and I think Adrian just said it, radicalism in the Spanish Empire, in the Indies. In the Indies, in the Indies. Radicalism in the Indies, in the Spanish Indies is not a critique of the monarchy, unlike Christopher Hill's is not a critique of the monarchy. It's the opposite, is the constitutional monarchy. Over the course of the 16th century, the monarchy gains power precisely because individuals from all quarters lend that power to them as mediator. Right. The Crown is extremely weak and passive. Extremely weak and passive can do very little until the Crown is actually constituted throughout the bottom up and the authority of the bishops emerges and the authority of the Inquisition emerges and the authority of the viceroy emerges. They didn't have any at the beginning, none. So it emerges over time. So the Crown that is kind of out there, passive and really very weak, with no monopoly of violence, as Adrian just said, all it has is that
- [43:15]
A
crown,
- [43:17]
C
that aura of mediator and judge, that is it. And so you can reach out to the Crown and the Crown can mediate. And once the Crown replies, that is the authority. So absolutism is nothing but the acknowledgment by everyone, the universal, acknowledged by everyone, of the mediating power of the Crown. That is it. That is what absolutism means in the 16th century Indies. Nothing else. No armies, no monopoly of violence, nothing. So because that is the case, because that is the case, reaching out to other monarchy makes no sense, right? You can reach out within that system to whatever forums are available in order to create welfare and fight against other factions or create factions. But once you cross that boundary of empire and reach out, I don't know, pirates or whatever, or you are cast as an outsider, which is the case of the Almagros or Pizarros in civil war, particularly pizarro, as kind of A threat to the monarchy, you are toasted. Or when it comes to our Diego de Torres in Nueva Granada, that is cast by local factions, the other genizaros, mestizos, as a creature of the British that is coming down from Cartagena to represent kind of a British invasion or something, that's a way of presenting you as an outcast, weakening your legitimacy or the legitimacy of your welfare. So in that sense, it's very different from what you find in the Mediterranean or what Tamar Harzak finds in, I don't know, in territory of possession, this kind of catering to two different monarchies. When in places where you have to settle boundaries and that is how boundaries are created. That is her argument. In our case, that is not. And we don't explore the boundaries with Brazil because with the Portuguese by then, is not an issue. It eventually emerges as an issue by the 18th century, but not in the 16th century.
- [45:40]
A
I think there's one way, though, to bring in all of these sort of other polities. For example, you have the other Habsburgs, right? You have Italians, you have. Who are in the Spanish Empire or sort of half in, right? There's all these Italians who are sort of, you know, like Corsica. What exactly is that in? Is that out? You know, there are weird cases. Sardinia, Tuscany, the Papal States. And then there's, of course, the papacy. It's interesting that the papacy doesn't play a huge role in the story that we're telling. I mean, I went to the Vatican and tried to find the documents and it didn't seem to be very pronounced. That's partly because the crown has this special permission to sort of manage a lot of issues that would normally be the Pope's. Like, for example, in the Portuguese case, the Pope has more power than in the Spanish. Now, that being said, Gracia, this sort of incentive system to create knowledge and to conquer things pulls in a huge amount of Germans and Italians. There's. I found reference to an Albanian conquistador at one point. There's Scots, there's. There are Brits, there are British conquistadors, one or two. And so the system of Gracia is so well put together. I mean, there's really no other state, except for maybe the Chinese that can. Or maybe the Ottomans, possibly, but I sort of doubt it. That can draw in so many people with the expectation that you'll get a small pension for your scientific invention. This is why Columbus is sponsored by the Spanish. I mean, he tries a whole bunch of other people. They're not first on his list. And so I know that you've worked, of course, on these sort of mercenaries of knowledge, right, who are always forum shopping. And these people exist and they're moving in and out of the Spanish Empire. We have a guy in the book who hops over, supposedly to the Ottoman Empire after having lived as a Catholic. He turns out he's a Greek Muslim. So there are these border crossers, right? But fundamentally this is a time period in which the Spanish Empire sucks people in. And it's doing that not because it has a gigantic coercive mechanism, but because it's actually got all the grants. It's sort of like it's the world's biggest grant giver. And so people are moving there. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who then hop over to the French or something. This happens. But fundamentally, at this time period, all of the forces pull you towards the Spanish court. Now the Spanish court has been imagined as this sort of Castilian stronghold, which is ridiculous because the city, it was Manhattan. I mean, you had every type of person living there. You had Filipinos and Chinese people early On, I mean, 1570s, early people from all over the world. You had Corsicans, Albanians, Turks, Armenians, Syrian Christians. I mean, you had pretty much, I mean, tons of sub Saharan Africans and Moroccans. And so Madrid is the place where all the borders meet. I mean, it's been imagined as the center, but it's really the sum of all of the frontiers. Right? And that's an interesting thing. So as for the costs of petitioning, right, because we're talking about traveling, we're talking about shelling out money for lawyers and stuff. I mean, the book doesn't get into the nitty gritty of costs, partly because some other people have worked on it. I also have a book that talks about the costs of certain types of petitioning. Litigation was horribly expensive. And there is talk about a huge amount of indigenous money flowing into the hands of basically Spanish lawyers as a result of all of this. We talk about a little bit in the Doubt chapter. There's this anger against legal experts because they seem to be siphoning away all this money. Jose Carlos de la Puente has a really good book, Andean Cosmopolitans, highly recommended, which talks about how indigenous communities raise money to send their representatives to Madrid in this period. And it was not a small amount of money. I mean, commoners really suffered. And this is part of the disintegration of lordly power is that some of these commoners say, I, I don't really Understand why I'm here to help you get like a papal privilege. I'm. I'm out. I'm going to go to Quito and I'm going to work as a painter and make my own money, or I'm going to go to Potosi and I'm going to make my own money. So there's a lot of. There's a crisis of legitimacy that comes from the cost specifically of lawsuits. Right. And in the book we make a careful distinction between different types of paperwork. Lawsuits are the ones that we're most familiar with in the British context, because in Anglo culture there's lots of lawsuits. And also common law means that these lawsuits form essentially the rules of the game. Not so in the Spanish Empire. So a lot of studies focus on lawsuits, but really most of the action happens through something called gobierno petitions, which could be free. You could just write a letter to the king essentially and send it to the king for free. Now, if you wanted a privilege, it was a bit more of an affair. You had to prove that you deserve the privilege. You had your friends come by and testify in your favor and you had to have a notary do it. And that could also be pricey. But crucially, one of the key weak points of the conquistadors is they keep getting roped into interminable lawsuits. And Cortes says, these guys are killing me. They're killing me with lawsuits. And I mean, it's a real financial issue because he has 35 lawsuits against him at one point point, and they're huge. I mean, I don't think more than a few people on planet Earth have ever read all of them. And these lawsuits cost him thousands of ducats. I mean, he's bankrupted by lawsuits. And so we also talk in the book a little bit about how the crown and vassals demand smoother, faster resolutions. And you see how this sort of horrible bureaucracy plays into the hand of the Crown because it keeps these conquistadors locked down for decades. And sometimes they have to go to Madrid to litigate and then they lose oversight over their lands. And this is one of the dirty sides of lawfare. Right. It's also a financial war.
- [51:37]
B
I want to pick up on some of this, the various players involved. And Adrian, I think in your first book, you do a little bit more with this, but I wondered if you could comment in the context of this new book on the intermediaries, the kind of low level folks who are involved in making this whole system work.
- [52:02]
A
Yeah, that's a really big part of all of this, I mean, we have to remember that basically no one speaks Spanish in this empire in the Indies, right? I mean, this is something that it's easy for us to forget since most of the sources are in Spanish. A lot of these intermediaries and subalterns in these lawsuits, investigations and stuff, a lot of them are translators, right? There's a huge army of people who become savvy with the legal system because they're translating. Really delicate things happen when you're having a lawsuit or there's an investigation. And sometimes just one little word matters. And this isn't the case that only we've worked on. Luis Glau and a few other people have worked on it. But there's this case where there's a translator in Cusco and the native lords are going, what's going to happen to us? What's going to happen to us? And there's a Spanish investigator there, there to fix everything. And the translator mistranslates a word which is alienation of property, and they understand it in Quechua to mean slavery, and they panic and it's almost sort of an uproar because this guy gets the word wrong. And so, you know, these subalterns involved in the paperwork regime are very important. There's legal agents who will go to Madrid on your dime and represent you. There's procurators who are sort of like low level lawyers almost, who just basically make sure that all the paperwork gets done or that if there's a delay, they check up and they can either be writing letters to the crown or they can live in Madrid too. There are these huge audits, which is a big part of the book, these big smashing audits which crush the conquistadors ultimately. And just, I mean, some of these cases are thousands and thousands and thousands of pages long. The top 21 Conquistadors are hit with 100,000 pages just of audits. And of course, these have to be produced by scribes, they have to be translators, yada, yada, yada. There's a whole world of this, and I mentioned this briefly, but the skepticism and the anger towards these intermediaries is really great. And there's a lot of suspicion that arises from these intermediaries. Sometimes they alter petitions, sometimes they lie under oath, sometimes they mistranslate things. And so there's a lot of friction and tension in this. Although I don't want to give the impression, though, that this held people back, because we really do make the case that people figured out ways around this indigenous people learned legal Spanish very quickly. I mean, we don't give these people enough credit, but they're listening hard. They're going, if I can figure out legal Spanish, I can go from shoveling hay or working in a mine to maybe being a small lord or even a big lord. If I. If I play my cards right, I can really get out of this town. And so there's a huge amount of legal expertise and also enslaved people and commoner women and all sorts of other people manage to find ways, in spite of illiteracy and maybe even not knowing Spanish, to figure out enough to fight pretty hard.
- [55:06]
B
Could we stick with women for a second in particular? Because, if I recall, was it something like 5% of the partitions were by women? It's not a big number, but I think significant. Could you tell us a little bit about that dynamic?
- [55:21]
A
This is something that I worked on specifically, and I'm interested in it. So we have all these different types of paperwork. We have gobierno, which is for legislative reform, so to speak. We have justicia, which is litigation, and we have gracia, which is privileges. And then there's sort of a fourth, which are these audits, which are technically filed under justicia in the bureaucracy. Govierno petitions. Women did not petition very often. They were expected to act in conjunction with male family members, so their brothers or their husbands or a friar might help them. And that doesn't mean that women didn't petition a lot, because, of course, you have widows, you have women who don't have these allies in their petitioning, or you have women who just say, I just can't count on these people. I have to petition on my own. But there's generally a sense. There's sort of a machismo. There is that sense that the procurators are tough guys and the lawyers are tough and the judges are tough, and it's a tough environment. I mean, there's civil war and there's sort of gang violence in the streets of one group against the other. And so the sort of lawfare element of the justice system is very gritty. I mean, not to draw too much of a parallel, but we can't. We have to imagine, like, you know, coal workers in 1970s England. Not a very inclusive space always. And that sort of tough edge is also there in the Spanish Empire. That being said, there are big caveats to this. One is that women engage in quite a lot of privilege petitioning. We have women petitioning to say, hey, listen, I introduced a new plant to The New World. And, you know, this is the reason why Lima has food, is because I brought wheat or my husband did something really important or I did something really important. You have women conquistadors, you have a lot of native lords are, of course, women, and so on and so forth. And sort of women also appear in the Commons. There are commons petitions that have lots of women's signatures, too, but oftentimes they sort of get blended out into the background. Crucially, though, a lot of these audits are about dark criminal wrongdoing. And, you know, tell me if this ain't relevant today, but a lot of the powerful in the New World are accused of sexual crimes, mainly against women. Not entirely. There are crimes against men, but. And we mentioned some of those in the case of Nueva granada in the 1570s. There's many other cases, and this is also. Fabian, you'll recognize this from your book too, is that there are men who are predators against men, but mostly men are predators against women. And who are you going to ask, if you're the judge and you want to say, did Hernan Cortez kill his wife or not? This is one of the central cases in the book. Who can speak to that? The women who are the retainers of this murdered wife. And these are really key testimonies. We're not blowing these out of proportion at the time. These were the star witnesses of these cases. They were the ones that really brought people down. And repeatedly, women testify in key ways against these powerful men, and the Crown listens. There are these royal decrees that say women's testimonies aren't worth as much as men's or such, you know, that sort of thing. And that's really not exactly how it worked on the ground. For example, how do you break into a friar theocracy, right? One of these gigantic areas where almost only friars control everything, and they don't even let petitions out. You accuse them of solicitation. And that's one of the things the Inquisition does, is it listens for solicitation, and then it takes away friars power. And people know this and they act on it. Indigenous families would say, we're going to get a testimony together and we're going to say everything that happened with this Franciscan guy, it could be true and it could not be true. I mean, I tend to believe that a lot of these cases were true. But the point is that people also understood that saying this was political, that it was. They were not just going to get this guy moved out, they were going to get the Franciscans demoted and a bishop would come in and take away their authority if they accused him. And they said, let's do it. Get the three women up on the stand. So, yeah, and then, Jorge, I'll let you say something because I know you also. I mean, there's also the case of Guaman Poma, for example, in which women play a very large antagonistic role.
- [59:39]
C
Yeah, well, yeah. Women as witnesses more than petitioners are very, very, very central to the story of taking down lords, taking down conquistadors, taking down friars, particularly friars and priests, secular priests. So part of the lawfare is this struggle with the testimony of women and commoners, particularly commoners. So for instance, the case of these, I don't know, this lord in Nueva Granada, this Muisca Lord, 1560s, the guy has an alliance with an encomendero. This is a case that Santiago Munoz Armelaes has studied very well in costumes in which you have this lore that which align with encomiendero. And so in this case, the governor and the crown authorities want to. And particularly the friars, although the friars in Mo Granada are very weak, want to take him down and kind of the spiritual conquest of the muiscas that is unfulfilled and not going well, everybody's pagan. Everybody's kind of engaging these drunkard orgies. Well, not orgies, but rituals. And the authorities are kind of impatient with this. So what do they do? They send these visitador, these auditor. The auditor goes around and collects. Well, no, the first one that goes is alcalde. And alcalde collects all this information. And there are all these encomenderos that say, well, we saw the guy getting drunk, and we saw them. Or excuse me, we heard from ladinos and we heard from women that the guy kind of not only is getting drunk, but he's actually sacrificing these slaves from the llanos, from the Venezuelan llanos plains. And so the alcalde goes with all this material to the audiencia. And the audiencia says, well, it doesn't work, man, because by law you cannot have hearsay. So you need witnesses. You need witnesses that the guy really had sacrificed all these slaves from the llanos. And so long and behold, the auditor now goes to the town and says, well, okay, so you encomenderos and you friars are not reliable testimony. We need witnesses. And so those who step in are slaves. Slave, female slaves, that said, yes, yeah, we saw the sacrifice. And so that is the undoing of the Lord. Are these slave women who have witnessed the event and are willing to offer testimony against the Lord because they just don't like the Lord because the Lord kind of raped them or whatever. And so they use this lawfare in order to kind of remove themselves from the Lord and get the Lord down. And it's commoner slave, commoner women that have this power, unlike the Frying or unlike the Commandero, that are just. All they have is hearsay.
- [62:53]
A
And this is why Guaman Poma is obsessed with bashing women in his book. I mean, he just absolutely, you know, there's nothing. He has nothing good to say about almost any women because he senses that they're dangerous, that they have statements to give against him. And in fact, when you look at Babambo's life, it's easy to see why, because he does get questioned. He has enemies, commoner enemies who say, you're not who you say you are. You're not a native lord. You're actually just a Joe Schmo. And one of the people who's really raising hell against him is a woman, a native, a commoner woman who's saying, I know a commoner when I see one. I am a commoner. And also, interestingly, this fear of women, this sort of panic about women, spreads all the way up to the crown. It's not just coming from the new world is this whole general anxiety in the 1500s about how to rule an empire and how to make sure your ministers are keeping their hands clean and women are trafficking corruption and gifts because they're under less scrutiny than men. So when there's a ruling, no corruption, please, then a lot of gifts start to circulate from wives to wives instead of from conquistadors to ministers. And so there's this sort of wave of misogyny in the late 1500s to arrest this power. But it's sort of already too late, because in that in the sense, women have already played a major role in shaping this order. And so in the end, you start to see a sort of pushback against women having so much power. But it's also important to mention that women as a group don't really tend to. To act in. In concert. I mean, there's a few petitions of, like, there might be a native lord who's a sexual predator. And then numerous women come together and petition against him. There's only a few of those. It wasn't enough to include in the book. I don't think it wasn't. It was too. We didn't want to cherry pick that information. But women tend to operate as sort of these broader part of these broader cliques and factions that we talk about in the book.
- [64:55]
D
And it comes to show that the radicalism you are speaking about broadly is multi situated as is relying on different tactics and strategies. And if we go back to Jorge's previous point, that this radicalism and it's the point you are making throughout the book, he ends up being constitutive of something like the monarchy system to such an extent that I think I remember the first occurrence of holographic depiction printed one of the signature of the King of Spain happened in Spain in relation with lawsuits related to the New World affairs. Meaning that the monarchy print the signature of the king for the first time in relation with these forms of petitioning and radicalism. Which leads to my question in the book. You hand the book you geared toward a conclusion. But there are many legacies of his radicalism that we can find in Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico. I'm wondering if we even go back to not as far in time, but in 17th century Europe at a moment when the Interior Indies of Europe are also engages in radical movements, some more discreet than the one happening around London. But when we look at places like the core of Aragon, when we look at the French Jura, French Comte, we see emerging some voices of people who are building solidarities around the world in relation with these communities of radical, although there are no direct connection at hand for them. But I'm wondering there if you see see this kind of impact back to Europe. Although I understand that all this radicalism is co constructed. But ultimately what comes out from this radicalism in the New World that is relevant in other parts of the world, including the so called Interior Indies of Europe at the beginning of the 17th century.
- [67:08]
C
The legacies of radicalism everywhere. Well, we end the book with kind of a reflection on what we think are the legacies in the Indies. And we redefine Latin America as Ladino America. Ladino America. The legacy is what is forgotten, yet the the practice that continues. So you have this kind of paradox of a world of radicalism and love fair that yielded tens of thousands of documents, including all these codices of Chicanos in the United States and codices that are constituted to the identity of Mexico as a nation, et cetera, et cetera. All these documentation, Bernald Castillo and De Verdadoria and all these that come out of petitioning, et cetera, all this documentation is there and we just don't. I mean it's a region that has forgotten the origins of the Documentation. And it's kind of ascribed to the documentation origins that are. That are. Yeah, they are mythical. Mythical, exactly. Yes. Not historical mythical. So they are fictions. And the problem is that these documents are there and that they are in places like Colombia, we have the case of these indigenous radical activists, so too in Bolivia and Zapata, also Mexico, et cetera, that are drawing on these documents and casting those documents also in radical terms, but always going back to that archive. It's not that they are producing their own, but there is this reference to this type of activism and this type of documentation that is still all over. I mean, it's all over archives, it's all over the Newberry Library, it's all over the Huntington is all over everywhere. This massive amount of documentation. Fields archives in Spain, Fields archives in every nation in Spanish America. There are also Fields archives in the Hispanic society and every Hispanic institution in the United States and France, et cetera. So for me, I think, and also. I don't know, Adrian, you have to say what is your reflection? But for me, what is striking in that the genealogy of this century is the forgetting. It is the absence of. It is the erasing of this tradition and a memory and a narrative and commemoration of silence.
- [70:29]
A
Yeah, I'll add to that too. Zilli. What Hori is complete dead on about is that we're talking about. And that's why we go to such great pains to talk about these historiographies. Not really historiographies, these narrative traditions that stand in the way of writing this book. Right. And. And that's really made it hard to write a history of the global impact of the 1500s. Right. I mean, it's, it's sort of unnatural to write this story because the soccer field is tilted three meters down and the ball always rolls in a certain direction. We're saying we think the soccer of the field is tilted and we try to explain why the ball always rolls down towards one goal. The. The liberal goalposts. Right. But if you look, for example, the Anti Tyranny chapter helps us understand the context of Las Casas. And Las Casas is super world famous, right. He's in textbooks all around the world. He says the Spaniards are tyrants. And that's oftentimes taken as sort of a one off statement. Like he's the only guy who said it and he said it so well. And he covered everything and he covered his bases and his whole books are drenched with bias. And we, you know, of course that's totally normal. We talk about that in our chapter on doubt. You know, exaggeration is what you do, right? This is, he's, he's taking part in a broader culture. He's not the only person. But his writings, he publishes them in the 1550s basically, and they spread all around the place by Spain's enemies. But it's fundamentally, this is just a little tiny shard of glass from the explosion of the radical era. And this little shard of glass is the ultimate anti colonial critique. It's fundamental to all critiques of colonialism. I mean, it's fundamental to Star wars, right? I mean, it's fundamental to. Every time the United States does something around the world, it's Las Casas all over again. Anything having to do with indigenous rights. But this is a product of the radical era. He's not a voice crying out in the wilderness all alone. He's actually really mainstream. He's a little bit more savvy and hardworking than a lot of other people. And he manages to have a little bit more power because he goes to Madrid and becomes good friends with the Council of the Indies and stuff. So we're not saying he didn't do anything, but, but he really is just one of many, many, many, many people making these arguments. And it just shows that if these petitions had been printed and had circulated, say across Protestant lines, probably a lot of them would have been recognized as radical. So that's one thing. And then the second chapter is really about globalized, you know, how these mining communities and these settler frontiers are formed. And I mean these, the impact there around the world is it supercharges the flow of silver to China, which causes in some accounts the collapse of the Ming dynasty. It helps the Dutch get a foothold in Indonesia. It helps the, you know, it sustains the European project. In Asia there's huge, and this is hugely disruptive and productive in some cases for Europe. And a lot of the social upheavals that you see in France and in Spain and other places are because of these flows. It's a subtle impact, but it's important. Then there was this thing about the discovery of the conquest of everything, this chapter about how privileged petitioning stimulates scientific discovery. We argue that basically the discovery of the New World before it was like, oh, I think we're somewhere in Asia, this is a weird peninsula. But the sort of bottom up explosion of mining and cartography and all this stuff makes it clear that this is the New World. And so the discovery of the New World isn't really an intellectual process so much as it's a grant winning process. Right. All these grant seekers are arguing for that. And then there's a section and this isn't our original research, but a couple of very good historians have found out that doubt in the really important neo scholastic tradition in 16th century Spain is largely flowing from Mexico to Spain because all of these Dominican friars are in Mexico and they're engaging in these debates alongside Las Casas. And they develop forms of legal reasoning that are about understanding context and making exceptions. It's called probabilism. And probabilism is largely a sort of New World and Atlantic phenomenon. And this becomes mainstream all throughout the Latin west. And it becomes part of a big culture war in Europe about more hardline. The law says this and this and this. Or wait a second, let's be skeptical. We don't know the situation. We have to get more information. Maybe there is no real right answer here. So probabilism becomes really important in Europe. And lastly, the response to all of this, and then Jorge touched on this, is the sort of creation of an overseas information state. People say, sorry, but the king needs to know things. And the Portuguese really haven't tried that. They don't have an information state. The British don't have that, the French don't have that, the Italians don't have that. The Vatican does sort of have it, but in a very different context. And so this doubt fuels the legitimacy of an information state. And other groups, the French and the British are going to imitate the Spanish because the Spanish are living in a barren peninsula with not that many vassals and they keep winning wars and they keep expanding. And it's partly because their paperwork is relatively well organized, whereas other courts cannot yet muster that, you know, other European courts eventually supersede them, but it takes them some time. And so we frame this bottom up knowledge accumulation, which is very cutting edge in the time as a result of bottom up forces largely from the New World. And that's. And that, I think that's a different way of looking at the origin of the state. Right? I mean, we're not arguing that something called the state with capital letters really appears, but the idea that someone in the Council of the Indians can fact check something that's happening in Paraguay is dramatically different from what you had before all of these crises. And without understanding the history of this radicalism, it's impossible to really understand why someone would even bother going through all that work.
- [76:34]
C
Good synthesis.
- [76:35]
B
So changing direction just for a minute. So this is about, this is a Book about paperwork and manuscript culture. And I wonder if you could comment a little bit about an adjacent, perhaps adjacent culture. And that is oral culture that is still, you know, prevalent and a primary way of communicating. Your book is not about that and for good reason. But I wonder if you had some comments on sort of figuring out how orality works in this world that you're describing.
- [77:08]
C
Oh, it's everywhere. It's a world. I mean, the radical ages are a world of commoner charisma and testimonies and morality. Whoever is able to kind of articulate out of group of followers, some kind of narrative about immemorial times pulls off lands and vassals. So it's kind of the transformation of local oral histories into narratives about immemorial times. The conquest of history by local. By local communities through commoner charisma. So all paperwork is about testimony, visitas, residencias, inquisition informationes, the entire system of paperwork. It's about mobilizing oral testimony somehow denunciations, inquiries, information that is kind of itemized. And so you have one witness after another witness after another witness, and there are hundreds of witnesses, and you are tired. But in the process of kind of going over all these witnesses, there are diverse narratives. It's not just the same thing over and over. There are details here and there that allow you to see that the world much better. So every individual that steps in, even though it's kind of bounded by certain formalities of paperwork, I mean, the nature
- [78:59]
D
of the question,
- [79:02]
C
the translator, et cetera, there is room for a lot of storytelling. Storytelling. It's all over. And all the irrelaciones of the gracia petitions of all these conquistadors that are hundreds if not thousands of gracia petitions that kind of create all the so called chronic chronicas that's kind of the foundation of literature departments in Spanish, Latin American, Spanish departments, until recently. It's all these narratives, storytelling, that the conquistadors want to create. That Relaciones of Cortez is the storytelling. It's kind of the Iliad or the odyssey of a guy that kind of erases everybody but himself. Yeah, yeah.
- [80:03]
A
I would add to that. I mean, the idea of kingship in say the 13th or 14th centuries was that the kings listened and they literally listened to the vassal would like appear, or rather the king would travel more or less to your town, and then all the aggrieved commoners would go 10km or 15km and then they would say, okay, we're going to sleep here for the night. Talk to the king and then go home. And it was a real, like, listening event. And you would converse. And of course, as paper enters the picture, the conversations become increasingly trapped in paper. And by the time you get to King Philip ii, there isn't a whole lot of direct face to face dialogue. But it's supposed to simulate orality. I mean, writing is supposed to be a simulacrum of the spoken. And that's one of the things we talk about in the doubt chapter, is that vassals are disturbed by this. You know, they're writing letters from Paraguay, and God only knows what things happen to the petition on the way there. And then the king has to read this paragraph that's talking about something that's hugely complex. And everyone at the time is going, yeah, and careful, because writing is not the same as orality. It's a deficient form. Writing is deficient. Orality is really where the meaning comes through. And so there's this sort of doubt, like, can we rule an empire if it's not spoken? I mean, high judges. The name for high judges in Spanish is listeners oidores. And their course is the audiencia, which is, you know, audre right to listen. And so this idea of listening is very important. Listening is also what separates kings from tyrants. Tyrants are the ones who do not listen. And so the idea is that you mobilize against those who do not listen. And this is a huge part of the story. So what's interesting though, is that writing is supposed to be sort of like a portable auditory experience. And the petitions are even written. Even regular petitions, like, I think we need to build a bridge here or there, are phrased as conversations. And they don't really have punctuation and things. And so they're meant to be read aloud in the Council of the Indies or in front of the king. This didn't always happen because they didn't have time to hear Some guy read 142 proposals for how to save the empire. But that's sort of the idea. But still, there's some really important changes that happen when you get writing as a sort of replacement for orality. They start to fight with each other a little bit. For example, in 1550, if you wanted to ask, did Mocte Suma conquer this town or not? You would go and ask someone and write down the oral answer. You can't do that in 1600 because those witnesses are no longer there. So what do you do? You go to the writing that reflected the oral testimony. So orality becomes super important. But it's the orality of the radical period that everybody wants, because they want to find out what Moctezuma did, or they want to find out what Cortes did, or what the Friars did in 1530. And so, weirdly, these conversations that have been trapped in paper begin the sort of paper ness. I don't know how to say it, the materiality, the storability, the stackability. You can now index previous conversations, and that takes on a life of its own. And that's what chapter five is really about, is the growing power of archives as a form of evidence rather than just spoken stuff. Spoken stuff remains there, of course. I mean, you know, everyone's really speaking still, right? People don't speak less. But the epistemology now says what is superior to orality is now writing. Because only through writing can we access the radical period, where truth was still to be found before it was all corrupted, before all the old, wise indigenous people and the old conquistadors died. And so writing then captures this whole empire in a way, and it becomes a custodial empire rather than a radical empire.
- [83:59]
D
And one thing that came out when I was going through your book, I really appreciated the many images that appear in the book and especially your perspective on them. So I guess it's a general question, a quick one, or maybe as long as we want it to be. But how do you. What do you say also about the visual manifestation of radicalism? Because this, I mean, you can see it, but yes, these petitions are highly vivid. There are many drawings, maps incorporated, folded into them. So how do you speak to this? I'm not going to use the term aesthetic of radicalism, but at least to the visual manifestation of it.
- [84:48]
C
This is central to our argument when it comes to codices. This is. Couldn't be. I mean, we want it to be stronger, but I think is the strongest we could accomplish in terms of kind of doing away with the way in which codices are read. This culturalist tradition that has rendered these codices as kind of the source of indigenous authentic culture. And so you go back to the picture, to the images, in order to kind of tried to figure out the essence of indigenous culture that was not erased or transformed by Spanish or European power or colonization. And so our point is that every codex was kind of unfortunately extracted from the larger context and documentation that reveals, and we try to put back that context and that does the images in order to render these documents into political documents. And so we're not interested in the aesthetics. I mean, there's A lot of beauty, but there's plenty of literature, historiography. You can kind of drown on that historiography. And we don't want to contribute anymore. Well, I mean, you can do whatever. You are free to continue pondering on the aesthetics of these documents, but our interest is not the aesthetics. Our interest is the political function of these documents and try to recover the political context that made them possible. And radical. And radical. And this idea that Serge Gusinski type and Walter Mignolo type, there's kind of these. This cultural genocide in which the systems of knowledge of the indigenous people are transformed into writing and images disappear, which is Grusinski's argument, in a way. And also Mignolo's argues that the point of the empire was to erase this type of knowledge and systems of writing and communication. And that is nonsense. With all due respect to these great authors, it's nonsense. There's a lot of room for epistemological diversity here. Everybody gets to express orally in whatever means are available. Orality or alphabetical writing or any type of script or any type of form of communication, which is what the codices are, are welcome quipus are welcome. Quipus, been established by people like Jose Carlos de la Puente, have more authority, epistemological authority, than the writing itself, because the Quipuca mayos are considered to be more reliable and careful when it comes to gathering information about labor, indigenous labor, indigenous items, et cetera, et cetera, when it comes to visitas or auditing or when it comes to other forms of paperwork. So we strongly, in the strongest terms possible, critique that tradition of rendering these into some kind of beautiful aesthetical principles of indigenous primeval culture. That's nonsense.
- [88:35]
A
Mm. Yeah. I mean, going on that, we had a funny incident, and, you know, we've had a great experience with Harvard. We're not bashing Harvard at all, but there were some proposals for the book cover, and it looked a lot like it was going to be sort of another one of these books about how those hybridized forms of indigenous Spanish knowledge in the 1550s and 60s. And then. And then, like, indigenous people have a hard time, and they start to disappear, and it becomes more alphabetic, and we're going, oh, no, this looks like one of these books. So we have to. We have to get some blood on the COVID or something. We really wanted this Image on page 95 of these Indigenous people, the commoners whooping these native lords butts and then throwing rocks at friars. And it's very Jacobin. I mean, they've even Got, you know, indigenous elites tied up by their wrists on these sort of wooden stakes. They're bleeding out of their mouths. And unfortunately, Harvard wouldn't take it. It was just too weird. So we went with a guy in chains on the COVID I mean, you guys know what it looks like. But we really wanted it to be a little more, even our aesthetic to shine through a little more. And that's the document on 95 that really, really hits home what was going on. Right. And it's very crude and it's not this beautiful work of indigenous artistry. It's just like sort of. Here, let me sketch out really quick what's going on with some indigenous epistemologies and things. But yeah, I mean, this is a very important part of the book because also, you know, we, we do assign power to aesthetics. We know that at the time appearing like a lord and, and creating these spectacular sort of gigantic canvas paintings in indigenous communities, the Lienzos, the aesthetics were very important for them. Right. But we're, but we're trying to, as Jorge said, make the point that we're not interested in what percentage of indigenous culture shines through or anything like that, because the story is that indigenous culture sort of collapses and there's sort of a traditional era which lasts until 1570 and then it's sort of broken down and it becomes a more Spanish era. We're going, no, no, no, no, no, no. These, these traditional, highly aesthetic works are radical. It's radical politics. Everyone's pretending that they've always been in control of the New World and that this is their town and that these commoners are pretending to be elites. And, and these elites are fighting off commoners who are trying to run away from them. And so they're creating sort of really legit looking documents. But that aesthetic is very misleading. One other aspect which is very related to aesthetics, I think, is this big theme of forgery. Because one of our arguments is that, you know, as these, as these opportunities to shape the order decrease and the written record piles up, it's sort of hard to pretend you're someone that you're not. When you appear in a document 20 years before saying, this guy shoveling hay, it's a little hard to say that you're a lord mysteriously 20 years later, right. Like so. So the truth becomes harder to sort of make up. So what you have to do sometimes as an indigenous person or as a Spanish person is to invent. And there's this huge tradition after the so called decline of codices to invent Codices, which, I mean, they're. They're real politics in 1750, they're real politics in 1740, but they're fake, you know, in scare quotes, because they're pretending to be from the radical period. And a lot of scholars have actually believed that these are real. And the few scholars that have pointed out, yeah, these are definitely not real, just sort of present it and sometimes don't do very much with it. But we think this is a crucial distinction. You didn't have to make up a codex in the 1550s because it was the first iteration of that truth. But in the 1750s, you absolutely have to beat the document up and shake your hand a little bit, cover it in dirt a little bit to make it look like it's really old. And that's a huge part of what we're trying to argue, is that the legacy of these objects continues and people continue to forge codices, and that the aesthetics of the 1500s remain. A lot of Chicano activism is based on certain codices. A lot of indigenous activism in Mexico or in Bolivia is based on having either these documents or the best thing that looks as much as possible, like these things. And so the aesthetics is actually also a part of the story in many ways. Right. I mean, it's the politics of these aesthetics, to say it that way.
- [93:07]
B
Well, we could go on forever and ever, but I think our time is our enemy here. But I did want to, before we left, ask you a broad question or ask you for a comment. Now, this is a paradigm shifting book, and as such, it requires. It's going to elicit a lot further research in the future. And I wondered if you could just give us a little cheat sheet for those of us who want to follow your path. What kind of questions or what kind of issues are there for us to explore?
- [93:44]
C
Okay. Wow, Adrian.
- [93:47]
A
I mean, I think one of the most important directions is to trace this into the 19th and the 20th centuries and into today. And I mean, you know, we didn't really put the epilogue together until quite close to the end. And then Jorge found this interesting statement in the book by Joanne Rappaport about Quinti Nami, this important indigenous activist from Colombia, refounding the Council of the indies in the 1910s. And I mean, we knew that our argument was on solid ground. But when you see an indigenous person refound the Council of the Indies as an indigenous institution, this is only indigenous people involved, and it represents. I don't know if it was 18,000 or 180,000 indigenous people in Colombia. It's in the epilogue, we said, wow. I mean, this is. Come on. It doesn't get any clearer than this. It's not just that this guy says, las Casas is the man and the Spanish are bad. He's saying, you guys are the conquistadors talking to the Colombian legislature. And. And we're the Council of the Indies. And this is not anarchism. This is not communism. This is a different radical tradition. And this guy scares the crap out of people in Colombia. And they call him a ladino, and they call him a mulatto, and they call him all these things, which is also what we talk about in the book. And he calls them a tyrant. And then all these women get together in Colombia and echo what Quinti Lama is saying and say, don't trust the conquistador legislature. You know, do what Kinti Lama is saying. So this is this deep radical tradition, and we don't really have all the answers for how the heck this survives. I mean, we think archives are a very clear part of it. But there's many, many, many huge investigations to be done about the ways that these vice regal era documents continue to be used by indigenous people. Like, for example, if you went into an indigenous community today, what awareness is there of that? And obviously that would change from town to town. But we had a former student of Jorge's, Camila. What's her last name?
- [95:50]
C
Ordeiga.
- [95:51]
A
Yeah. And she found a case, I think it was 2020, where Indigenous people beat a Canadian mining conglomerate back in a Mexican Supreme Court case. I think it was using a colonial document. And so this is a huge phenomenon, and I would be really excited to see people doing that. And then also sort of saying, okay, now that we sort of have the outlines of this radical tradition, we can make it dialogue on equal footing with anarchism or communism or fascism or other radical ideas in the 19th and 20th centuries. Because it has contents. Right. It's not just tradition. It's a form of politics. And so I would love to hear what people do with this sort of idea, because I hope that the message comes through that we're saying that this is a separate but very developed and deep tradition, very sophisticated and widespread. And just to see those studies come out would be amazing.
- [96:51]
C
I have a different wish. My wish has more to do with really taking down the undoing of the paradigm of the public sphere and the political, the Republic of letters, print culture, and particularly public sphere that allows the political to emerge. I was listening to a podcast from the BBC on Mill's treaties on liberalism or freedom of thought in the 1840s, 50s. And the whole idea is that the British had this thing called opinion, and opinion kind of informed society and kind of made it a little bit rigid. And so liberalism allowed for the expression of individualism and so on, so forth. And the podcasters kept on comparing this idea of opinion in Britain to the more hierarchical structure of France and other spaces where opinion was not as well established yet. So Tocqueville and Mill are the kind of the guys who describe opinion and democracy in the United States. And opinion and democracy or whatever, is it constitutional monarchy in Britain. And in the process, you have the complete obliteration of forms of politics that were extremely active and extremely, in this case, radical that are missing. And so my wish, Christmas wish, is for the undoing of that liberal paradigm. The undoing. And the more examples, the better, in which the whole category of the Atlantic Revolution or the late 18th century arrival of the political, the arrival of the political in Latin America with the constitutional cadiz and freedom of expression and print culture. It is in the DNA of our historiography. And I want that and edifice to collapse. Hopefully our paradigm will allow that collapse, if not this generation in the generations to come, probably 400 years from now, in which. Okay, finally we're done. And the undoing of that shit.
- [99:16]
B
Well, thanks so much. This has been really, really fun and thank you for sharing your knowledge and your book with us.
- [99:23]
A
Well, thanks to both of you for organizing this. Super exciting and nice to meet you, Fabian, digitally, finally.
- [99:29]
C
Thank you both.
- [99:30]
D
Yes, more to come. Thank you for being with us. It was. Yeah, the book was a good trip. And this interview pushes even further. So we are very grateful for your generosity of thought and your engagement with the field.