New Horizons in Spanish Colonial Law

New Horizons in Spanish Colonial Law PDF Author: Thomas Duve
Publisher: Max Planck Institute for European Legal History
ISBN: 3944773020
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/gplh3 http://www.epubli.de/shop/buch/48746 "Spanish colonial law, derecho indiano, has since the early 20th century been a vigorous subdiscipline of legal history. One of great figures in the field, the Argentinian legal historian Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, published in 1997 his Nuevos horizontes en el estudio histórico del derecho indiano. The book, in which Tau addressed seminal methodological questions setting tone for the discipline’s future orientation, proved to be the starting point for an important renewal of the discipline. Tau drew on the writings of legal historians, such as Paolo Grossi, Antonio Manuel Hespanha, and Bartolomé Clavero. Tau emphasized the development of legal history in connection to what he called “the posture superseding rational and statutory state law.” The following features of normativity were now in need of increasing scholarly attention: the autonomy of different levels of social organization, the different modes of normative creativity, the many different notions of law and justice, the position of the jurist as an artifact of law, and the casuistic character of the legal decisions. Moreover, Tau highlighted certain areas of Spanish colonial law that he thought deserved more attention than they had hitherto received. One of these was the history of the learned jurist: the letrado was to be seen in his social, political, economic, and bureaucratic context. The Argentinian legal historian called for more scholarly works on book history, and he thought that provincial and local histories of Spanish colonial law had been studied too little. Within the field of historical science as a whole, these ideas may not have been revolutionary, but they contributed in an important way to bringing the study of Spanish colonial law up-to-date. It is beyond doubt that Tau’s programmatic visions have been largely fulfilled in the past two decades. Equally manifest is, however, that new challenges to legal history and Spanish colonial law have emerged. The challenges of globalization are felt both in the historical and legal sciences, and not the least in the field of legal history. They have also brought major topics (back) on to the scene, such as the importance of religious normativity within the normative setting of societies. These challenges have made scholars aware of the necessity to reconstruct the circulation of ideas, juridical practices, and researchers are becoming more attentive to the intense cultural translation involved in the movement of legal ideas and institutions from one context to another. Not least, the growing consciousness and strong claims to reconsider colonial history from the premises of postcolonial scholarship expose the discipline to an unseen necessity of reconsidering its very foundational concepts. What concept of law do we need for our historical studies when considering multi-normative settings? How do we define the spatial dimension of our work? How do we analyze the entanglements in legal history? Until recently, Spanish colonial law attracted little interest from non-Hispanic scholars, and its results were not seen within a larger global context. In this respect, Spanish colonial law was hardly different from research done on legal history of the European continent or common law. Spanish colonial law has, however, recently become a topic of interest beyond the Hispanic world. The field is now increasingly seen in the context of “global legal history,” while the old and the new research results are often put into a comparative context of both European law of the early Modern Period and other colonial legal orders. In this volume, scholars from different parts of the Western world approach Spanish colonial law from the new perspectives of contemporary legal historical research."

Law and People in Colonial America

Law and People in Colonial America PDF Author: Peter Charles Hoffer
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 1421434598
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
It makes for essential reading.

Constituting Empire

Constituting Empire PDF Author: Daniel J. Hulsebosch
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807876879
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
According to the traditional understanding of American constitutional law, the Revolution produced a new conception of the constitution as a set of restrictions on the power of the state rather than a mere description of governmental roles. Daniel J. Hulsebosch complicates this viewpoint by arguing that American ideas of constitutions were based on British ones and that, in New York, those ideas evolved over the long eighteenth century as New York moved from the periphery of the British Atlantic empire to the center of a new continental empire. Hulsebosch explains how colonists and administrators reconfigured British legal sources to suit their needs in an expanding empire. In this story, familiar characters such as Alexander Hamilton and James Kent appear in a new light as among the nation's most important framers, and forgotten loyalists such as Superintendent of Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson and lawyer William Smith Jr. are rightly returned to places of prominence. In his paradigm-shifting analysis, Hulsebosch captures the essential paradox at the heart of American constitutional history: the Revolution, which brought political independence and substituted the people for the British crown as the source of legitimate authority, also led to the establishment of a newly powerful constitution and a new postcolonial genre of constitutional law that would have been the envy of the British imperial agents who had struggled to govern the colonies before the Revolution.

Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500-1700

Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500-1700 PDF Author: Susan Kellogg
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806136851
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In this book, Susan Kellogg explains how Spanish law served as an instrument of cultural transformation and adaptation in the lives of Nahuatl-speaking peoples during the years 1500-1700 - the first two centuries of colonial rule. She shows that law had an impact on numerous aspects of daily life, especially gender relations, patterns of property ownership and transmission, and family and kinship organization. Based on a wide array of local-level Spanish and Nahuatl documentation and an intensive analysis of seventy-three lawsuits over property involving Indians residing in colonial Mexico City (Tenochtitlan), this work reveals how legal documentation offers important clues to attitudes and perceptions. Although Kellogg's analysis reflects contemporary and theoretical developments in social and literary theory, it also applies a unique ethnographic and textual approach to the subject.

Humanism and America

Humanism and America PDF Author: Andrew Fitzmaurice
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139436759
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
Humanism and America provides a major study of the impact of the Renaissance and Renaissance humanism upon the English colonization of America. The analysis is conducted through an interdisciplinary examination of a broad spectrum of writings on colonization, ranging from the works of Thomas More to those of the Virginia Company. Andrew Fitzmaurice shows that English expansion was profoundly neo-classical in inspiration, and he excavates the distinctively humanist tradition that informed some central issues of colonization: the motivations of wealth and profit, honour and glory; the nature of and possibilities for liberty; and the problems of just title, including the dispossession of native Americans. Dr Fitzmaurice presents a colonial tradition which, counter to received wisdom, is often hostile to profit, nervous of dispossession and desirous of liberty. Only in the final chapters does he chart the rise of an aggressive, acquisitive and possessive colonial ideology.

The Nahuas After the Conquest

The Nahuas After the Conquest PDF Author: James Lockhart
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080476557X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 676

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Book Description
A monumental achievement of scholarship, this volume on the Nahua Indians of Central Mexico (often called Aztecs) constitutes our best understanding of any New World indigenous society in the period following European contact. Simply put, the purpose of this book is to throw light on the history of Nahua society and culture through the use of records in Nahuatl, concentrating on the time when the bulk of the extant documents were written, between about 1540-50 and the late eighteenth century. At the same time, the earliest records are full of implications for the very first years after contact, and ultimately for the preconquest epoch as well, both of which are touched on here in ways that are more than introductory or ancillary.

Upholding Justice

Upholding Justice PDF Author: Tamar Herzog
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472113750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Explores the close relationship between judicial institutions and the social fabric of early modern Quito

Postconquest Coyoacan

Postconquest Coyoacan PDF Author: Rebecca Horn
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804727730
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Nahua-Spanish contact was not limited to formal political and economic settings. The author describes the development of Spanish estates and the market economy, which opened up a new arena of cultural contact in the countryside. In bringing Nahuas and Spaniards together in this study, the book explores the changing contours of their relationship in Central Mexico, emphasizing informal interethnic contact in the making of both the Spanish colonial economy and postconquest Nahua society.

Lords of All the World

Lords of All the World PDF Author: Anthony Pagden
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300074499
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
This book, the first to compare theories of empire as they emerged in, and helped to define, the great colonial powers-Spain, Britain, and France-describes the different ways and arguments these countries used to legitimate the seizure and subjugation of aboriginal lands and peoples."Learned, wide-ranging and important. . . . Pagdens willingness to examine the three empires in tandem is as rewarding as it is innovative."-Linda Colley, London Review of Books"An impressive book, erudite and lively. . . .The book succeeds as an exercise in drawing together the interpretive treatises of three empires over three centuries and showing, often subtly but at times explicitly, their similarity."-William D. Phillips, Jr., American Historical Review"This volume . . . provides an excellent commentary on the imperial ideologies of three major European powers during the early modern era. . . . This is a book to which scholars will return time and again. I certainly found it intellectually stimulating."-Chandra R. de Silva, Sixteenth Century JournalAnthony Pagden is Harry C. Black professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He is also the author of European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism and Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination, both published by Yale University Press.

The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History

The Oxford Handbook of European Legal History PDF Author: Heikki Pihlajamäki
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191088374
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1217

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Book Description
European law, including both civil law and common law, has gone through several major phases of expansion in the world. European legal history thus also is a history of legal transplants and cultural borrowings, which national legal histories as products of nineteenth-century historicism have until recently largely left unconsidered. The Handbook of European Legal History supplies its readers with an overview of the different phases of European legal history in the light of today's state-of-the-art research, by offering cutting-edge views on research questions currently emerging in international discussions. The Handbook takes a broad approach to its subject matter both nationally and systemically. Unlike traditional European legal histories, which tend to concentrate on "heartlands" of Europe (notably Italy and Germany), the Europe of the Handbook is more versatile and nuanced, taking into consideration the legal developments in Europe's geographical "fringes" such as Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. The Handbook covers all major time periods, from the ancient Greek law to the twenty-first century. Contributors include acknowledged leaders in the field as well as rising talents, representing a wide range of legal systems, methodologies, areas of expertise and research agendas.