The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire

This is a history of the Enlightenment--the rights-oriented, formalist, secularizing, freedom-inspired eighteenth-century movement that defined modern Western law. But rather than members of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters, its principal protagonists are non-literate, poor, and enslaved litigants who sued their superiors in the royal courts of Spain's American colonies. Despite growing evidence of the Hispanic world's contributions to Enlightenment science, the writing of history, and statecraft, the region is conventionally believed to have taken an alternate route to modernity. This book grapples with the contradiction between this legacy and eighteenth-century Spanish Americans' active production of concepts fundamental to modern law. The Enlightenment on Trial offers readers new insight into how Spanish imperial subjects created legal documents, fresh interpretations of the intellectual transformations and legal reform policies of the period, and comparative analysis of the volume of civil suits from six regions in Mexico, Peru and Spain. Ordinary litigants in the colonies--far more often than peninsular Spaniards--sued superiors at an accelerating pace in the second half of the eighteenth century. Three types of cases increased even faster than a stunning general rise of civil suits in the colonies: those that slaves, native peasants and women initiated against masters, native leaders and husbands. As they entered court, these litigants advanced a new law-centered culture distinct from the casuistic, justice-oriented legal culture of the early modern period. And they did so at precisely the same time that a few bright minds of Europe enshrined new ideas in print. The conclusion considers why, if this is so, the Spanish empire has remained marginal to the story of the advent of the modern West.

About the Author :
Bianca Premo is professor of History at Florida International University. She is the author of Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima and a co-editor of Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America.

Review :
"A truly brilliant study that changes the field as we know it....The combined force of Premo's numerical data and her culturalist analysis of the cases is overwhelming. She is simply right" -- Camilla Townsend, Journal of Women's History "Premo does a solid job of reading deeply into the written record to show how the litigants were active participants in a process that was often handled largely in text. This is important groundwork for what comes later....Premo's book is a very worthwhile collection of battle stories from the front lines of the Enlightenment."--Rufus F., Ordinary Times "The best books reveal truths we didn't know and make them seem obvious. Bianca Premo's masterfully researched and beautifully written book shows how ordinary men and women shaped Atlantic legal culture as they sued more powerful adversaries. The result is required reading for anyone interested in law and empire, the Americas in world history, and new approaches to the history of ideas."--Lauren Benton, Vanderbilt University "In Spain, legal culture privileged extralegal solutions to communal conflict, promoting the informal mediation of the powerful within and therefore reinforcing a patriarchal ancien-regime. Not in the New World. Bianca Premo marshals overwhelming empirical evidence to show that subordinates in Spanish America regularly took social superiors to court: wives husbands, Indian commoners caciques, slaves masters. This is social history of the law at its best that untethers the Enlightenment from its traditional, parochial European moorings. To understand Enlightenment, go to Peru, don't read Voltaire."--Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin "Combining prodigious archival research with sterling prose, this book centers unlettered Latin Americans' contributions to the Enlightenment. In challenging a timeworn narrative, Premo makes signal contributions to histories of slavery, women, and indigenous peoples. A towering achievement."--Pamela Voekel, author of Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico "Meticulously and convincingly argued, this book seeks to address why litigiousness in six regions of the Spanish empire increased in the eighteenth century...Premo has written a brilliant work of groundbreaking, critical importance that should be read by Latin Americanists, early modernists, and legal scholars alike. Her study also lays the groundwork for future research on the Enlightenment --"from below"-- a growing area of investigation in eighteenth-century studies."--Nancy Van Deusen, Hispanic American Historical Review "This wide-ranging comparative analysis of litigation is an impressive feat-most legal histories focus on one or two sites to convey a sense of legal culture, consciousness, or custom as these evolved within a particular place. Even within this panoramic survey, Premo does not lose sight of the local nuances, as she is well attuned to the flexible nature of legality as savvy actors deployed arguments that best supported their claims...a richly detailed book that requires time to mine its richness and to digest the debates it provokes. As we become more attuned to the rhizomatic nature of legal change, Premo shows how ordinary litigants deserve the spotlight as agents of the Enlightenment."--Michele McKinley, American Historical Review