In the sixteenth century hundreds of thousands of indios—indigenous peoples from the territories of the Spanish empire—were enslaved and relocated throughout the Iberian world. Although various laws and decrees outlawed indio enslavement, several loopholes allowed the practice to continue. In Global Indios Nancy E. van Deusen documents the more than one hundred lawsuits between 1530 and 1585 that indio slaves living in Castile brought to the Spanish courts to secure their freedom. Because plaintiffs had to prove their indio-ness in a Spanish imperial context, these lawsuits reveal the difficulties of determining who was an indio and who was not—especially since it was an all-encompassing construct connoting subservience and political personhood and at times could refer to people from Mexico, Peru, or South or East Asia. Van Deusen demonstrates that the categories of free and slave were often not easily defined, and she forces a rethinking of the meaning of indio in ways that emphasize the need to situate colonial Spanish American indigenous subjects in a global context.

AN ECONOMIST AND SMITHSONIAN BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A landmark work of narrative history that shatters our previous Eurocentric understanding of the Age of Discovery by telling the story of the Indigenous Americans who journeyed across the Atlantic to Europe after 1492 We have long been taught to presume that modern global history began when the "Old World" encountered the "New", when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. But, as Caroline Dodds Pennock conclusively shows in this groundbreaking book, for tens of thousands of Aztecs, Maya, Totonacs, Inuit and others—enslaved people, diplomats, explorers, servants, traders—the reverse was true: they discovered Europe. For them, Europe comprised savage shores, a land of riches and marvels, yet perplexing for its brutal disparities of wealth and quality of life, and its baffling beliefs. The story of these Indigenous Americans abroad is a story of abduction, loss, cultural appropriation, and, as they saw it, of apocalypse—a story that has largely been absent from our collective imagination of the times. From the Brazilian king who met Henry VIII to the Aztecs who mocked up human sacrifice at the court of Charles V; from the Inuk baby who was put on show in a London pub to the mestizo children of Spaniards who returned “home” with their fathers; from the Inuit who harpooned ducks on the Avon river to the many servants employed by Europeans of every rank: here are a people who were rendered exotic, demeaned, and marginalized, but whose worldviews and cultures had a profound impact on European civilization. Drawing on their surviving literature and poetry and subtly layering European eyewitness accounts against the grain, Pennock gives us a sweeping account of the Indigenous American presence in, and impact on, early modern Europe.

After the Spanish victories over the Inca claimed Tawantinsuyu for Charles V in the 1530s, native Andeans undertook a series of perilous trips from Peru to the royal court in Spain. Ranging from an indigenous commoner entrusted with delivering birds of prey for courtly entertainment to an Inca prince who spent his days amid titles, pensions, and other royal favors, these sojourners were both exceptional and paradigmatic. Together, they shared a conviction that the sovereign's absolute authority would guarantee that justice would be done and service would receive its due reward. As they negotiated their claims with imperial officials, Amerindian peoples helped forge the connections that sustained the expanding Habsburg realm's imaginary and gave the modern global age its defining character. Andean Cosmopolitans recovers these travelers' dramatic experiences, while simultaneously highlighting their profound influences on the making and remaking of the colonial world. While Spain's American possessions became Spanish in many ways, the Andean travelers (in their cosmopolitan lives and journeys) also helped to shape Spain in the image and likeness of Peru. De la Puente brings remarkable insights to a narrative showing how previously unknown peoples and ideas created new power structures and institutions, as well as novel ways of being urban, Indian, elite, and subject. As indigenous people articulated and defended their own views regarding the legal and political character of the "Republic of the Indians," they became state-builders of a special kind, cocreating the colonial order.

This Handbook integrates innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to the production of Iberian imperial borderlands in the Americas, from southwestern U.S. to Patagonia, and their connections to trade and migratory circuits extending to Asia and Africa. In this volume borderlands comprise political boundaries, spaces of ethnic and cultural exchange, and ecological transitions.

Examines early modern Spanish contributions to international relations by focusing on ambivalence of natural rights in European colonial expansion to the Americas.

The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History presents exciting new innovations in the dynamic field of Indigenous global history while also outlining ethical, political, and practical research. Indigenous histories are not merely concerned with the past but have resonances for the politics of the present and future, ranging across vast geographical distances and deep time periods. The volume starts with an introduction that explores definitions of Indigenous peoples, followed by six thematic sections which each have a global spread: European uses of history and the positioning of Indigenous people as history’s outsiders; their migrations and mobilities; colonial encounters; removals and diasporas; memory, identities, and narratives; deep histories and pathways towards future Indigenous histories that challenge the nature of the history discipline itself. This book illustrates the important role of Indigenous history and Indigenous knowledges for contemporary concerns, including climate change, spirituality and religious movements, gender negotiations, modernity and mobility, and the meaning of ‘nation’ and the ‘global’. Reflecting the state of the art in Indigenous global history, the contributors suggest exciting new directions in the field, examine its many research challenges and show its resonances for a global politics of the present and future. This book is invaluable reading for students in both undergraduate and postgraduate Indigenous history courses.

This collaborative multi-authored volume integrates interdisciplinary approaches to ethnic, imperial, and national borderlands in the Iberian World (16th to early 19th centuries). It illustrates the historical processes that produced borderlands in the Americas and connected them to global circuits of exchange and migration in the early modern world. The book offers a balanced state-of-the-art educational tool representing innovative research for teaching and scholarship. Its geographical scope encompasses imperial borderlands in what today is northern Mexico and southern United States; the greater Caribbean basin, including cross-imperial borderlands among the island archipelagos and Central America; the greater Paraguayan river basin, including the Gran Chaco, lowland Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia; the Amazonian borderlands; the grasslands and steppes of southern Argentina and Chile; and Iberian trade and religious networks connecting the Americas to Africa and Asia. The volume is structured around the following broad themes: environmental change and humanly crafted landscapes; the role of indigenous allies in the Spanish and Portuguese military expeditions; negotiations of power across imperial lines and indigenous chiefdoms; the parallel development of subsistence and commercial economies across terrestrial and maritime trade routes; labor and the corridors of forced and free migration that led to changing social and ethnic identities; histories of science and cartography; Christian missions, music, and visual arts; gender and sexuality, emphasizing distinct roles and experiences documented for men and women in the borderlands. While centered in the colonial era, it is framed by pre-contact Mesoamerican borderlands and nineteenth-century national developments for those regions where the continuity of inter-ethnic relations and economic networks between the colonial and national periods is particularly salient, like the central Andes, lowland Bolivia, central Brazil, and the Mapuche/Pehuenche captaincies in South America. All the contributors are highly recognized scholars, representing different disciplines and academic traditions in North America, Latin America and Europe.

The history of war is also a history of its justification. The contributions to this book argue that the justification of war rarely happens as empty propaganda. While it is directed at mobilizing support and reducing resistance, it is not purely instrumental. Rather, the justification of force is part of an incessant struggle over what is to count as justifiable behaviour in a given historical constellation of power, interests, and norms. This way, the justification of specific wars interacts with international order as a normative frame of reference for dealing with conflict. The justification of war shapes this order, and is being shaped by it. As the justification of specific wars entails a critique of war in general, the use of force in international relations has always been accompanied by political and scholarly discourses on its appropriateness. In much of the pertinent literature the dominating focus is on theoretical or conceptual debates as a mirror of how international normative orders evolve. In contrast, the focus of the present volume is on theory and political practice as sources for the re- and de-construction of the way in which the justification of war and international order interact. With contributions from international law, history, and international relations, and from Western and non-Western perspectives, this book offers a unique collection of papers exploring the continuities and changes in war discourses as they respond to and shape normative orders from early modern times to the present.

Diego Javier Luis tells the story of transpacific Asian movement to and through the Spanish Americas. On arrival in Mexico, diverse Asian peoples became "chinos" subject to the colonial caste system. Tracing Asian resistance and adaptation to New Spanish ideas of race, Luis presents a Pacific-focused narrative of the colonial Americas.

The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century breaks new ground in articulating the early Spanish Caribbean as a distinct and diverse group of colonies loosely united under Spanish rule for roughly a century prior to the establishment of other European colonies. In the sixteenth century no part of the Americas was more diverse; international; or as closely tied to Spain, the islands of the Atlantic, western Africa, and the Spanish American mainland than the Caribbean. The Caribbean experienced rapid growth during this period, displayed considerable ethnic and religious diversity, developed extensive networks of exchange both within and beyond the region, and played an important role in the broader Spanish colonization of the Americas. Contributors address topics such as the role of religious orders, the development of transatlantic and regional commercial systems, insular and regional political dynamics in relation to imperial objectives, the formation of colonial society, and the effects on Caribbean colonial society of the importation and incorporation of large numbers of indigenous captives and enslaved Africans.