By focusing on both Spanish and Portuguese empires, this anthology enlarges the field of study and provides useful comparative frameworks from which to view the imperial project. The essays provide a corrective lens for Eurocentric interpretations of the early modern global world and contribute greatly to debates concerning slavery, law, religion, and race.
Two essays examine the defense and critique of the slave trade in scholarly treatises. Anna More looks at Alonso de Sandoval's 1627 Naturaleza, policía sagrada y profana, which denounced the violence of the slave trade but accepted justifications for it based on natural law. She notes that the original defense of slavery as the result of just-war theory gave way to justifications based on geography and lineage as slavery intensified in the early seventeenth century. María Eugenia Chavez introduces the reader to the 1681 abolitionist work of Francisco José Jaca, a seventeenth-century Capuchin from Caracas. He argued that since the primary cause of freedom is God, all baptized Christians have inherited freedom, as legal status follows the womb (partus ventrem sequitur). In 1821, another abolitionist cited the same principle, promoting the liberation of the womb and its issue, but keeping women enslaved. Rachel Sarah O'Toole's essay focuses on the experiences of enslaved women of African descent in Peru. Imperial ideology viewed the slave owner as the patriarch of a household and encouraged freed slaves to remain in the domestic sphere of their former owners. Nevertheless, notarial records indicate that formerly enslaved women tried to break free from their former households.
Several essays concern the interplay of religion and hierarchies of race, caste, and lineage. María Elena Martínez looks at local statutes that governed entry into the priesthood in Portuguese and Spanish colonies. She finds that local statutes based on limpieza de sangre excluded certain groups from access to civil and ecclesiastical offices, but these differed according to location. In an effort to co-opt local elites, the clergy allowed Brahmins and the indigenous descendants of noble lineage in the Americas and Africa into the priesthood. Whereas the official rhetoric of the empires promised religious inclusion and equality, specific laws promoted hierarchy and exclusion. This dichotomy is echoed in the essay by Guillermo Wilde who notes that the texts Jesuits wrote for a European audience tended to include descriptions of indigenous people that resulted in typologies, while the more practical texts, such as translations of sermons, were more likely to include the voices of indigenous authors. Bruno Feitler's essay discusses how the Portuguese subjected Hindus, Muslims, and West Africans to the Inquisition, but deemed Amerindians in Brazil unworthy of it. Ivonne del Valle describes a sixteenth-century project to use hospitals as “civilizing agents” in Mexico. Unfortunately, its goal was to convert the indigenous people from barbarism to poverty. By focusing on local sources rather than official ideology, these splendid essays revise our understanding of lineage and hierarchy in the Iberian empires during the colonial era.
Two articles examine conversion efforts in Asia. Jody Blanco traces the strange history of the Barlaam and Josaphat tale in eighteenth-century Philippines. This essay explores themes such as free will and desire in both a religious and colonial context. Elizabeth Corsi's essay looks at the Jesuit focus on true images versus false idols. She points out that educated Chinese often secularized and appropriated these religious images they considered as exotic curiosities.
Although all the essays in this anthology strive to counter a Eurocentric perspective, two are particularly successful in this endeavor. Bernd Hausberger argues that silver production in the Americas connected Asian manufacturing systems, American miners, and European merchants. In this way, the Americas became a nexus of globalized interdependence and integration as early as the sixteenth century. Charlene Villaseñor Black's “The Iridescent Enconchado” looks at seventeenth-century inlaid mother of pearl artworks. Her essay weaves Asian roots, Indo-Portuguese inspirations, Mexican richesse, and religious purity with the Baroque emphasis on surfaces, composite media, and multiple, destabilizing perspectives. These two essays encapsulate the purpose of the anthology as a whole. Hausberger relocates the early modern Americas from the economic periphery to the center, while Villaseñor Black seems to posit no center at all in her vision of the early modern globalized world.
