During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish authorities restricted emigration to the Americas to those who could prove they had been Catholic for at least three generations. In doing so, they hoped to instill religious orthodoxy in the colonies and believed Muslim converts, or Moriscos, would hamper efforts to convert indigenous people to Catholicism. Nevertheless, Moriscos secretly made the treacherous journey across the ocean, sett ...
Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were especially brutal but conspicuously successful eighteenth-century slave societies and imperial colonies. These plantation regimes were, to adopt a metaphor of the era, complex «machines,» finely tuned over time by planters, merchants, and officials to become more efficient at exploiting their enslaved workers and serving their empires. Using a wide range of archival evidence, The Plantation Machine traces a crit ...
Debates about poverty and inequality in the United States frequently invoke the early twentieth century as a time when new social legislation helped moderate corporate power. But as historian Daniel Amsterdam shows, the relationship between business interests and the development of American government was hardly so simple. Roaring Metropolis reconstructs the ideas and activism of urban capitalists roughly a century ago. Far from antigovernmen ...
A collection of 20 essays, by a distinguished panel of specialists in British and American history, that explores the complex political, economic, intellectual, religious, and social environment in which William Penn lived and worked. ...
Juan de Solorzano Pereira (1575-1654) was a lawyer who spent eighteen years as a judge in Peru before returning to Spain to serve on the Councils of Castile and of the Indies. Considered one of the finest lawyers in Spain, his work, De Indiarum Jure , was the most sophisticated defense of the Spanish conquest of the Americas ever written, and he was widely cited in Europe and the Americas until the early nineteenth century. His work, and that ...
What do we know about early modern sex, and how do we know it? How, when, and why does sex become history? In Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns , Valerie Traub addresses these questions and, in doing so, reorients the ways in which historians and literary critics, feminists and queer theorists approach sexuality and its history. Her answers offer interdisciplinary strategies for confronting the difficulties of making sexual knowledge. Based ...
