‘The Radical Spanish Empire’ Shows the Power of Paperwork
A new book explores how 16th-century commoners wielded the legal system against their colonizers to surprising effect.
This article is adapted from AQ’s special report on Latin America’s demographic transformation Can ordinary people’s actions change how they are governed It’s a timely question, but one with few simple answers. Besides protests or armed revolts, opportunities for change have sometimes emerged during periods of instability caused by new communication tools, such as the internet, the telegraph, newspapers, or the printing press. Yet a new book by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters, The Radical Spanish Empire, argues that, in the early Spanish Empire, the most radical...
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