We have been told that the new laws of the Indies of 1542 were the product of the persistent stubbornness and social engineering of Bartolomé de las Casas. Their ideas generated meetings like those of Valladolid that, under a neo-scholastic spirit, wisely regulated the Indies, protecting indigenous people from the exploitation of encomenderos and conquistadors. In an extraordinary empirical work in nearly 26 archives, ‘We, the King’, by Adrian Masters, it is shown that the hundreds of thousands of royal charters and the millions of viceregal commandments produced in the Indies in the 16th century were actually the product of requests from vassals of all kinds, including women and slaves, not ‘diktats’ from distant authorities, virtuous or ignorant, willing to regulate every detail of daily life indiana. ESSAY ‘We, the King. Creating royal legislation in the sixteenth-century Spanish New World’ Author Adrian Master Publisher Cambridge University Press Year 2023 Pages 342 Price 99.20 euros 4There was actually a ‘we’ behind each ‘I, the king’. The archives have separated the petitions from the identification cards and the ordinances and commandments and have made us believe that Felipe, the Prudent King, from El Escorial imagined every legislative detail of the Indians. How did the law originate? Masters demonstrates that the Spanish monarchy was actually a state in which theories of popular sovereignty determined vast systems of communication between vassals and monarchs to avoid tyranny. The Council of the Indies was created to listen to the distant voices of Indian factions and vassals clamoring for reforms, grants and justice. “I have been informed” is the refrain that precedes each royal decree and viceregal commandment, which were generally a literal copy of petitions. The state was a passive state captive to the local requests of vassals whose voices came through an extensive system of communication and mail. The Spanish monarchy was a state in which theories of popular sovereignty determined vast communication systems. Masters points out that corruption and Disinformation were the two black beasts that harassed the crown. The new laws of 1542 actually originated when magistrates of the Royal Council discovered that the wealth of the Pizarro and Almagro had compromised the decisions of the majority of the magistrates of the Council of the Indies. Throughout the century, the crown found the wives and daughters of councilors responsible for ‘lobbying’ and corruption; The encomenderos gave them gifts of gold, jewelry, and marriage promises to dissuade counselors from designing legislation according to their needs. The reforms of 1542 and 1571 were both designed to create gender control systems and audits through paper. Throughout the century, Masters concludes, the Council of the Indies also sought to assume a more active role to stop depending on factions and parties for information. He did this by creating archives.Racial legislation, Masters suggests, originated in the petitions and ‘lobbying’ of a multitude of Indian factions, indigenous groups in particular. The state did not have a preordained direction in neo-scholastic theory, it was the result of contingency and politics. The creation of the bureaucracy involved the marginalization of elite women and the creation of imperial archives to avoid the interested manipulation of information in a state that was built from below and, literally, on paper.
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