It is difficult to envision the sheer quantity of pearls dredged up from the New World by sixteenth-century colonists. An average of a 1,000 pounds of pearl per year in tax revenue alone. The social, political, and ecological challenges of producing such richness is the subject of a fascinating book by historian Molly Walsh reviewed here.
05.06.2019
Pirate or privateer? In practice, identical, but in terms of legal and social standing, the designations were considered worlds away in the contested waters of the North Atlantic. How did sanctioned privateering transition over time to being considered lawless pirating?
04.09.2019
After the conquest, Tenochtitlan became Mexico, but the city remained predominantly indigenous. As a viceregal capital and global commercial hub, Mexico City underwent profound changes as ethnic newcomers from Oaxaca to Manila elbowed out the Nahua from their barrios, and Aztec systems of water management survived even as dikes and canals were modified.
03.11.2019
In both the Iberian Peninsula and the New World, the archive played a central role in the creation of borders. Through the alchemy of litigation and treaty mediation, the paperwork of fictional claims was transformed into lines on the ground.
02.07.2019
Offering a provocative critique of the unspoken liberal underpinning of historiography on slavery, Herman Bennett's new study is addressed to Europeanists who have ignored the centrality of slavery to early modern political theory.
03.22.2018
Maligned in popular conceptions of the history of medicine, Afro-American religious healers in early modern Cartagena played a constructive role in the development of an science that privileged empiricism over dogma in Pablo Gómez's new study, The Experiential Caribbean.
11.20.2017
Toussaint Louverture is celebrated by some as a saint worthy of his namesake. Recent work by historian Philippe Girard paints a less saintly portrait of this seminal figure of the Haitian Revolution.
09.18.2017
According to myth, The Alamo honors the resilience and courage of Anglos and Tejanos pitted against Mexican centralism, brutality, and corruption. In fact, The Alamo is all about emancipation and slavery.
04.29.2017
How was Aristotelian theory (of nature, of the state, and of society) debated and implemented by the Spanish in the New World? Understanding this tradition and its impact gives a new perspective on Spanish Colonialism in the Americas.
08.26.2016
On the early modern history of the drug quinine and the links between bureaucracy and knowledge in the Spanish American empire.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas Austin. His books include How to Write the History of the New World (2001), Puritan Conquistadors (2006), and Nature, Empire, and Nation (2007)