Brian P Owensby
Biographic Data
| ID | 475778 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian P Owensby |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian P |
| FAMILY NAME | Owensby |
| SIGNATURE | OWENSBY B P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Empire of Poverty
Since Time Immemorial
Over the last decade, one of the most striking developments in scholarship on colonial Latin America has been the study of what might be called Indigenous legality. Yanna Yannakakis's rigorous, imaginative, and well-written new book testifies to the vibrancy of this trend and shows how much remains to be done.Yannakakis builds on recent archival work demonstrating the centrality of law, litigation, and legal consciousness to Indigenous people dur…
The Imperial Nation
Stanley J. Stein (1920–2019)
Stanley J. Stein was born in June 1920. He died 99 years later in December 2019, just months from his 100th birthday. At the time of his death, Stein was emeritus at Princeton University, where he had been the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture since joining the Princeton faculty in 1953.Stein was born in New York to eastern European immigrants who arrived at the United States shortly after the twentieth cen…
New World of Gain
In the centuries before Europeans crossed the Atlantic, social and material relations among the indigenous Guaraní people of present-day Paraguay were based on reciprocal gift-giving. But the Spanish and Portuguese newcomers who arrived in the sixteenth century seemed interested in the Guaraní only to advance their own interests, either through material exchange or by getting the Guaraní to serve them. This book tells the story of how Europeans f…
Between Justice and Economics
Justice in a New World
Global Indios
Reviews of serious books should not begin by noting their covers. In this case there is something deeply poignant about the portrayal of three indigenous people. The image is from Juan Cordero’s Cristóbal Colón en la corte de los reyes católicos, a canvas executed in 1850 as the myth of Columbus-as-culture-hero was being invented. The larger tableau from which the image was cropped shows Columbus in April 1493 standing before Ferdinand and Isabel…
History at the Roots
“Trouxemos de terras estranhas um sistema complexo e acabado depreceitos, sem saber até que ponto se ajustam às condições da vidabrasileira e sem cogitar das mudanças que tais condições lhe imporiam.Na verdade, a ideologia impessoal do liberalismo democrático jamaisse naturalizou entre nós.”“We brought from foreign lands a complex and accomplished system ofprecepts, without knowing to what point they were consistent with theconditions of Brazilia…
The Art of Being In-Between
Anyone who has seen the Codex Florentino’s picture of Doña Marina interpreting between Moctezuma and Cortés knows that the image and idea of an interpreter standing in the space between two other people is a visual and cultural cue crucial to making sense of Latin America’s historical experience. The mere fact of adding a third term to easily paired notions of conqueror-conquered or Spaniard-Indian challenges the methodological individualism unde…
Legal personality and the processes of slave liberty in early-modern New Spain
This article examines several court cases in which slaves in seventeenth-century Mexico litigated to gain their liberty. Revisiting the Tannenbaum thesis regarding slave moral and legality personality, the article seeks to understand how litigation actually worked and what effects it can be seen to have had in individual slaves' lives. Historians have often referred to the outcomes of legal proceedings, or used court records as libraries of histo…
Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico
Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico shows how Indian litigants and petitioners made sense of Spanish legal principles and processes when the dust of conquest had begun to settle after 1600. By juxtaposing hundreds of case records with written laws and treatises, Owensby reveals how Indians saw the law as a practical and moral resource that allowed them to gain a measure of control over their lives and to forge a relationship to a …
How Juan and Leonor Won Their Freedom
In the early 1660s, a number of slaves in central Mexico sued for their freedom— and won. In the two cases examined here, the slaves pressed their claims following the death of their masters. The transcripts include all procedural wrangling, all court orders, all testimony, the judges’ sentences and, in one case, an appeal. In one form or another, case reports such as these have been the piece de résistance of colonial Mexican historiography. His…
Toward a History of Brazil's 'Cordial Racism
As anyone who has tried knows, the central problem in thinking about race in Brazil is how to. The almost quantum-theory-like indeterminacy of the ways Brazilians of different skin colors interact has exercised imaginations for decades, fromfin-de-sièclescientific racists, to the eugenists of the 1920s, to interwar modernists who promoted the idea of racial democracy, to the Brazilian and later North American revisionists of the 1950s and beyond.…
Consumption Intensified
Twenty years ago Marshall Berman noted that the experience of the modern in “underdeveloped places was built on the fantasies and dreams of modernity.” Though Berman did not say so explicitly, this formulation implied that under certain circumstances modern lives in such places could become the nightmare of Tantalus from whom the object of his desire was ceaselessly fugitive. This is the experience at the core of anthropologist Maureen O’Doughert…
Intimate Ironies
Domesticating Modernity
How Juan and Leonor Won Their Freedom
In the early 1660s, a number of slaves in central Mexico sued for their freedom— and won. In the two cases examined here, the slaves pressed their claims following the death of their masters. The transcripts include all procedural wrangling, all court orders, all testimony, the judges’ sentences and, in one case, an appeal. In one form or another, case reports such as these have been the piece de résistance of colonial Mexican historiography. His…
Toward a History of Brazil's 'Cordial Racism
As anyone who has tried knows, the central problem in thinking about race in Brazil is how to. The almost quantum-theory-like indeterminacy of the ways Brazilians of different skin colors interact has exercised imaginations for decades, fromfin-de-sièclescientific racists, to the eugenists of the 1920s, to interwar modernists who promoted the idea of racial democracy, to the Brazilian and later North American revisionists of the 1950s and beyond.…
Legal personality and the processes of slave liberty in early-modern New Spain
This article examines several court cases in which slaves in seventeenth-century Mexico litigated to gain their liberty. Revisiting the Tannenbaum thesis regarding slave moral and legality personality, the article seeks to understand how litigation actually worked and what effects it can be seen to have had in individual slaves' lives. Historians have often referred to the outcomes of legal proceedings, or used court records as libraries of histo…
Domesticating Modernity
Domesticating Modernity
Intimate Ironies
Consumption Intensified
Twenty years ago Marshall Berman noted that the experience of the modern in “underdeveloped places was built on the fantasies and dreams of modernity.” Though Berman did not say so explicitly, this formulation implied that under certain circumstances modern lives in such places could become the nightmare of Tantalus from whom the object of his desire was ceaselessly fugitive. This is the experience at the core of anthropologist Maureen O’Doughert…
How Juan and Leonor Won Their Freedom
In the early 1660s, a number of slaves in central Mexico sued for their freedom— and won. In the two cases examined here, the slaves pressed their claims following the death of their masters. The transcripts include all procedural wrangling, all court orders, all testimony, the judges’ sentences and, in one case, an appeal. In one form or another, case reports such as these have been the piece de résistance of colonial Mexican historiography. His…
Toward a History of Brazil's 'Cordial Racism
As anyone who has tried knows, the central problem in thinking about race in Brazil is how to. The almost quantum-theory-like indeterminacy of the ways Brazilians of different skin colors interact has exercised imaginations for decades, fromfin-de-sièclescientific racists, to the eugenists of the 1920s, to interwar modernists who promoted the idea of racial democracy, to the Brazilian and later North American revisionists of the 1950s and beyond.…
Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico
Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico shows how Indian litigants and petitioners made sense of Spanish legal principles and processes when the dust of conquest had begun to settle after 1600. By juxtaposing hundreds of case records with written laws and treatises, Owensby reveals how Indians saw the law as a practical and moral resource that allowed them to gain a measure of control over their lives and to forge a relationship to a …
Legal personality and the processes of slave liberty in early-modern New Spain
This article examines several court cases in which slaves in seventeenth-century Mexico litigated to gain their liberty. Revisiting the Tannenbaum thesis regarding slave moral and legality personality, the article seeks to understand how litigation actually worked and what effects it can be seen to have had in individual slaves' lives. Historians have often referred to the outcomes of legal proceedings, or used court records as libraries of histo…
The Art of Being In-Between
Anyone who has seen the Codex Florentino’s picture of Doña Marina interpreting between Moctezuma and Cortés knows that the image and idea of an interpreter standing in the space between two other people is a visual and cultural cue crucial to making sense of Latin America’s historical experience. The mere fact of adding a third term to easily paired notions of conqueror-conquered or Spaniard-Indian challenges the methodological individualism unde…
History at the Roots
“Trouxemos de terras estranhas um sistema complexo e acabado depreceitos, sem saber até que ponto se ajustam às condições da vidabrasileira e sem cogitar das mudanças que tais condições lhe imporiam.Na verdade, a ideologia impessoal do liberalismo democrático jamaisse naturalizou entre nós.”“We brought from foreign lands a complex and accomplished system ofprecepts, without knowing to what point they were consistent with theconditions of Brazilia…
Global Indios
Reviews of serious books should not begin by noting their covers. In this case there is something deeply poignant about the portrayal of three indigenous people. The image is from Juan Cordero’s Cristóbal Colón en la corte de los reyes católicos, a canvas executed in 1850 as the myth of Columbus-as-culture-hero was being invented. The larger tableau from which the image was cropped shows Columbus in April 1493 standing before Ferdinand and Isabel…
Justice in a New World
Between Justice and Economics
New World of Gain
In the centuries before Europeans crossed the Atlantic, social and material relations among the indigenous Guaraní people of present-day Paraguay were based on reciprocal gift-giving. But the Spanish and Portuguese newcomers who arrived in the sixteenth century seemed interested in the Guaraní only to advance their own interests, either through material exchange or by getting the Guaraní to serve them. This book tells the story of how Europeans f…
Stanley J. Stein (1920–2019)
Stanley J. Stein was born in June 1920. He died 99 years later in December 2019, just months from his 100th birthday. At the time of his death, Stein was emeritus at Princeton University, where he had been the Walter Samuel Carpenter III Professor of Spanish Civilization and Culture since joining the Princeton faculty in 1953.Stein was born in New York to eastern European immigrants who arrived at the United States shortly after the twentieth cen…
The Imperial Nation
Since Time Immemorial
Over the last decade, one of the most striking developments in scholarship on colonial Latin America has been the study of what might be called Indigenous legality. Yanna Yannakakis's rigorous, imaginative, and well-written new book testifies to the vibrancy of this trend and shows how much remains to be done.Yannakakis builds on recent archival work demonstrating the centrality of law, litigation, and legal consciousness to Indigenous people dur…
Empire of Poverty
Political science (13 works) · History (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Historical Studies in Latin America (6 works) · Economic Justice (5 works) · Art (4 works) · Colonialism (4 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works)