Justice in a New World

Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America is a collection of essays that uses the lens of justice to study power struggles in the British and Iberian Americas. These authors agree that justice is multivalent, ranging from legal practices and their surrounding ceremonies to the beliefs central to a society. The laws themselves are equally works in progress, shaped by the dreams of distant crowns pressed up against the lived realities on the ground—hence the “negotiating” part of the book's title. People navigated their way through new, unknown, or hostile (or all of the above) legal and geographic territory, while they also deliberated or wrangled, a process the field now almost considers standard when describing interactions between these powers.The introduction by Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross proposes the concept of “(un)intelligibility” to frame and connect the various chapters. It is (un)intelligibility, then, that stands at the center of the work and, in the best possible way, at the center of the disagreements studied. The editors approach the study of the interactions, struggles, and relationships between European and indigenous communities through this concept, a term they define as a type of understanding informed by deeper engagement with other communities' beliefs and history. Central for the editors is that (un)intelligibility is less a metric of comprehension to be quantified than a way to assess the “relation between actors, individual and collective” (p. 32). The idea is that the more that different groups “appropriated” and “adapt[ed]” legal concepts, the better the groups could outwit, accommodate, or resist each other (p. 13). In this way, the editors are also trying to move away from conversations that place the burden of “misunderstandings” on native communities alone even as these communities suffered the consequences disproportionally.To interrogate this concept of (un)intelligibility, the collection employs a comparative approach that covers large swaths of the Americas and stretches chronologically as well from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth century. The introduction and a number of individual essays use an explicitly comparative approach to colonial encounters to build this point. Bradley Dixon's comparison of Virginia and Florida and Nancy O. Gallman and Alan Taylor's exploration of how both British and indigenous leaders shaped the process of resolving a murder between communities offer explicit comparison on how European and indigenous parties accommodated fraught ideas of what constituted justice. The comparative methodology offers the hoped-for analytical payoff when studying British, Iberian, and indigenous colonizing histories: generalizing about colonial and indigenous powers risks collapsing the contingency and circumstances distinct to a region that shaped each of these histories. In regard to European powers, these empires may have intended to approach native nations differently, but the chapters highlight a steady stream of exceptions to (as Nancy Shoemaker frames it) the distinctions between Iberian imperial colonialism and British settler colonialism. Looking at the collection collectively, Lauren Benton rightly muses, “one wonders how many exceptions it might take to unsettle this generalization” (p. 286).Interrogating interactions between these groups in official negotiations has been, and remains, central to the study of these relationships in part because official records—ranging from court documents to descriptions of diplomatic events and local colonial, town, and regional records—are sometimes the only ones that survive. Ever frustrating is that records from English, Spanish, and Portuguese officials often skew toward noting male native leaders and other men of influence, but the authors work against this bias when they can. Karen B. Graubart's work explores how different social classes within Peruvian indigenous communities deployed various legal approaches to confront Spanish officials. Tamar Herzog's work digs into the fraught Portuguese records to recover how people in the Amazon basin envisioned trade and protection negotiations without extending that vision to political subjugation. The legal archive can also obscure individual indigenous actors, which is why Jenny Hale Pulsipher's work on John Wompas, a Nipmuc man who deployed the law to advance his financial future, is a necessary intervention.Strikingly, the editors' expressed goal to explore legal (un)intelligibility comes under attack when both Lauren Benton and Daniel K. Richter question, even eschew, it in their dueling conclusions. Benton presses that there is a distinction between intelligibility and understanding, and she favors “studied ignorance” as an interpretive lens, by which she means the decision of people to ignore laws and authority figures as it suited them. Richter argues for yet another approach. Rather than negotiating legal intelligibility, he proposes reframing the discussion as one of “incommensurability,” the problem being that these groups had “fundamentally incompatible aims” (p. 291). Though more focused on North America, Richter leverages his experience to highlight the sobering point that emphasizing “intelligibility only made incommensurability more plain” (p. 291). For scholars of the Americas, this collection is a welcome contribution that continues to shift the conversation about conflict in the Americas away from one of misunderstandings and poor communication to one of informed disagreements

Epistemology · Indigenous · Intelligibility (philosophy) · Negotiation · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Historical Legal Studies and Society · Historical Studies in Latin America · Law

• Beyond Anachronism

  Lauren Benton•Journal of the History of…•2019

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