Nancy E. van Deusen. Global Indios

The tens of thousands of indigenous inhabitants of the Americas whose lives were radically disrupted, transformed, and often prematurely curtailed by Europeans’ escalating demands for slave labor in the first half of the sixteenth century mostly have remained anonymous because of the nature of both the trade in indigenous captives and the records themselves, which reduced them to numbers and units of sale (piezas) and often obscured their actual fate. In this volume, Nancy E. van Deusen has recovered in part the experiences of a small number of people reduced to slavery or servitude and relocated to Spain from lawsuits that were initiated following the proclamation of the New Laws of 1542 that in principle made indigenous slavery illegal in Spanish dominions. Although the total of 184 litigants she found represents a small percentage of the more than 2,000 indigenous slaves brought to Castile, many of whom had lived there for years by the time their cases reached the court or received final adjudication, the existence of these petitions for freedom reveals something of their lives. The cases represent a tiny fraction of the men, women, and children who were reduced to slavery or perpetual servitude in the Spanish empire in the sixteenth century, and their numbers are dwarfed by the thousands of slaves freed following the establishment of the New Laws in places like Guatemala and Mexico.

Adjudication · Ancient history · Economic Justice · Empire · Ethnology · Indigenous · Pleading · Political science · Proclamation · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies