Transatlantic Obligations

‘To be without family was to be impoverished in a number of ways’; this is the statement which fittingly concludes this rich history—the transatlantic history of family in the sixteenth century by Jane E. Mangan. Her book lays out the different strands of the history of family to show the variety of ways in which the Andean world of the Viceroyalty of Peru was knitted together with the Iberian in a complex pattern, in the century that followed the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. It is based on intensive archival research in the Archivo General de Indies, Seville, Spain, Archivo Gerneral de la Nación, Lima, Peru, Archivo Histórica Provincial de Sevilla, Spain, Archivo de Regional de Arequipa, Peru, and Biblioteca Nacional del Perú, with illustrations from the John Carter Brown Library collections. The book will be of interest to historians of Colonial Peru, the Spanish Empire, and of the family. Its particular value can be found in the way it offers a window onto not only the complexity of the emergence of transatlantic families in the sixteenth century but also the lives of women—including indigenous women. Significantly, we receive a breakdown of the numbers of women crossing the Atlantic in the sixteenth century (p. 102), stories of the challenges and threats that they faced, and also stories of acts of resistance, such as the denunciation of a ship’s captain who attempted to sexually assault a woman travelling to the Americas, and wives’ denunciations of wayward husbands and refusal of summons to follow their husbands across the Atlantic

Ancient history · Archaeology · Colonialism · CONQUEST · Denunciation · Empire · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Early Modern Women Writers · History · Latin American history and culture · Law