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“Contested legalities in colonial Mexico : Francisco Xavier Gamboa and the defense of Derecho Indiano” explores the legal culture of late colonial Mexico through the lens of Francisco Xavier Gamboa, the most celebrated Mexican jurist of his era. Born in Guadalajara in 1717, Gamboa practiced in the courtrooms of Mexico City, represented the merchants guild of Mexico in Madrid from 1755 to 1764, analyzed mining legislation in the 1761 Comentarios a las Ordenanzas de Minas, and served three decades as an Audiencia judge until 1794. His long career encompassed the most salient features of the legal culture of his time. The central argument of this dissertation is that the legality Gamboa embodied and defended, known to historians as Derecho Indiano, came under attack in the period of the so-called Bourbon Reforms during the reign of Charles III. Led by José de Gálvez, the visitor-general of New Spain in the 1760s and later the secretary of state for the Indies from 1776 to 1787, the crown sought to streamline the legal order in order to root out corruption, restrict local autonomy, and strengthen royal authority. Gamboa and many other experienced officials opposed this effort. They argued that the old legal order, which recognized local customs and guaranteed judicial autonomy, provided the flexibility needed to maintain the Spanish empire in America. This contest in legalities marked the emergence of a centralized state in Spanish America and the moment when the Spanish legal order began to lose its legitimacy in America. / text

The Spanish colonisation of the Philippines in 1565 opened up trade between China, Latin America and Europe via the Pacific crossing, changing the history of global trade forever. The traditional understanding of the early colonial period in the Philippines suggests that colonial control spread rapidly and peacefully across the islands, ushering in dramatic changes to the social, political and economic environment of the archipelago. This dissertation argues by contrast that the extent of Spanish control has been overstated - partially as a by-product of an over-reliance on religious and secular chronicles that sought to magnify the role and interests of the colonial state. Through extensive archival work examining different sites of colonial authority and power, I demonstrate that Philippine communities contested and limited the nature of colonisation in their archipelago. In making this argument, I challenge prevalent assumptions of indigenous passivity in the face of imperial expansion. By demonstrating the agency of Southeast Asians, particular actors come to the fore in each of the chapters: Chinese labourers, indigenous elites, fugitives and apostates, unpacified mountain communities, native priestesses and Moro slave raiders. The culture and social organisation of these Southeast Asian communities impacted on the nature of Spanish imperialism and the capacity for the Spanish to retain and extend their control. Throughout the seventeenth century, the Spanish presence within the archipelago was always tenuous. A number of communities remained outside of Spanish control for the duration of the century, while still others oscillated between integration and rebellion, by turns participating in and resisting the consolidation of empire. These communities continued to maintain their local and regional economies and customs. Thus, by the end of the seventeenth century, imperial control remained fragmented, partial and incomplete. The dissertation contributes not only to the historiography of the Philippines - which remains under-explored - but also to the historiographies of Colonial Latin America, Southeast Asia and early modern empires. Conceptualising the Philippines as a frontier space helps to overturn the foundations of the myth of a completed conquest. This dissertation thus raises questions about the inevitability of empire by arguing that indigenous communities were active respondents to Spanish colonisation attempts and that indigenous traditions and culture in this region were both resilient and enduring in the face of colonial oppression.

Building Opportunity centers on disaster response and recovery after a 7.5-magnitude earthquake destroyed the city of Antigua Guatemala, the capital of colonial Guatemala, on July 29, 1773. It also concentrates on the colonial government’s decision to relocate Antigua Guatemala and establish a new capital, New Guatemala. This dissertation examines how the cultural, economic, political, and social views of inhabitants -- bureaucrats, clerics, Indians, architects, and the poor -- shaped their reactions to the tremor. Furthermore, it contends that the migration from Antigua Guatemala to New Guatemala created socioeconomic opportunities through which individuals made strong efforts to rebuild their lives. Debates on natural catastrophe in colonial Latin America have emphasized the ability of calamity to ignite power struggles over competing ideas about emergency management. However, in addition to an analysis of such disputes, this dissertation advances new understandings of the ways in which the earthquake gave victims chances to reshape their world. How did individuals' beliefs influence their attitudes toward the cataclysm? How did the effort to create a new city forge openings for survivors to refashion their identities? This study shows that individual groups' notions of fear, hazard mitigation, history, and socioeconomics defined arguments about whether or not to move. It also demonstrates that the tragedy produced spaces in which officials, ecclesiastics, indigenous peoples, and the impoverished worked to improve their lives. In various ways, administrators and victims turned adversity into an opportunity to become disaster managers and survivors, respectively. / text

Le « cas » Juan de Betanzos (1519-1576) est en apparence extrêmement simple et peut se résumer en quelques mots : en 1551, à Cuzco, un Espagnol, marié à une princesse indigène, écrit une histoire des Incas à la demande du vice-roi de l’époque, don Antonio de Mendoza. Cette simplicité explique sans doute, pourquoi ce « cas » n’a pas suscité davantage d’intérêt. Si la Suma y narración de los Incas, depuis la découverte d’une version complète en 1987, est unanimement considérée comme une source fondamentale pour la connaissance du Tahuantinsuyo et un passage obligé pour tout spécialiste du Monde andin, son contexte d’élaboration, ses sources et même son auteur n’ont reçu qu’une attention fort limitée. Ce dernier a été relégué à l’arrière-plan au sein de son propre ouvrage et cantonné à un second rôle au sein de la société de son époque. Abordé comme un « passeur culturel » et un « expert » de la langue quechua et du monde inca, Betanzos acquiert un tout autre relief : il n’apparaît plus comme un personnage secondaire, mais comme un acteur du processus de transition entre monde préhispanique et monde hispanique et de la construction de la société coloniale péruvienne. / The “case” of Juan de Betanzos (1519-1576), apparently simple, can be summed up in a few words: in 1551, in Cuzco, a Spaniard, married to an indigenous princess, writes a history of the Incas, commissioned by the viceroy at the time, don Antonio de Mendoza. This simplicity undoubtedly explains why this "case" did not raise more interest. Although the Suma y narración de los Incas, since the discovery of a complete version in 1987, has been considered unanimously as a fundamental source for understanding the Tahuantinsuyo, as well as required reading for any specialist of the Andean world, the context of its production, its sources, and even its author have only received very limited attention. The author has been pushed to the background of his own work and confined to a secondary role in his own society. Approached, however, as a “passeur culturel” and an "expert" of the Quechua language and Inca world, Betanzos acquires an altogether different depth: he no longer appears as a secondary character, but as an agent in the process of transition between pre-Hispanic and Hispanic worlds and in the construction of colonial Peruvian society.

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xiv, 485 p. / The organizing principle of this dissertation is that Las Casas's most famous work, the Brevisima relacion , is primarily an intricately reasoned legal argument against the excesses of early Spanish colonialism rather than a fiery polemical diatribe by the "first human rights activist." Contrary to such anachronistic (though enduringly popular) characterization, this study employs a historical perspective to view this influential text as belonging to the genres of the early modern juridical tradition. Accordingly, this investigation begins by examining the historical matrix of fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century Spain to properly contextualize Las Casas's early life and certain initial colonial institutions of the Spanish Indies. Similarly, his juridical expertise is firmly rooted in an explication of his contemporaneous formation in canon law and theology. From these foundational strands of his life and work, his maturing juridical voice spoke most decisively in certain of the major debates among Spanish jurists, theologians, and politicians--as well as in the Brevísima relación --in the wake of the Iberian "discovery" of what was for all concerned a physical as well as philosophical "New World." The combined focus of subsequent chapters elucidates the fundamentally juridical dimensions of the text, beginning with the specific context accompanying its genesis in 1542 until its publication a decade later. The treatise's legal character as an official publication based on various evidentiary sources is further revealed by the text's triple function--to inform, to denounce, and to petition, which in turn corresponds to the genres of relaciones, denuncias , and peticiones of the civil juridical tradition. The Brevísima relación 's content unveils far more than this; the epistemological rationale and analytic framework are intimately linked to canonistic, Thomistic, and biblical genres of the ecclesial juridical tradition. Continuing this historical investigation, the concluding chapter demonstrates anew the fundamental grounding of Las Casas's approach in the vibrant first generations of juristic discourse of the so-called Spanish colonial era. His multifaceted juridical voice was distinctively encoded in a powerful melding of civil and ecclesial legal traditions. This dissertation intends to communicate this voice intelligibly with the proper accents of the past. / Committee in charge: Dr. Robert Haskett, Chairperson; Dr. Carlos Aguirre, Member; Dr. Stephanie Wood, Member; Dr. David Luebke, Member; Dr. Stephen Shoemaker, Outside Member