Episode 74 with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters

In this episode, we discuss the new book—The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World—with its authors, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters. In their book, the two scholars offer a new perspective on the development of the Spanish Empire during the sixteenth century, highlighting the important role of lawsuits and other types of paperwork in forging a radical Spanish society in the New World. 

The Episode

The Guests

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of numerous books, and he is currently completing a book project, titled Categories as Prisons for the University Pennsylvania Press, which explores how historiographical categories organize what questions about the past are permissible and therefore how archives are organized and historical  narratives are structured.

Adrian Masters teaches at the University of Trier, Germany, where he leads a multi-million-dollar grant, The Iberian Roots of German Racial Thought, financed by the German Department of Education. He is author of the book We, the King: Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth Century Spanish New World (Cambridge, 2023), and has published multiple articles in leading journals.

Suggested Readings

• Brendecke, Arndt. The Empirical Empire: Spanish Colonial Rule and the Politics of Knowledge. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.
• Cuadriello, Jaime. Las glorias de la República de Tlaxcala. Mexico: IIE, 2004.
• Deusen, Nancy E. van. Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Duke University Press, 2015. 
• Malcolm, Noel. Agents of Empire: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
• Matthew, Laura E., and Michel R. Oudijk, eds. Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007.
• Penry, S. Beth. The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
• Puente Luna, José Carlos de la. Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018.
• Ramos, Gabriela, and Yanna Yannakakis, eds. Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.