Indigenous Petitioning in the Early Modern British and Spanish New World
Abstract
The Spanish and British monarchies were the two most powerful European powers to claim sovereignty over large swaths of the New World. It is well-known to historians that indigenous peoples variously refused these powers’ claims through armed struggle, passive resistance, flight to other lands, and even by taking their own lives. In the past decades, scholars have increasingly turned their attention to more formal major strategies of indigenous contention-diplomatic negotiation and petitioning. This chapter overviews indigenous petitioners in both empires, providing brief descriptions of the institutional cultures various so-called “Indian” and native groups worked within to achieve a number of individual and collective goals. It explores the primary institutional layout which Indian vassals of the Spanish crown looked to for redress, as well as Indian-administered city councils, and the less intricate but nonetheless important system of British officials and legislatures who responded to native requests, and the world of documentation both of these monarchies produced. It highlights some of the main concerns indigenous peoples pressed before these authorities, as well as the bigger picture of their outcomes by the eve of the U.S. American and Spanish Wars of Independence. After providing this comparative and entangled overview of indigenous petitioning within the two empires, this chapter then looks briefly at certain fundamental issues which arose in both cases-the rise of complex legal pluralism shaping of political ideas and legal categories, self-fashioning and ethnogenesis; political loyalty, forum-shopping, and acculturation; literacy, translation, and mediation in petitions; violence and its relationship with justice systems; and gender and women petitions. It briefly gestures toward the enduring legacies of these petitioning systems in the past two centuries of indigenous movements within a liberal legal framework which has been both hostile and accommodating throughout the hemisphere.
Publication Title
Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500-1840: Empires, Revolutions and Social Movements
Recommended Citation
Masters, A., & Dixon, B. (2022). Indigenous Petitioning in the Early Modern British and Spanish New World. Petitioning in the Atlantic World, c. 1500-1840: Empires, Revolutions and Social Movements, 105-136. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98534-9_6
