Republics of Difference

Spanish monarchs recognized the jurisdictions of many self-governing corporate groups, including Jews and Muslims on the peninsula, indigenous peoples in their American colonies, and enslaved and free people of African descent across the empire. Republics of Difference examines fifteenth-century Seville and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lima to show how religiously- and racially-based self-governance functioned in a society with many kinds of law, what effects it had on communities, and why it mattered. By comparing these minoritized communities on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic world, this study offers a new understanding of the distinct standings of those communities in their urban settings. Drawing on legal and commercial records from late medieval Spain and colonial Latin America, Karen B. Graubart paints insightful portraits of residents' everyday lives to underscore the discriminatory barriers as well as the occupational structures, social hierarchies, and networks in which they flourished. In doing so, she demonstrates the limits, benefits, and dangers of living under one's own law in the Spanish empire, including the ways self-governance enabled some communities to protect their practices and cultures over time.

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Exceptionally original, well-researched, and well-written... Graubart's prose is lively and quick paced, as she moves back and forth between narrative case studies and illustrative anecdotes culled from archival sources, synthetic surveys of general trends, and finely grained analyses of an often elusive documentary record... Republics of Difference constitutes an exemplary work of interdisciplinary, comparative scholarship such that the reader sees as much continuum as rupture between the Middle Ages and the Early Modern and between European Iberia and New World Peru. This dense but very readable work will be appreciated by scholars in a range of fields and is eminently suitable to be assigned in a graduate or upper-level undergraduate seminar.