The Business of Conquest

Nicole D. Legnani

Description

The Spanish conquest has long been a source of polemic, ever since the early sixteenth century when Spanish jurists began theorizing the legal merits behind native dispossession in the Americas. But in The Business of Conquest: Empire, Love, and Law in the Atlantic World, Nicole D. Legnani demonstrates how the financing and partnerships behind early expeditions betray their own praxis of imperial power as a business, even as the laws of the Indies were being written. She interrogates how and why apologists of Spanish Christian empire, such as José de Acosta, found themselves justifying the Spanish conquest as little more than a joint venture between crown and church that relied on violent actors in pursuit of material profits but that nonetheless served to propagate Christianity in overseas territories. Focusing on cultural and economic factors at play, and examining not only the chroniclers of the era but also laws, contracts, theological treatises, histories, and chivalric fiction, Legnani traces the relationship between capital investment, monarchical power, and imperial scalability in the Conquest. In particular, she shows how the Christian virtue of caritas (love and charity of neighbor, and thus God) became confused with cupiditas (greed and lust), because love came to be understood as a form of wealth in the partnership between the crown and the church. In this partnership, the work of the conquistador became, ultimately, that of a traveling business agent for the Spanish empire whose excess from one venture capitalized the next. This business was thus the business of conquest and featured entrepreneurial violence as its norm—not exception.

The Business of Conquest offers an original examination of this period, including the perspectives of both the creators of the colonial world (monarchs, venture capitalists, conquerors, and officials), of religious figures (such as Las Casas), and finally of indigenous points of view to show how a venture capital model can be used to analyze the partnership between crown and church. It will appeal to students and scholars of the early modern period, Latin American colonial studies, capitalism, history, and indigenous studies.

Sujets

• Legal History
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Iberia
• Laws of the Indies
• God
• Spanish Empire
• General officer
• South
• Latin America
• Iberian Peninsula
• New World
• Central
• LAW
• General
• Iberia Líneas Aéreas de España

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268108984
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Business of Conquest
The
Business of Conquest
EMPIRE, LOVE, AND LAW IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD
NICOLE D. LEGNANI
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946986
ISBN: 978-0-268-10896-0 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10899-1 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10898-4 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
Para mi hija, Francesca Delia
CONTENTS List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Setting Sail with Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (1550–1616) ONE On the Same Boat: Iberian Ventures in Christian Conquest TWO Contracting Love Interests THREE Telling Islands in the Claribalte and the Historia de las Indias FOUR The Specter of Las Casas in the Political Theology of José de Acosta FIVE The Bidding of Empire: The Curacas Negotiate Dominion with Philip II Epilogue: (No) Exit: The Maroons of Empire Notes Works Cited Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1. Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, “Conquista. Embarcáronse a las Indias”
Figure 2. Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, “Pontifical Flota Colum en la mar a las Yndias del Pirú”
Figure 3. Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, “Conquista. Guaina Capac Inga, Candía, español”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Perhaps it is fitting that a study that reckons with the moral and material debts incurred by various agents in the Iberian conquests should participate in the long-established trope of the author expressing her gratitude for the support received from people and institutions, without whom and without which this book would have been impossible to complete. So I begin with my thanks for the genre itself, which designates this space at the beginning to itemize both my outstanding debts and my sincere assurances of my intention to repay them, alongside the deep-seated conviction that a commensurate settlement remains an impossible but not for this reason, less indispensable task to undertake in the lines below.
I am deeply indebted to Eli Bortz, my editor at the University of Notre Dame Press, and his editorial team for their unflagging support for and meticulous work on this project. Sheila Berg, you are a rock star.
It has been a privilege and a pleasure to benefit from two especially generous mentors and rigorous readers over the years, José Rabasa and Mary Malcolm Gaylord. Their patience, sense of humor, and encouragement never fail to surprise and guide me.
To José Rabasa, who first directed me with marginal notes and questions and in phone conversations and meetings over coffee ever since I was a graduate student, my deepest gratitude for continuing to read me and for providing me with invaluable advice such as “No te comas el coco.” He continually challenges me to embrace the questions that arise in writing, questions that must be raised precisely because they have no easy answers.

This book would not have been possible without the unparalleled support and nurturing of Mary Malcolm Gaylord, who remembers where I sat in all the seminars that she taught and has never failed to support my professional development, who cooks for and hosts dinners at her home in Concord, and who asks variations on the question “So what?,” as needed, in copious marginalia. She has been my teacher, mentor, and friend since I was a first-year student at Harvard College. Her attention to detail, argument, and structure is without parallel. My thanks for her patience and support and for believing in the salience of this project from the outset.
I am extremely grateful to Juan Vitulli for his extensive commentary, questions, and suggested revisions of the manuscript. I am similarly grateful to the anonymous reviewer for extremely positive feedback and suggestions. I cannot begin to express my thanks to Jorge Téllez Vargas for reading and commenting on earlier versions of the introductory and third chapters and to Isis Sadek for her insightful comments and recommendations on later versions. My thanks also to Andy Alfonso, Juan Diego Pérez, and Robert A. Myak, whose sharp eyes and attention to detail were integral to the editing and proofreading processes.
I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude to José Antonio Mazzotti for recognizing my vocation when I was an undergraduate and for encouraging and supporting my first foray into colonial Latin American studies.
I must also thank my colleagues with whom I have the great pleasure of working in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University: Marina Brownlee, Alberto Bruzos Moro, Nicola Cooney, Arcadio Díaz Quiñones, Rubén Gallo, Javier Guerrero, Germán Labrador Méndez, Christina Lee, Angel Loureiro, Pedro Meira Monteiro, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Rachel Price, and Ron Surtz. Though Bruno Carvalho has left us, I would certainly be remiss if I failed to thank him as well. Fernando Acosta, our curator, and Gabriel Swift, at the Rare Books and Special Collections in Firestone Library, fielded all my questions and last-minute requests. I would also like to thank Mitra Abbaspour at the Princeton Art Museum for reaching out to me in the spring of my first year at Princeton when I was teaching my first graduate seminar. Without her inquiry and initiative, I would not have met the Postcommodity collective, Raven Chacón, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist, whose praxis continues to be an inspiration. To Vera Candiani, the ardent inquisitor of my use of the term “venture capital,” my thanks for the pushback and the camaraderie. I am also grateful to Sarah Rivett for opening a space for Indigenous studies to flourish at Princeton, the settled and unceded territory of the Lenni-Lenape.
My thanks to Danelle Gutarra Cordero for organizing the Postcolonial Humanities Working Group through the Humanities Council at Princeton, where I benefited greatly from participants’ questions and comments on Las Casas and his Madeira rabbits. I am also grateful to the Tepoztlán collective for affording me the opportunity to present two papers during the 2014 and 2017 summer meetings. The theory read, commentary given, and performances presented by participants informed the sections on José de Acosta in the introduction and chapter 4 and the Las Casas section in chapter 3. I also wish to thank Tulia G. Falletti and Cathy Bartch for inviting me to give the keynote address at the third annual Penn in Latin America and the Caribbean conference in October 2017. The longer format allowed me to trace the relationships between Las Casas and Columbus as developed in chapter 3.
I would also like to acknowledge the editors of Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human , who permitted me to reproduce sections from my chapter, “Invasive Specie: Rabbits, Conquistadors, and Capital in the Historia de las Indias (1527–1561) by Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566),” in chapter 3. These selected excerpts are reprinted with the permission of the University Press of Florida from my chapter in Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human , edited by Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020).
Over the years, many of the students who sat around a seminar table with me have proved influential in my research and writing process. When I served the Romance Languages and Literatures Department as a College Fellow at Harvard University, I was especially grateful for the insights provided by James Almeida, Henry Brooks, José de León González, and Wilnomy Pérez Pérez. As an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, I have been similarly blessed to sit at a roundtable with Andy Alfonso, Luisa Barraza Caballero, Vero Carchedi, Berta Del Río Alcalá, Yangyou Fang, Jannia Gómez González, Ryan Goodman, Alejandro Martínez Rodríguez, Sean McFadden, William Mullaney, Juan Diego Pérez, Paula Pérez Rodríguez, Paulina Pineda, Sowmya Ramanathan, Margarita Rosa, and Peter Schmidt.
Over the years, I have benefited from conversation with and camaraderie of friends, readers, and co-presenters who have informed my research and writing in creative and productive ways: Arantxa Araujo, Santa Arias, B. Chrissy Arce, Antonio Arraiza, Orlando Bentancor, Josiah Blackmore, Monique Blom, Lotte Buiting, Luis Cárcamo Huechante, Rodolfo Cerrón Palomino, Enrique Cortés, Gregory Cushman, Jessica Delgado, Ivonne Del Valle, Susana Draper, Caroline Egan, Luis Girón Negrón, Goretti González, Karen Graubart, Evelina Guzauskyte, V. Judson Harward, Michael Horswell, Rosario Hubert, Nick Jones, David Kasanjian, Stephanie Kirk, Salomon Lerner Febres, Obed Lira, Melissa Machit, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Kelly Mc-Donough, Michelle McKinley, María Rosa Menocal ( q.e.p.d ), Leah Middlebrook, Giovanna Montenegro, Anna More, Cristina Moreiras Menor, Chris Morin, Abdul-Karim Mustapha, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Dan Nemser, Sophia B. Núñez, Simone Pinet, Rachel O’Toole, María Josefina Saldaña Portillo, David Sartorius, Sarah Winifred Searle, Mariano Siskind, Daniel Strum, Analisa Taylor, Zeb Tortorici, Carlos Varón González, Miguel Valerio, Manuela Valle-Castro, Sonia Velázquez, Luciana Villas Bôas, Pamela Voekel, Lisa Voigt, Dillon Vrana, Emily West