In Global Indios Nancy E. van Deusen offers us a thorough insight into the emancipation of indigenous slaves that were transported to Spain from the New World in the sixteenth century. Utilizing a set of 127 court records involving 184 indios who litigated for their freedom between 1530 and 1585, she unpicks the intellectual, legal and cultural frameworks that underpinned indigenous slavery and its gradual dismantling in early modern Spain. The book pivots on two key developments. First, the publication of the New Laws in 1542, which prohibited indigenous slavery across the empire and placed legal limitations on the rights of slave owners to keep their slaves. Second, Gregorio López’s 1543 inspection into the presence of free and enslaved indios living in Seville, which resulted in the liberation of more than a hundred indigenous slaves. The subsequent proliferation of litigation cases by indios seeking their freedom allows van Deusen to meticulously reconstruct the lives and experiences of indios in sixteenth-century Spain. She adeptly represents the contestation between masters and their slaves, and argues that the actions of indios within the courtroom setting were essential to the dismantling of indigenous slavery and the transformation of Spanish jurisprudence. Over the course of the book, legal arguments shift from whether indios could be slaves to questioning the legality of the act of enslavement itself using legal constructs such as “just war” or the trans-imperial provenance of indios.
Van Deusen uses a variety of methodologies throughout the book, ranging from legal history to the semiotics of enslavement, and backs up her findings with powerful and interesting case studies of the lives of individual indios that crossed oceans and continents. The outcome is a book that deals with cultural identity construction as much as with the system of slavery itself. Van Deusen explores the formation of the category “indio”, which she sees “as a process of local and global interactions, connecting East to West and West to East, that deepened over the course of the sixteenth century” (13). She argues convincingly that the presence of indios in Spain contributed to Spanish understandings of the wider world. The progression of each slave litigation case involved the interrogation of not only where indios came from, but of their very nature as both observable objects and subjects of Spanish patrimony.
Each chapter unpacks the litigation process from a slightly different perspective. Chapter one opens the book with a case study centring on the town of Carmona, just outside of Seville, where more than two dozen indios lived in 1530. Exploring two litigation suits in detail, Carmona becomes a microcosm from which van Deusen explores the multiple themes of the rest of the book—including the role of indigenous slaves within Castilian households, the conflictual nature of the litigation process, and the construction of indio identity. Chapter two provides a broad overview of indio experiences slavery. Events surrounding capture and transportation are pieced together through patchy evidence provided within travel documents, notarial records and testimonies—all of which, she argues, fail to adequately express the true reality of rupture and dislocation that enslavement must have entailed. She then turns to the role of slaves in Castilian households, focusing on the relationships of kinship that developed between slaves and their masters. While slaves were subject to violence, abuse and disfigurement, they also found themselves incorporated into a family which offered them some degree of protection, sustenance and stability. Such bonds were inherently problematic once a slave decided to litigate for freedom.
Chapter three delves into the legal context surrounding Gregorio López’s inspection of indio slaves in Seville in 1543. López was instrumental in establishing a legal culture whereby slave owners were forced to prove that their slaves were legitimately owned. Court proceedings focussed on questions of provenance—whether the indios were from Spanish or Portuguese territories, whether they came from communities known to be at war with Spain—as well as process—whether the initial act of enslavement could be demonstrated through legal documentation and whether this documentation withstood interrogation. Van Deusen then explores in chapter four how these legal frameworks operated within the courtroom setting. Evidence was produced by both sides in the form of bodily branding, bills of sale, travel documents and witness depositions. She argues that slave owners in particular constructed document-based realities—which she calls a “papereality” (128)—that at times could be fabricated or fraudulent, but which they presented as legal truths in support of their claims.
In chapter five, we learn more about the legal justifications that were used to uphold indigenous slavery in the decades following the promulgation of the New Laws. Legal claims such as just war, territorial belonging (naturaleza), ransom and cannibalism were utilized to prove whether or not the initial act of enslavement was legitimate. These arguments were used not only within the court cases by owners wishing to retain their slaves but also within the colonial context more broadly to justify slave raiding and other conquest activities taking place across the expanse of the Spanish empire. Chapter six looks at the litigation testimonies to uncover the semiotics of slavery—the physical and sonic markers that identified indios. Van Deusen notes that these observable characteristics were crucial to proving the origins of an indio, but they could also be contested within the courtroom setting and at times placed the legitimacy of a slave’s testimony in doubt. This was particularly the case for slaves that could speak Portuguese. Since indios captured in Portuguese territories were deemed to be legitimate slaves, it was crucial for litigants to prove that they were from Spanish provinces. The final chapter considers this problematic of trans-imperialism in greater detail. Contested and shifting imperial borders in the sixteenth century led to doubts about the origins of slaves. While van Deuesen demonstrates that trans-imperialism was a problem for litigants within the courtroom setting, she also makes a more profound point about how these indio litigants actively helped to shape the imagination of a globalized early modern world. As she argues, “it was the indio slaves who brought the world into sharper focus and whose global experiences permeated imperial dialogues” (218).
Larger points such as this about changing understandings of the wider world over the course of the sixteenth century is what makes this book important for historians of world history, as well as Latin Americanists and historians of slavery. Van Deusen argues convincingly that imperial borders were contested, moveable and shaped by active agents that included indio slaves as well as great thinkers like Bartolomé de las Casas. Yet, arguably, it is this aspect of the book that could have been developed further. While we learn a great deal about the lives of indigenous slaves transported to Spain, we lack an insight into what it meant to be an indigenous slave in the Americas—the labour they performed, the conditions they lived under, the contestations that emerged within the colonial setting over the use or abuse of their bodies. These questions are only introduced by van Deusen in the event that they impacted on the litigation process itself. Yet, the same intellectual legal frameworks were also used to explain, justify and assert behaviours taking place in the New World, including the appropriate use of indigenous labour. While mentioned in passing in the introduction, this might have been explored further. Nonetheless, van Deusen reminds us pertinently that Spanish colonization of the Americas was new, unsettled and definitely not immutable, and that the boundaries of acceptable behaviour for conquistadors, encomenderos and colonial administrators were still being defined and challenged. The indios that crossed the Atlantic in the sixteenth century played an essential role in challenging those behaviours.
