Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (review)

The contributions to this welcome volume on the history of childhood in early modern Spain and Portugal and their American colonies reveal the inner workings of colonization—of creating, or “raising,” an empire. The authors explore changing concepts of childhood and reconstruct children’s experiences within several nested contexts: the family, the life course, institutions for children, and trends in adults’ expectations of children. Premo observes that this volume also pushes the history of childhood in new directions. Instead of limiting their inquiry to recovering hidden histories of childhood, the contributors present the complex interpersonal and political worlds that children inhabited and link “everyday patterns of growing up” to “traditional historical themes,” evincing an approach that illuminates children’s agency within the systems of power that surrounded and shaped them (244).

Geographically diverse and spanning more than three centuries, the chapters are organized in overlapping chronological order, beginning with sixteenth-century Portugal and ending with a study of child-rearing practices among African slaves in Brazil, where slavery lasted until the late nineteenth century. The authors’ discussion of their sources adds to the strength of the collection. Given that much of their evidence comes from prescriptive texts, they note the difficulty of reconstructing children’s experiences, perspectives, and identities. Yet, with their analytical tools sharpened by questions about race, class, and gender, they mine well-used primary sources and familiar secondary sources for new insights into childhood and colonialism.

These studies explore a fundamental difference between past and present childhoods: In early modern Iberia and Latin America, most children grew up outside their natal homes. Children were moved into other households and institutions as infants to be nursed and raised and as older children to work, according to a practice called child circulation. Exploring the different terms under which children circulated exposes the diversity of their experiences. Isabel dos Guimarães Sá explains that in early modern Portugal, those terms were shaped by distinctions based on parents’ social and marital status and children’s sex. The same distinctions differentiated the asylums for children in eighteenth-century Seville, as described by Valentina Tikoff, and determined the degree of protection and training that children received in those institutions.

In the colonies, ethnicity and racial categories added new social cleavages. Teresa C. Vergara, for example, examines the practice of placing indigenous children and youth in Spanish households as servants and apprentices in seventeenth-century Lima and assesses acculturation as an indigenous strategy for survival in the new social and political order. Ann Twinam examines the consequences of elite resistance in Cuba to the 1794 royal decree that granted all foundlings the same privileges as white subjects of legitimate birth.

Two contributions map the distant poles of colonial childhoods. Jorge Rojas Flores analyzes the spiritual autobiography of a seventeenth-century Chilean nun to show how her recollections of a privileged childhood were shaped by the conventions of the genre but also to illuminate the imaginative space of childhood and her awareness of her position and influence in a complex web of family relationships. At the opposite social pole were the childhoods of African slaves in Brazil, studied by Elizabeth Kuznesof. Her findings challenge the received wisdom that slavery destroyed African culture in Brazil. The importation of slaves from Africa well into the nineteenth century meant that African practices shaped Brazilian slave children’s upbringing.

The volume’s clarity and accessibility belie its sophistication; students and advanced scholars have much to learn from these well-crafted studies.