Ordering the New World

In New World Orders: Violence, Sanction and Authority in the Colonial Americas (Pennsylvania, 2005), John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey have compiled an outstanding and stimulating collection of essays whose subjects span the Americas and contribute to a more comprehensive, nuanced understanding of how colonial authority was constituted and maintained in Europe’s Atlantic colonies. Taken collectively, the essays compel scholars to reexamine the relationships among violence, sanction, and authority and to reconceptualize how these served to forge, and subsequently maintain, social order in colonial contexts.

As Smolenski indicates in his lively and lucid introduction, the theme that unites the essays is a common interest in sanction. Sanction, he contends, “can mean to permit, authorize, ratify, countenance, encourage, or make legal—or it can mean to penalize for the violation of a legal rule or norm . . . sanction encapsulates the process through which order is produced through the distribution of punishments and rewards” (3–4). One of the salient points to be gleaned from the introduction is that the study of colonial institutions must be examined alongside the processes by which such institutions were maintained, the “constant creation and re-creation” of colonial power (15). This requires, as Smolenski rightly indicates, an appreciation of “how thoroughly entwined conceptions of colonial legality and sovereignty were with extralegal discourses of race, gender and civilization” (14).

The eleven essays following Smolenski’s provocative introduction are remarkably wide-ranging: Christopher Tomlins examines English colonial discourse; Richard Price studies three narratives of death and creation in Caribbean rim-land history; Kimberly Gauderman focuses on marital discord and social order in colonial Quito; Cécile Vidal investigates private and state violence against slaves in Louisiana under French rule; Sharon Block analyzes constructions of rape and race in early America; Mark Meuwese sheds light on resistance to Dutch authority in northeastern Brazil; Cynthia Radding compares the birth of two cultures of resistance in Mexico and Bolivia; Matthew Dennis examines links between sorcery and sovereignty; Tamar Herzog analyzes conceptions of citizenship in the early modern Spanish world; Gene Ogle considers the spectacle of duels and beatings in Saint Domingue; and Ann Twinam compares informal and official understandings of “whiteness” in colonial Spanish America.

Several of the essays collected in New World Orders merit special, extended consideration. Gauderman’s “The Authority of Gender: Marital Discord and Social Order in Colonial Quito” is a gem and persuasively reincorporates the Spanish imperial periphery into the broader debates that engage eighteenth-century scholars. Gauderman shows that women’s use of the criminal justice system in Quito poses questions about the connection between gender norms and the creation and maintenance of authority and social order. As she points out, “society empowered women with the juridical capacity to litigate independently from and even in opposition to men, including male kin, as part of a cultural strategy to maintain social stability through decentralizing relations of authority” (79). Husbands convicted for domestic violence or adultery routinely faced severe punishments including imprisonment, confiscation of their property, fines, loss of office, forced labor, and long exile. This was not due, of course, to “enlightened ideas of women’s rights, equality between the sexes or fairness” (91), but rather to the state’s aim to prevent individual men from forming enclaves of patriarchal authority beyond the reach of its power.

Herzog’s “Early Modern Spanish Citizenship: Inclusion and Exclusion in the Old and the New World” brilliantly reconstructs the manner in which Castilian local citizenship (vecindad) was “modified in the New World in order to open local communities to Spanish newcomers and exclude from them all non-Spaniards, including foreigners and individuals of Indian, African or mixed ancestry” (205). Herzog’s essay offers a number of important, discipline-altering features, but two deserve special recognition. First, she challenges the pervasive assumption that Spain was a “monolithic and unchanging reality” whereas colonial Spanish America “experienced many changes” (206) by analyzing the simultaneous transformation of practices in Spain and its ultramarine kingdoms under the same lens. Second, she debunks the idea, which emerged from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983), that “Spanish...