IAS Book Launch: The Radical Spanish Empire

ABOUT THE BOOK
As Spanish conquistadors swept the New World, the Crown hoped a rigid aristocratic order would follow. Initially, great conquerors ruled as nobles, but the empire soon became a laboratory of radicalism. Conquistador regimes fell, as did friar enclaves and native lords’ power. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters show, these collapses stemmed from challenges by non-elite Spaniards and Indigenous people, women, and the enslaved who used colossal amounts of bottom-up paperwork - petitions, lawsuits, complaints, testimonies - to wage unrelenting lawfare. This dismantled  seigneurial power, weakened theocracy, curtailed native lordship, reshaped law and knowledge, and forged an order crystallizing in the 1570s under viceroys, bishops, and inquisitors.

The Radical Spanish Empire. How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World was written by Adrian Masters and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, and published by Harvard University Press in March 2026. 

ABOUT THE EVENT 
The author, Adrian Masters, will present the book. Responses will follow from Alexander Samson (Professor of Early Modern Studies, UCL) and Jagjeet Lally (Associate Professor of the History of Early Modern and Colonial India, UCL).