-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Ivonne del Valle, Karen B. Graubart. Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World., The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 3, September 2024, Pages 1342–1344, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae317
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
In the comprehensive and comparative spirit of María Elena Martínez’s study of the complex interconnections between blood and religion in Spain and its colonial domains (Genealogical Fictions [2008]), Karen Graubart’s Republics of Difference delivers an extensive transatlantic history of the governmental units Spain created to administer different populations in the expanding territories under its control. Jews, Muslims, free and enslaved Africans, as well as Indigenous peoples were understood and treated differently both in legal and spatial terms. The unequal and important repercussions for the thousands of people affected by these policies are the core of what Graubart conveys to her readers.
Academics studying the Spanish colonial world are well acquainted with repúblicas de indios, but much less familiar with the mirroring image these administrative units had in the Jewish and Muslim aljamas that preceded them in the Iberian Peninsula. Although not exactly similar to their American counterparts, these ethnic and religious self-governing enclaves, physically separated from the Christian population, existed centuries before repúblicas de indios. Some of the differences between them (deftly summarized in the conclusion) have to do with the ethnographic work required in the Americas in order for the Spanish to achieve an understanding of the Indigenous populations they were to rule. That was not the case of Spain’s Jewish and Muslim subjects who, for the most part, had a lot in common with their Christian overlords, with whom they shared, for example, basic ideas about land tenure, legal transactions, work, and civility (235–36).
