We, the King - Creating Royal Legislation in the Sixteenth-Century Spanish New World

We, the King challenges the dominant top-down interpretation of the Spanish Empire and its monarchs' decrees in the New World, revealing how ordinary subjects had much more say in government and law-making than previously acknowledged. During the viceregal period spanning the post-1492 conquest until 1598, the King signed more than 110,000 pages of decrees concerning state policies, minutiae, and everything in between. Through careful analysis of these decrees, Adrian Masters illustrates how law-making was aided and abetted by subjects from various backgrounds, including powerful court women, indigenous commoners, Afro-descendant raftsmen, secret saboteurs, pirates, sovereign Chiriguano Indians, and secretaries' wives. Subjects' innumerable petitions and labor prompted - and even phrased - a complex body of legislation and legal categories demonstrating the degree to which this empire was created from the "bottom up". Innovative and unique, We, the King reimagines our understandings of kingship, imperial rule, colonialism, and the origins of racial categories.

List of contents

List of figures; List of tables; Acknowledgments; Prelude: A Peruvian pestizo at the Spanish Court; Introduction: the collective making of an empire; 1. Paper ceremonies for a global empire: Gobierno petitions and the collective work of Voluntad; 2. The co-creation of the Imperial Logistics Network; 3. Distant kings, powerful women, prudent ministers: the gendered creation of the Council of the Indies; 4. Lawmaking in a portable council: Gobierno decision-making technologies before 1561; 5. 'Bring the Papers:' Royal decision-making and the power of archives in Madrid, 1561-1598; 6. Creating the royal decree: format, phraseology, and petitioners' transformation of Indies law; 7. Pedro Rengifo's epilogue: subjects of chance; Conclusions; Index.

About the author

Adrian Masters is Director of the University of Trier's GloVib: Global Entanglements Project. Raised in rural Costa Rica, he has written several award-winning articles on Spanish imperial history.

Product details

• Authors: Adrian Masters, Adrian (Universitat Trier Masters
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.11.2025
• EAN: 9781009315401
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0931540-1
• No. of pages: 338
• Series: Cambridge Latin American Studies
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Ethnology > Ethnology; Ethnic Studies, Latin America, LAW / Legal History, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy, POLITICAL SCIENCE / World / Caribbean & Latin American, LAW / Annotations & Citations, Legal History, Legislation, Latin America – Mexico, Central America, South America, Central / national / federal government policies, 16th century, c 1500 to c 1599, c 1500 to c 1600, Central government policies, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Cultural & Ethnic Studies / General, Sources of law: legislation, Ethnic studies / Ethnicity