Why read Mastering the Law?

Book cover of Mastering the Law: Slavery and Freedom in the Legal Ecology of the Spanish Empire

Book description

Explores the legal relationships of enslaved people and their descendants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spanish America.

Atlantic slavery can be overwhelming in its immensity and brutality, as it involved more than 15 million souls forcibly displaced by European imperialism and consumed in building the global economy. Mastering…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Mastering the Law as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Leo J. Garofalo

Author

Colombia links the Andes to the Caribbean, and Ricardo Raúl Salazar Rey’s book shows how central the story of the African Diaspora is to how the Spanish Empire was built and governed for so long (much, much longer than the US has existed or the British were able to govern in the Americas). And this book shows how in the 1600s, Black people were building enduring places for themselves in that Spanish Empire that initially only viewed them as enslaved laborers, but was forced by their legal actions and alliances to recognize them as much more and much more diverse.…

From Leo's list on The best books about Afro-Latin American and Afro-Andean history.