Thursday, October 5, 2023

Deardorff's "Tale of Two Granadas"

Max Deardorff, University of Florida, has published A Tale of Two Granadas: Custom, Community, and Citizenship in the Spanish Empire, 1568–1668 (Cambridge University Press, 2023):

This book offers a wide-ranging analysis of transforming conceptions of citizenship in the Spanish monarchy as it became a global empire. Side-by-side case studies of old Granada (southern Spain, core settlement of Spain's last independent Islamic polity) and colonial New Kingdom of Granada (modern Colombia) show that Spanish ecclesiastics' involvement in the Council of Trent (1545-1563) went hand-in-hand with the monarchy's thinking about the structure and cohesion of its empire. With fine-grained archival work, the book shows how two subject communities -- Andalusi "moriscos" of old Granada and indigenous Muiscas of the New Kingdom of Granada -- weathered a century of political and social change that followed. At stake were the question of the terms of colonial indigenous integration into the monarchy’s social structures and the looming threat of disenfranchisement faced by Granada’s “moriscos.” A Tale of Two Granadas makes the case that even more than 1492, the year that completely reshaped the monarchy was 1568. That year was both the beginning of the famed Rebellion of the Alpujarras in southern Spain, and the year when the famous Junta Magna met in  Madrid to lay out grand new plans for the administration of the monarchy's colonies overseas.
Here is an endorsement:
‘In this lucidly written book, Max Deardorff explores what citizenship meant for those social actors in the early modern Spanish territories who faced degrees of exclusion due to their ethnicity and proximity to orthodox Christianity. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Deardorff brings together the Iberian Atlantic by looking at lesser-studied regions and the people inhabiting their margins, and also, at the Spanish powerholders who moved across the two jurisdictions.’

Joanne Rappaport - Georgetown University
--Dan Ernst