Bulletin of the Comediantes

IN RECENT YEARS, there has been an increasing tendency to treat the early modern Iberian world comparatively and from a global perspective, expanding the earlier model of transatlantic studies to incorporate transpacific and other networks. Among historians, the works of Sanjay Subrahmanyam on “connected histories” (for instance, “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500–1640,” The American Historical Review, vol. 112, no. 5, 2007, pp. 1359–385) and of Serge Gruzinski (Les quatre parties du monde: histoire d’une mondialisation, Éditions de la Martinière, 2004) articulated this movement, which has since given rise to a series of collective volumes specifically focused on the Iberian world and its empires. The volume under review is a good example of this trend. One of its distinctive contributions is to bring a more interdisciplinary focus to the debates on early modern globalization, moving away from the predominant focus on economic, social, and political history to incorporate cultural studies and with it shed light on how particular groups and individuals, including subaltern populations, were impacted and exercised agency in this newly globalizing environment.

The volume is not divided into sections and no rationale is given for how essays are ordered or grouped, but some complementary themes can be discerned. After an introduction coauthored by the editors, the book opens with a chapter by Bernd Hausberger (“Precious Metals in the Americas at the Beginning of the Global Economy”) considering the immediate material cause for the increased global connectivity of this period: the flow of silver, exported from mines in the Americas to the rest of the world. Hausberger’s wide-ranging contribution works well as an opening, summarizing scholarly debates on the periodization and spatial organization of globalization, before making a number of points that find resonance across the rest of the collection: that early globalization did not lead to homogeneity; that Latin American agency (in this case that of the new American elites) was crucial; and that mining and the trade in precious metals resulted in a “deep restructuring of conquered spaces” (35), [End Page 137] producing an economy which was not fully agrarian but not truly capitalist either. Chapter 2 by del Valle (“A New Moses: Vasco de Quiroga’s Hospitals and the Transformation of ‘Indians’ from ‘Bárbaros’ to ‘Pobres’”) also considers economic issues from a different focus, reassessing the aims of Quiroga (ca. 1470–1565) in founding the repúblicas de indios in Michoacán. The next two chapters, by the late María Elena Martínez (“Religion, Caste, and Race in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires: Local and Global Dimensions”) and Bruno Feitler (“The Portuguese Inquisition and Colonial Expansion: The ‘Honor’ of Being Tried by the Holy Office”) discuss the Inquisitions and related questions of early racial categorizations. These are followed by three chapters which provide different angles on the intellectual and social ramifications of the African slave trade in the Americas, intersecting with Africana Studies and works on the Black Atlantic: Anna More, “Jesuit Networks and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Alonso de Sandoval’s Naturaleza, policía sagrada y profana (1627)”; Rachel Sarah O’Toole, “Household Challenges: The Laws of Slaveholding and the Practices of Freedom in Colonial Peru”; María Eugenia Chaves, “The Reason of Freedom and the Freedom of Reason: The Neo-Scholastic Critique of African Slavery and Its Impact on the Construction of the Nineteenth-Century Republic in Spanish America.” Guillermo Wilde contributes a chapter on the textual production of the Jesuit reducciones of the Province of Paracuaria in the River Plate region (“Jesuit and Indigenous Subjects in the Global Culture of Letters: Production, Circulation, and Adaptation of Missionary Texts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”), and Charlene Villaseñor Black on “The Iridescent Enconchado,” the mixed-medium artworks produced in Mexico City. The two final chapters turn the focus to Asia, considering the Jesuit mission to China (Elisabetta Corsi, “‘Idolatrous Images’ and ‘True...