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Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters, "The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Mar 13, 2026

Guest

Adrian Masters

Guest

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Adrian Masters, a historian of 16th-century Spanish legislation, and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, an Atlantic and Spanish Americas scholar, discuss how paperwork reshaped power in the New World. They explore petitions driving royal decrees, lawfare and forum shopping, women’s testimony topping elites, vernacular skepticism, and how archives and documents fueled political and technical change.

01:44:11

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INSIGHT

Petitions Wrote Royal Decrees

Royal decrees in the Spanish New World often originated from petitioner texts rather than being purely top-down edicts.
Adrian Masters found many decrees that were verbatim copies of petitions, revealing bottom-up legislation driving imperial lawmaking.

insights

INSIGHT

Radicalism As Participatory Upheaval

The book reframes Spanish imperial conflict as radical, participatory upheaval rather than elite-only disputes.
Indigenous lords, friars, and conquistadors each alternately challenged one another, aiming to uproot social foundations rather than merely seek minor reforms.

insights

INSIGHT

Grants Fueled Rapid Knowledge Growth

Massive knowledge production (cartography, mining engineering) came from bottom-up grant-driven ventures, not centralized state planning.
Conquistador share-companies and small entrepreneurs generated maps and built Potosí in decades via incentives for upward mobility.

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Origin Story: How the Book Began

01:20 • 2min

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Petitions Driving Royal Decrees

03:46 • 2min

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Reframing Liberal Narratives

Comparing English and Spanish Radicals

08:53 • 2min

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Radicalism as Structural Uprooting

10:50 • 4min

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Skepticism, Manuscripts, and the Masses

15:10 • 2min

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Anti‑tyranny as a Vernacular Tradition

17:11 • 2min

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Gracia Petitions and Knowledge Production

18:55 • 4min

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Vernacular Skepticism and Guaman Poma

23:11 • 7min

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Designing the Book's Architecture

30:10 • 5min

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Lawfare: Aggressive Paperwork Politics

35:10 • 6min

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Forum Shopping and Limits Across Empires

40:57 • 4min

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Foreign Mercenaries of Knowledge

45:25 • 3min

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Costs and Types of Petitioning

48:25 • 3min

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Intermediaries: Translators and Procurators

51:46 • 3min

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Women as Witnesses and Political Actors

54:50 • 8min

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Lawfare Successes Using Female Testimony

01:02:37 • 8min

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Legacy: Documents, Memory, and Activism

01:10:10 • 6min

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Global Impacts: Silver, Probabilism, Information State

01:16:21 • 32sec

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Orality, Testimony, and Paper Translation

Visuals, Codices, and Political Context

01:25:14 • 5min

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Forgery, Aesthetics, and Political Memory

01:29:51 • 5min

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Future Research Directions

Nature, Empire, and Nation

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra's book analyzes how scientific inquiry, natural history, and imperial administration intertwined in the early modern Atlantic to produce new forms of knowledge and political authority. Focusing on colonial contexts, he shows how environmental and scientific practices were mobilized to support imperial claims and state-building. The work addresses how knowledge production helped shape national imaginaries and economic exploitation. It integrates intellectual, social, and political history to reveal the role of science in empire. The podcast mentions it among Jorge's major publications introducing the authors.

Puritan Conquistadors

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

In 'Puritan Conquistadors,' Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra explores intersections of religious zeal, imperial ambition, and cross-cultural encounters in the early modern Atlantic. The book interrogates how Puritan and Spanish projects of conquest and conversion overlapped and diverged, shaping colonial policies and identities. By examining religious rhetoric, legal disputes, and travel narratives, the work highlights how confessional differences influenced imperial competition and cooperation. It contributes to broader debates on the role of religion in colonization and the formation of Atlantic networks. The podcast mentions it while introducing Jorge's prior scholarship.

The Verdadera Historia (The True History)

Bernal Diaz Del Castillo

Bernal Díaz del Castillo's 'Verdadera Historia' is a detailed memoir by a soldier of the conquest of Mexico, written to set the record straight against other accounts, notably those of Hernán Cortés. It provides eyewitness descriptions of battles, Indigenous societies, and the complexities of conquest from the perspective of participants. The work has been central for historians studying the Spanish conquest and colonial narratives. In the podcast, it is cited as part of the archive of petitionary and testimonial writings that shaped New World knowledge and memory. Díaz's chronicle remains a key primary source for early colonial history.

Andean Cosmopolitans

José Carlos de la Puente Luna

The King

The Life of Charles III

Christopher Anderson

The King: The Life of Charles III provides a vivid and unsparing yet sympathetic portrait of Charles, covering his military training, marriages, and his role in the British monarchy. It offers a balanced look into the life of the new monarch, shedding light on his complexities and controversies.

Mercenaries of Knowledge

Fabien Manchet

How to Write the History of the New World

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

In How to Write the History of the New World, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra examines historiographical traditions about the Americas and proposes new approaches to understanding colonial history. He interrogates Eurocentric narratives and highlights the epistemic challenges of reconstructing New World histories. The book emphasizes archival practices, intellectual currents, and the transatlantic circulation of knowledge that shaped accounts of discovery and colonization. Cañizares-Esguerra's work is widely cited in Atlantic and colonial studies and informs the authors' approach in The Radical Spanish Empire.

The Radical Spanish Empire

How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra

Adrian Masters

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters examine how petitions, lawsuits, and other paperwork empowered commoners, indigenous actors, friars, and conquistadors to contest authority in the Spanish Americas. The book shows that many royal decrees and colonial institutions emerged in response to bottom-up lawfare rather than exclusively from top-down directives. It traces how this paperwork culture generated massive practical knowledge (cartography, mining, administration) and a vernacular skepticism that destabilized elite claims to authority. The authors argue this radical paperwork politics helped create the administrative and archival structures of the Spanish Empire and left a long legacy in Latin America. By reframing the origins of the political and public sphere in the Atlantic, the book challenges longstanding liberal and decolonial historiographical narratives.

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• Mentioned in 4 episodes

The world turned upside down

Christopher Hill

The Radical Spanish Empire: How Paperwork Politics Remade the New World by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters (Harvard UP, 2026) is a groundbreaking history of political struggle in the Spanish New World, where commoners and elites alike challenged the social order through the remarkable power of paperwork.

As Spanish conquistadors swept through the New World, the Crown envisioned that a rigidly hierarchical aristocratic order would flourish in their wake. At first, this vision seemed to be within reach: the great conquistadors ruled as noblemen over millions. Yet contrary to all expectations, the Spanish empire in the New World quickly became a hotbed of radical efforts to overturn the emerging order. With the conquistadors in retreat, new enclaves controlled by powerful friars and native lords arose. But they too collapsed, again to the surprise of many.

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