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A review by bahareads
Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing Through Slavery in Colonial Quito by Sherwin K. Bryant
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
fast-paced
5.0
Sherwin Bryant says that "Slavery in Quito reveals the centrality of slavery to colonial development and the emergence of race as a modality of early modern colonial governance." He is seeing to address the political history of slavery in the Andes and the ways in which slavery, and race for that matter continues to evade the grasp of postcolonial theoretical innovations concerning and coming out of Latin America.
Byrant moves away from the dichotomies of slave and non slave society by moving away from the lens of labor and economic capital. He turns to slavery within the Mediterranean household and Roman law to see labourers as conscripted colonial subjects. He suggests seeing slaves, slaveholders, magistrates, and colonial actors ad conditioning the development of an absolutist state and personal patronage. The book sheds light on the way colonial participants engaged in dialogues about good governance.
Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage reveals slavery as a fundamental feature of colonial practice, political economy and social life within early modernity RATHER than a replacement of a labor system used for the declining indigenous population. He also insists that slavery and race governance were quintessential to Spanish rule in the Andes.
Bryant says "Whatever justice there was for a slave, slave subjection was understood through and marked severely upon the body of the enslaved. Brands, baptism, and bonds (fetters, lashings, castration, amputations etc.) were all modes of subjection meant to govern slaves' comportment within Christian discipline. This was colonial race governance." Slave bodies were cites to inscribe and endow meaning, making it both text and repository for master and slave. Which really sticks to me with my own work.
Bryant's book has narrated precisely this struggle and dialogues it produced. It is, therefore, a history of a slave society, an insistent one that hopes to force us to see the enslaved as they would have been seen in society, to look at the slave in our attempts to define and describe the life cycle of colonial Quito
Byrant moves away from the dichotomies of slave and non slave society by moving away from the lens of labor and economic capital. He turns to slavery within the Mediterranean household and Roman law to see labourers as conscripted colonial subjects. He suggests seeing slaves, slaveholders, magistrates, and colonial actors ad conditioning the development of an absolutist state and personal patronage. The book sheds light on the way colonial participants engaged in dialogues about good governance.
Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage reveals slavery as a fundamental feature of colonial practice, political economy and social life within early modernity RATHER than a replacement of a labor system used for the declining indigenous population. He also insists that slavery and race governance were quintessential to Spanish rule in the Andes.
Bryant says "Whatever justice there was for a slave, slave subjection was understood through and marked severely upon the body of the enslaved. Brands, baptism, and bonds (fetters, lashings, castration, amputations etc.) were all modes of subjection meant to govern slaves' comportment within Christian discipline. This was colonial race governance." Slave bodies were cites to inscribe and endow meaning, making it both text and repository for master and slave. Which really sticks to me with my own work.
Bryant's book has narrated precisely this struggle and dialogues it produced. It is, therefore, a history of a slave society, an insistent one that hopes to force us to see the enslaved as they would have been seen in society, to look at the slave in our attempts to define and describe the life cycle of colonial Quito