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This essay is part of<\/em> The Radical Spanish Empire<\/strong> Roundtable<\/strong>, a series of review essays examining the book from different disciplinary perspectives. Read the introduction and explore the other contributions in the series below.<\/em><\/p>\n The action seems frenzied, turbulent, anxious, and, at the same time, thorough and calculated.\u00a0 At the beginning of Chapter Three of Ca\u00f1izares-Esguerra and Masters\u2019 remarkable new book The Radical Spanish Empire<\/em>, we, the readers, meet three suppliant men: Gualpa, an Indigenous man who had accidentally discovered a new vein of silver; the Spaniard don Bartolome Inca y Orozco, whose father had created new mining technologies; and don Francisco de la Cueva, a Spaniard whose family of conquistadors and warriors had \u201cpacified\u201d New Spain, in part by slaying hundreds, if not thousands, of Natives.\u00a0 Gualpa\u2019s son approached the Viceroy don Francisco de Toledo asking for royal rewards.\u00a0 Inca y Orozco wanted a royal pension.\u00a0 De la Cueva asked for Indigenous tribute, the downstream spoils of conquest.\u00a0 These men, from remarkably different social stations, all qualify as vassals, as those who inhabit a lower order of humanity in the caste system of the vast, complicated Spanish Empire of the sixteenth century.\u00a0 Emphasizing their deservingness, here represented as service to the Crown, they sought benefits, rents, and privileges.\u00a0 They ultimately received them.<\/p>\n Petitioning in the longue dur\u00e9e<\/em> of Eurasian and Atlantic history has usually been an ineluctably relational process.\u00a0 It can be studied neither entirely from the bottom up nor entirely from the top down.\u00a0 Along with Masters\u2019 remarkable We the King<\/em>, Ca\u00f1izares-Esguerra and Masters\u2019 Radical Spanish Empire<\/em> demonstrates both widespread, decentralized petitioning and the workings of a vast administrative system of courts and offices.\u00a0 Empires and states built courts, offices, and perhaps even forms of bureaucracy that both managed and, beyond that, encouraged<\/em> supplication from those lower in the social order, sometimes at or near the bottom of it. From a comparative, longue-dur\u00e9e<\/em> vantage point, Ca\u00f1izares-Esguerra and Masters\u2019 notion of radicalizing paperwork extends an earlier literature showing that aspects of ancient Roman, medieval European and other imperial systems also had some inclusive and leveling aspects.\u00a0 Yet the authors\u2019 paperwork radicalism is not reducible to earlier imperial models, nor did it (yet) amount to the much more democratized and democratizing<\/em> petitioning of the modern era, when petitions were used to recruit members to new organizations, expand legislative and administrative agendas, and foster new cultures of equality.\u00a0 Among many literatures in which the book is properly nestled as a generative interlocutor and gadfly, however, The<\/em> Radical Spanish Empire<\/em> should be read in this current of world-historical studies of petitioning.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n Ca\u00f1izares-Esguerra and Masters narrate the stories of Gualpa, Inca y Orozco, and de la Cueva as a story of radicalism, of an upwelling of claims that shattered hierarchies both formal and informal and led to a non-trivial degree of empowerment for vassals.\u00a0 Gracia\u2019s paperwork \u201cprompted a bottom-up deluge of knowledge creation\u201d (160) and \u201cdrove politics and action at once incredibly violent and creative, participatory and elitist\u201d (162). Ca\u00f1izares-Esguerra and Masters are right to emphasize this upwelling of political activity, but I want to draw attention to what might be regarded as \u201cthe other side of the coin.\u201d\u00a0 A system like this carried considerable benefit to the Crown.\u00a0 The benefits included information about highly scattered populations as well as the recognition of the Crown and its agents as sovereign when vassals sought the kinds of things that only the Crown could grant licenses (172-73), patents (171-72), pensions (159), tribute (159), and, in general, rights and rents accorded by the Crown.\u00a0 As social scientists have begun to recognize, many of the most inclusive and participatory institutions of our time developed as imperial and monarchical institutions of rule.\u00a0 A far-flung, exhaustive, and literally exhausting system of paperwork.\u00a0 Paperwork produced information for the empire, and, beyond that, its actors participated in a system in which the sovereignty of the Crown was reinforced as well as occasionally undermined.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n The extreme scale and scope of the Spanish Empire\u2019s paperwork regime endow Ca\u00f1izares-Esguerra and Masters\u2019 book with vital comparative and world-historical lessons. \u00a0Early modern petitioning was more common in colonial Spanish America than in most other contemporary settings.\u00a0 Indeed, as the authors show, petitioning did not wither but swelled after the great comunero<\/em> revolt against Charles V. Spanish law governed these petition-and-response systems, and the set of categories studied under the concept of \u201cpaperwork\u201d included justicia<\/em> (court cases), gracia<\/em> (privileges) and gobierno<\/em> (administrative legislation). Justicia<\/em> and gracia<\/em> represented casuistic jurisprudence and bestowals of privileges. With gobierno<\/em> petitions, imperial officials could issue edicts with the force of law; there were tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of such petition-induced rulings in the radical Spanish empire.\u00a0 Gobierno<\/em> petitions were sent to the Council of the Indies or to viceregal officials and high courts in Mexico.\u00a0 Indigenous people and mestizos used paperwork regularly and with some success; even as their rights and land claims changed dramatically, and even as dispossession continued apace, petitioning led to Spanish creation of new indigenous entitlements, a system of rights that created pathways and agendas for further empowerment by petitioning.\u00a0 In the larger view, scholars should revisit, if not jettison entirely, claims of a much more \u201cinclusive\u201d and \u201cparticipatory\u201d English North American empire as compared with the Spanish.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n As this paperwork empire was built, however, two other things were constructed: a ritually recognized sovereignty in imperial venues and legible information about the Crown\u2019s subjects.\u00a0 The first is that the very act of supplication acknowledged a certain status of the Crown and its officials.\u00a0 What Gracia<\/em> paperwork asked for was usually the kind of thing that could be found elsewhere only with great difficulty, or not at all: licenses for mining, guaranteed revenue streams through pensions or tribute from dependent populations, legal privileges.\u00a0 Recognition of the centrality of the Crown as a source of Gracia was all the more important because, as Ca\u00f1izares-Esguerra and Masters emphasize, the Spanish Empire wrestled with a \u201cworld where disease and violence had fragmented society into countless unstable factions\u201d (167).\u00a0 Military domination was not guaranteed, and paperwork also made this society more visible, more legible to the Crown.\u00a0 This was the second legacy of petitioning, which came from the very rules that generated so much paperwork.\u00a0 \u201cFor a conquistador to receive any kind of reward, especially Indigenous labor but even entry into the ranks of the Spanish grandees, he would need to certify his exploits\u201d (168), and at that, certify them according to the rules of the Crown and its officers.\u00a0 Beyond the generation of facts and narratives, the Gracia paperwork embedded \u201copen-ended emphasis on royal service\u201d (171), which created new incentives to conquer, develop, settle, Christianize, and subjugate, and to do so in a way that was recognizable, justiciable to the Crown.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n Ca\u00f1izares-Esguerra and Masters show the duality of petition-and-response systems.\u00a0 Long held to be a near-meaningless process of abject subjection, the imperial petition becomes, in their creative and exhaustively researched account, a tool for creating new knowledge that no single actor truly controls.\u00a0 Paperwork becomes a ladder by which vassals can upend and destabilize hierarchies both imperial and Indigenous.\u00a0 At the same time, paper generates powerful new bureaucracies, fashions new imperial lenses through which the Crown can glimpse and read its subjects, and institutionalizes an everyday, everywhere recognition of who, at least theoretically, has authority to grant what the supplicant asks.\u00a0 As all eyes drift toward the petition, all eyes drift toward the petitioned who, even in ways ineluctably contested and liminal, establishes the visibility of his rule.<\/p>\n Daniel Carpenter is Allie S. Freed Professor of Government and Chair, Department of Government, in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. His book <\/em>Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790\u20131870<\/a> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021) was awarded the J. David Greenstone Prize of the American Political Science Association, the Seymour Martin Lipset Prize of the American Political Science Association, and the James P. Hanlan Book Award of the New England Historical Association.<\/em><\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Consult Zaret (2025) for the most comprehensive Eurasian overview.\u00a0 On republican and post-republican Rome, see Eberle (2024), Deniaux (1993) and Millar (1977); on medieval Europe, Koziol (1992), Millet (2003) and Boucoyannis (2021); on modern democratized petitioning, Carpenter (2016), Carpenter (2021), Blackhawk et al (2021), Miller (2023), Carpenter (2023) and Carpenter (2025).\u00a0<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> By rent here I mean the traditional sense of a source of supply controlled uniquely by its owner, whether a vein of bauxite in a mount she owns or a legal privilege (e.g., a monopoly) granted by a ruler.\u00a0 For arguments about how more inclusive systems could serve imperial interests, consult Gailmard (2017), Gailmard (2024) and Carpenter and Gailmard (2024).<\/p>\n
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