Indigenous People and Imperial Politics in the Eastern Caribbean

Abstract

Although most of the volume focuses on Europe and the Americas ( pace Liam Brockey) —and so belies the growing literature on Jesuit interactions with slavery in Asia that is documented in both European and Asian languages—there are nonetheless perspectives from outside the canonical geographies of the United States, southern Europe, Mexico, and central Peru. For instance, Andrew Redden’s chapter on Jesuit racial thinking on the Chilean frontier is a welcome addition to the volume. Redden takes a quantitative approach to the letters of Luis de Valdivia (1560–1642), and reveals (among other things) that social function and enmity versus friendship were the most important qualifying categories of racial terms like indio, an understandable scenario given the highly unstable nature of borderlands like Chile.