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In the centuries before Europeans crossed the Atlantic, social and material relations among the indigenous Guaraní people of present-day Paraguay were based on reciprocal gift-giving. But the Spanish and Portuguese newcomers who arrived in the sixteenth century seemed interested in the Guaraní only to advance their own interests, either through material exchange or by getting the Guaraní to serve them. This book tells the story of how Europeans felt empowered to pursue individual gain in the New World, and how the Guaraní people confronted this challenge to their very way of being. Although neither Guaraní nor Europeans were positioned to grasp the larger meaning of the moment, their meeting was part of a global sea change in human relations and the nature of economic exchange. Brian P. Owensby uses the centuries-long encounter between Europeans and the indigenous people of South America to reframe the notion of economic gain as a historical development rather than a matter of human nature. Owensby argues that gain—the pursuit of individual, material self-interest—must be understood as a global development that transformed the lives of Europeans and non-Europeans, wherever these two encountered each other in the great European expansion spanning the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.

Economics --- Exchange --- Guarani Indians --- Reciprocity (Psychology) --- Whites --- Moral and ethical aspects. --- History. --- Relations with Indians --- Paraguay --- History --- Ethnic relations --- Anthropology. --- Empire. --- European expansion. --- Gift-Reciprocity. --- Globalization. --- Indigenous Studies. --- Intellectual and cultural history. --- Latin America. --- Missions. --- Moral economy. --- White people

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Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico shows how Indian litigants and petitioners made sense of Spanish legal principles and processes when the dust of conquest had begun to settle after 1600. By juxtaposing hundreds of case records with written laws and treatises, Owensby reveals how Indians saw the law as a practical and moral resource that allowed them to gain a measure of control over their lives and to forge a relationship to a distant king. Several chapters elucidate central concepts of Indian claimants in their encounter with the law over the seventeenth century―royal protection, possession of property, liberty, notions of guilt, village autonomy and self-rule, and subjecthood. Owensby concludes that Indian engagement with Spanish law was the first early modern experiment in cosmopolitan legality, one that faced the problem of difference head on and sought to bridge the local and the international. In so doing, it enabled indigenous claimants to forge a colonial politics of justice that opened up space for a conversation between colonial rulers and ruled

Indians of Mexico --- Justice, Administration of --- Mexico --- Legal status, laws, etc --- Government relations --- History

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Indians --- Colonies --- Colonial law --- Law, Colonial --- Aborigines, American --- American aborigines --- American Indians --- Amerindians --- Amerinds --- Pre-Columbian Indians --- Precolumbian Indians --- Ethnology --- Legal status, laws, etc --- History --- Law and legislation --- Law --- Civilization --- United States --- History. --- Legal status, laws, etc. --- American --- Indigenous peoples --- Indians - Legal status, laws, etc. - History --- Colonies - America - Law and legislation --- American - History - To 1810