Indian Petitioners for Freedom
As touchstones of colonial reality and claimants to something better, diasporic indigenous slaves in sixteenth-century Spain forced conversations about imperialism into the open. Their pursuit of freedom highlights the grasping geographical extent of early modern European imperialism and “some of the more insidious aspects of colonial governance” (227), including self-serving paternalism, the desire for possession, the assumption of power over others, and an adherence to “papereality” (128) that justified abuse as often as it protected the weak.