This hefty collection, 530 pages long, has 20 chapters by authors of multiple nationalities. Nineteen essays are in Spanish and one in Portuguese; the book also includes an introduction (in Spanish) as well as a preface and postface (both in Italian). The time frame spans the 1400s to around 1800. The collection espouses a global perspective that is preeminently Spanish, centered in Iberia, with two forays into Portugal, one into Sardinia under Spanish rule, and four into Spanish America. Chapters on Asia and Africa have a Spanish connection through missionaries in China and the Philippines as well as Catholic “renegades” who converted to Islam in northern Africa.The broad geographical and chronological scope is of a piece with the wide-ranging subject matter outlined in the title: resistance, violence, and police, primarily but not exclusively in early modern urban contexts. The introduction by Tomás Mantecón Movellán, Marina Torres Arce, and Susana Truchuelo García reviews four broad themes into which the essays are grouped: urban cultures and imaginaries of order and conflict, typologies and protagonists of conflict, tensions and reconstruction of order, and police and discipline. Yet the essays' widely different topics and approaches resist comparison or comprehensive conclusions. Several studies deal with minute subjects like resistance to standard weights and measures in the Spanish region of Galicia or ceremonial quarrels between the archbishops of Cagliari and Spanish viceroys of Sardinia. Other contributions offer broader perspectives on resistance “from below,” by slaves, Indigenous people, or ordinary Iberian women, and “from above,” by nobles thwarting Spanish Bourbon monarchs' efforts to professionalize the army. It is up to readers to draw their own lessons and comparisons.The preface and postface, respectively by the Italian historians Angela De Benedictis and Livio Antonielli, offer guidance. Even at the height of absolute monarchies, everyone understood that authorities should not wield their power or use force indiscriminately. Jurists acknowledged the right to resist as something natural. One did not need to be a lawyer to know this. A young man resisting unjust arrest on false grounds, a wife and mother loudly protesting high bread prices, and rebels everywhere clamoring distant rulers for justice all acted on the conviction that their actions were legitimate and sometimes even legal. The early modern concept of police was much broader, encompassing all areas of life: moral, political, economic, and spiritual. Policing was therefore decentralized, subject to seemingly inefficient, even irrational overlap of jurisdictions that in fact reflected practices and strategies constantly adapting to society's needs.Rather than engage with these ideas, the chapters offer their own, often very different takes on resistance, violence, and police, showing that there is no consensus about their meaning. Images on the book cover of massacres, public executions, and armed fighting reflect the assumption that violence and physical coercion were central elements of policing and resistance. Yet many of the chapters discuss nonviolent forms of resistance ranging from the symbolic gesture of an archbishop refusing to cede his place of honor in a church in deference to secular authority to individuals who simply ignored orders from authorities, often quietly to avoid drawing attention.Fortunately for readers of this journal, three of the most stimulating chapters deal with Latin America. Jorge Díaz Ceballos examines maroon communities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Panama. They secured privileges and a measure of self-government by rebelling and resorting to armed self-defense but also by ably deploying European notions of loyalty and vassalage to play off competing imperial powers. Susana Elsa Aguirre discusses everyday forms of resistance among Indigenous men and women to secular and religious authorities in Buenos Aires. Their actions are typical of James C. Scott's “weapons of the weak,” but they are nonetheless fascinating for their uniqueness. Baptiste Bonnefoy recasts revolts, plots, and rumors in Venezuela between 1794 and 1799, which nationalist historiography presented as precursors of independence movements, as instead rooted in traditional political language of loyalty and the quest for justice and protection from bad government, typical of ordinary people across the early modern world. However, fearful of news and rumors about the Haitian Revolution, colonial authorities reinterpreted Venezuelan events as revolutionary to validate repressive measures.Rather than point to grand theories, the overall impression left by this varied collection of essays is that the concepts of resistance, violence, and police are perhaps too broad for sustained global comparisons. One may speak of shared early modern “culture” and “imaginaries” only in the broadest sense. Analysis requires grounding actions and words in specific times and places. In each instance, men and women of very different backgrounds adapted for their own needs and purposes a common lexicon and repertoire of physical gestures at once strange and not entirely unfamiliar to us.
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Mar 1, 2022
Chelsea Stieber 
Open Access