Webb Lecture: The Republic of the Unlettered

Bianca Premo, Associate Professor of History, Florida International University 

This talk explores what it means to write an intellectual history of the Enlightenment among people who could not read or write—namely enslaved people, women, and the indigenous inhabitants of the colonial Spanish America who sued in royal courts during the eighteenth century. 

Intellectual historians have been content to conceive of the Enlightenment as primarily a movement among literate European men, while scholars with a political commitment to oppressed groups see it as a the origin of modern forms of racism, exclusion and imperialism. Yet Primo's research demonstrates that the Enlightenment occurred in the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Peru at the same time as in Europe, and that it had a particular vibrancy in the realm of law. What is more ordinary, unlettered imperial subjects including slaves, Indians and ordinary women were its practitioners. Such a discovery raises important questions about how we should conceive of “intellectual history;” the origins of modern Western thought, and the history of people who could not author their own history. 

Bio:  

Bianca Premo is associate professor of Latin American history at Florida International University. She has written on diverse topics including the history of childhood in colonial Peru, native women in the Andes and Mexico, slavery, and jurisprudence and legal thought in the Spanish empire. Her latest book project is entitled The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigation and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire, and it is the product of research in over a dozen archives in Spain, Mexico and Peru.