Karen B. Graubart

A study of Seville (Spain) in the fifteenth century and Lima (Peru) in the sixteenth century, this project seeks to understand how states sought to create “difference” (religious, ethnic, racial) through law and urban planning, and how citizens of these cities navigated, negotiated, and ignored these legal and physical structures. By counterpointing the history of law with social history, this project provides a richer social history of these two key cities. In particular, it examines how the treatment of “Indians” and “Blacks” in the New World diverged from an apparently common beginning in the Old World, as a way to analyze the development of racial categories in the later colonial period.