Books by Brian P. Owensby

Empire of Law shows how seventeenth-century Indian claimants, by litigating and petitioning before Mexico City tribunals, became full participants in an early modern cosmopolitan legality that gave rise to a colonial politics of justice that struggled, with some success, against the utter degradation of subject peoples.

Focusing on the period between 1920 and 1950, the author looks beyond ideologies to reveal how middle-class men and women strained to wrest order from the ordeal of change.