Of Love & Loathing : Marital Life, Strife, and Intimacy in the Colonial Andes, 1750-1825

Robins, Nicholas A.

ISBN 10: 0803277199 / ISBN 13: 9780803277199

Published by University of Nebraska Press, 2015

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 24063940-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Of Love & Loathing : Marital Life, Strife, and Intimacy in the Colonial Andes, 1750-1825
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0803277199
• ISBN 13: 9780803277199
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Policies concerning marriage, morality, and intimacy were central to the efforts of the Spanish monarchy to maintain social control in colonial Charcas. The Bourbon Crown depended on the patriarchal, caste-based social system on which its colonial enterprise was built to maintain control over a vast region that today encompasses Bolivia and parts of Peru, Chile, Paraguay, and Argentina. Intimacy became a fulcrum of social control contested by individuals, families, the state, and the Catholic Church, and deeply personal emotions and experiences were unwillingly transformed into social, political, and moral challenges.

 

In Of Love and Loathing, Nicholas A. Robins examines the application of late-colonial Bourbon policies concerning marriage, morality, and intimacy. Robins examines how such policies and the means by which they were enforced highlight the moral, racial, and patriarchal ideals of the time, and, more important, the degree to which the policies were evaded. Not only did free unions, illegitimate children, and de facto divorces abound, but women also had significantly more agency regarding resources, relationships, and movement than has previously been recognized. A surprising image of society emerges from Robins’s analysis, one with considerably more moral latitude than can be found from the perspectives of religious doctrine and regal edicts.

About the Author

Nicholas A. Robins is a teaching associate professor in the Department of History at North Carolina State University. He is the author of several books, including Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes and Priest-Indian Conflict in Upper Peru: The Generation of Rebellion, 1750–1780.