Law, labour and everyday life under colonial rule in Bolivia

A glimpse into research

During their fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, the researchers work on a project of their own choice related to the Kolleg’s topic. Sometimes a single source is at the centre of these projects, sometimes there are hundreds, and it is not always classical historical source material. That is why we have asked our fellows to present a source that is central to their research project, that is particularly meaningful or that simply reads like a thriller – their absolute favourite source, so to speak.

We publish these continuously on the weekends during Advent, allowing us to look back on the year once again.

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Raquel Gil Montero

Project: Working under colonial rule. Legal unity and pluralism in seventeenth-century Bolivia

Source: Padrón de Carangas, Numeración General de la Palata, Archivo General de la Nación Argentina, Sala XIII, 18-4-4

My research focuses on labour relations in seventeenth-century Bolivia. I am interested in the various colonial obligations imposed by the Spanish conquerors on the indigenous population, based on the notion of vassalage. Although I am working with various sources, my favourite one is a kind of census called Visitation. It is a handwritten source of 20,000 pages in which the governors collected information from the indigenous population and sometimes from non-indigenous relatives (African slaves, Spaniards, etc.). The censuses of the 17th century were less administrative in nature than those of today and more curious about personal matters.

There are two interesting things about this source. The first is that the information collected can be very varied and sometimes includes short life stories: escapes, multiple marriages, the clothes the respondents wore, the language they spoke, personal or work conflicts. The second is that it allows me to have a very broad context in which to insert the other sources that are more exceptional. For example, if I were to find a court record of a man who had temporarily “sold” his wife to pay off a debt (something that was forbidden), the census allows me to know if there were many similar cases or if it was really unique.

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Zitieren als:
Gil Montero, Raquel, Law, labour and everyday life under colonial rule in Bolivia. A glimpse into research, EViR Blog, 12.12.2025, https://www.evir.uni-muenster.blog/en/colonial-rule-in-bolivia/.

Lizenz:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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