Raising an Empire

From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Spain and Portugal raised and nurtured vast American empires, both metaphorically and literally. From the very beginning, conquerors and settler elites engaged in colonial enterprises as they considered the New World through traditional Iberian ideas about childhood and as they established institutions for educating youths, sheltering infants, and extracting labor from children. Inevitably, Iberian concepts of childhood were transformed by everyday confrontations with the practices and norms of indigenous, African, and mixed-race inhabitants, and as new generations of truly colonial children were born.

Raising an Empire takes readers on a journey into the world of children and childhood
in early modern Ibero-America. Its contributors enter a vibrant new field of study in the region and challenge the conventional notion that children are invisible in the historical record. Employing diverse methods to decode a wide variety of sources, these essays present their small subjects - elite maidens, abandoned babies, Indian servants, slave apprentices - through their lives and times.

Contributors
Isabel dos Guimaráes Sá, history, Universidade de Minho, Portugal
Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, Latin American history and director of the Center of Latin American Studies, University of Kansas
Jorge Rojas Flores, history and social sciences, Universidad de Talca and Universidad de Arte y Ciencias Sociales, Chile
Laura Shelton, history, Georgia Southern University
Valentina Tikoff, history, DePaul University, Chicago
Ann Twinam, history, University of Texas, Austin
Teresa Vergara, history Ph.D. student, University of Connecticut at Storrs