We had the pleasure of indexing a very engaging read from Nicole Legnani, of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. Her work, The Business of Conquest: Empire, Love, and Law in the Atlantic World will be published later this year by Notre Dame University Press. It “traces the relationship between capital investment, monarchical power, and imperial scalability in the Conquest. In particular, she shows how the Christian virtue of caritas (love and charity of neighbor, and thus God) became confused with cupiditas (greed and lust), because love came to be understood as a form of wealth in the partnership between the crown and the church. In this partnership, the work of the conquistador became, ultimately, that of a traveling business agent for the Spanish empire whose excess from one venture capitalized the next. This business was thus the business of conquest and featured entrepreneurial violence as its norm—not exception.”
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 