Race and Labor in Sixteenth-Century Seville through the Prism of Accounting Books (Hijuelas) from the Reales Alcázares

Abstract

Hijuelas furnish scholars with more than account balances and bills paid: ledgers such as the ones that detailed the expenses of Seville’s sixteenth-century Alcázar also yield important insight into the facility’s work environment. These hardly studied ledgers describe the workers’ backgrounds, including their wages and any special accommodations they required, as well as the transaction of material goods, which in this period included slaves. The following examination of hijuelas uncovers the racial and labor realities of a royal property. These documents also challenge established scholarly observations about working life in early modern Seville in important ways.

Material Ways of Looking: A Methodological Proposal for Visual and Material Culture Studies

“…This approach, but not our general definition of what is implied by "thing," presumes that objects are entities and is inspired byHodder (2012, 10).2 I borrow the term armchair traveler fromKagan (2000, 71).3 This approach has been used elsewhere to understand, through the accounting books that list and contextualize expenditures, the lived and material experience of slaves in the early modern period according to the objects with which they interacted. SeeBeck (2018).…”