From late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century, Spain and Portugal struggled to define the extension of their American domains. Having first secured papal bulls and having signed a bilateral treaty confirming, albeit with changes, a monopoly, for the next 500 years the monarchs, bureaucrats, experts, military men, religious personal and inhabitants of these two powers could not agree what this monopoly meant and how it was to be implemented. This indetermination led to a massive local involvement.

Rather than debated by the courts - which it often was ­most of the discussion regarding who was allowed to be where, doing what, happened on the territory itself, as individual Spaniards wished to bar individual Portuguese from doing certain things, and as their rivals hoped to achieve the same. The testimonies they left give us generous clues as to how the territorial uncertainty influenced their lives: what it meant to live in the shadow of bulls and treaties, and, most particularly, in the shadow of a doctrine of actual occupation. And, although locals pretended that the debate confronted Europeans among themselves, none of the local speakers could ignore the (obvious) fact that the territory was indigenous.

How they dealt with Indian presence and what they made of  it, and how - because of Indian presence - the religious orders became involved in what was essentially a political issue, is part of the story.

Tamar Herzog - Professor of Latin American and Spanish History na Stanford University desde 2005, fez o doutoramento em Histoire et civilisations na Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, tendo leccionado em várias universidades, entre as quais a Universidade de Chicago. A sua investigação tem privilegiado as relações entre Espanha e a América espanhola, e as transformações que ocorreram na sociedade espanhola em virtude do seu envolvimento colonial. Questões em torno à formação de identidades, do regionalismo e do nacionalismo, problemas relativos à imigração, à raça, etnicidade, e representação política, o funcionamento das instituições coloniais, as relações entre normas legais e práticas políticas e sociais, deram origem a inúmeras publicações, de entre as quais se destacam os livros Upholding Justice: State, Law and the Penal System in Quito (University of Michigan Press, 2004), Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (Yale University Press, 2003), The Collective and the Public in Latin America. Cultural Identities and Political Order (Sussex Academic Press, 2000), co-edited com Luis Roniger e Observation and Communication: The Construction of Realities in the Hispanic World (Frankfurt, 1997), co-edited com J.M. Scholz.