Justice in a New World: Negotiating Legal Intelligibility in British, Iberian, and Indigenous America is a collection of essays that uses the lens of justice to study power struggles in the British and Iberian Americas. These authors agree that justice is multivalent, ranging from legal practices and their surrounding ceremonies to the beliefs central to a society. The laws themselves are equally works in progress, shaped by the dreams of distant crowns pressed up against the lived realities on the ground—hence the “negotiating” part of the book's title. People navigated their way through new, unknown, or hostile (or all of the above) legal and geographic territory, while they also deliberated or wrangled, a process the field now almost considers standard when describing interactions between these powers.

The introduction by Brian P. Owensby and Richard J. Ross proposes the concept of “(un)intelligibility” to frame and connect the various chapters. It is...

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