sex:crime:empire
Welcome to the Bourbon Quito Project. The eighteenth century was a dynamic time in the Spanish Empire. Royal officials began to re-imagine the empire, and to implement new methods of rule. The Bourbon Quito Project seeks to document this process by examining litigation of criminal sexuality and its punishment in Quito, Ecuador during the Age of Charles III.
The City
A city at the center of the world. Quito was a regional capital of the Spanish Empire from the 1530s through the 1820s and a seat of the a Real Audiencia. In the 18th century, the city was constituted of seven barrios, or parishes, and home to the full variety of social groups of early modern empire.
The Litigation
One of the main purposes of the Bourbon Quito Project is to make publicly available transcriptions of criminal and civil litigation from 18th-century Quito. The transcriptions are organized as the cases are at the Archivo Nacional del Ecuador, and are also available in facsimile form. Both are freely available for download as well.
The Blog
The Bourbon Quito Project is an active research project. All of the transcriptions are hand-keyed, and thus take quite a bit of time. But, as the archive is being built, I will be posting analysis of cases, methodological observations, and the like on the project blog. There's room for comments, and blog posts will form a part of a forthcoming book.