Looking for a precedent that eased the way for "civilized" people to embrace fascism in the twentieth-century, Hannah Arendt found it in nineteenth-century colonialism, with its mix of bureaucratic rule, racial superiority, and appeals to rationality. Modern Inquisitions takes Arendt's insights about the barbaric underside of modern Western civilization and moves them back in time several hundred years to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Spanish empire dominated the globe. Irene Silverblatt argues that the modern bureaucratic state developed in tandem with colonialism and that its genesis is especially evident in the machinations of Spanish Inquisition. She illuminates the intricate "dance of bureaucracy and race" evident in the Inquisition's persecution of scores of Spanish subjects in colonial Peru. Drawing on extensive archival research in Lima, Silverblatt highlights what Spanish trial records, evangelizing sermons, and missionary guides say about how the emerging