Theorising the Ibero-American Atlantic

Culture & History, 2023

World History Connected, 2010

Review essay: Debra Blumenthal, Enemies and Familiars: Slavery and Mastery in Fifteenth-Century Valencia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott, eds. Origins of the Black Atlantic: Rewriting Histories (New York: Routledge, 2009). J.H. Elliott, Spain, Europe and the Wider World 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Matthew Restall, The Black Middle: Africans, Mayas, and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Stuart B. Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Resumen Este ensayo combina varios campos de investigación histórica para iluminar la edad de las revoluciones en América Latina: la crisis del mundo Ibero-Americano, la transformación del comportamiento mercantil, y el surgimiento de nuevos resortes de legitimidad política. Apunta a la importancia de la trata de esclavos en el Atlántico del Sur, y cómo la crisis de imperios provocó un golpe profundo a las economías basadas en la esclavitud. Las Guerras Trans-Atlánticas resultaron en una doble crisis, fiscal de los imperios y social para una régimen de acumulación. Los resultados de la coyuntura fueron nuevos actores sociales y nuevos modelos de política. En el debate en torno a la edad de revoluciones como continuidad o discontinuidad, este ensayo insiste en la importancia del cambio. Llama la atención sobre la centralidad de la esclavitud para la naturaleza de los regímenes y sobre el papel de las fuerzas sociales y económicas en la formación de las instituciones e ideas políticas. Abstract This essay connects several fields of historical research about the age of revolutions in Latin America: the crisis of the Iberian Atlantic, the transformation of merchant capital, and the rise of new sources of political legitimacy. It points to the importance of the slave trade in the South Atlantic, and how the crisis of empires had a fundamental effect on slave economies. Warfare produced, therefore, a fiscal crisis of the empires and a social crisis of a regime of accumulation. The outcomes of the conjuncture were new social actors and new models of politics. In the debate about whether the age of revolutions was one of continuity or discontinuity in Latin America, this essay makes the case for discontinuity. It draws attention to

International Review of Social History , 2021

This volume edited by Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, and Rachel S. O'Toole explores a twofold argument: how, while the Iberian empires pioneered early modern globalization, these empires were also globalized by interacting with and incorporating a myriad realities, agents, and cultures across the world. Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization delves into that question, departing from a conceptual framework built on three main assumptions: (i) the polycentric nature of the Iberian empires, (ii) the possibility of establishing a non-European, but Iberian genealogy of the globalization process, and (iii) the importance of recovering social and cultural perspectives to explain Iberian globalization, frequently dominated by economic-oriented approaches. In the view of the editors, globalization did not lead to a more homogenous world. Instead, it "created heterogeneity within a connected and complex system" (p. ). Having all these elements on the table, the book seeks to create a "space for inquiries into the non-European peoples" who forged Iberian globalization, and by extension the world's globalization. What compass have the editors chosen to guide a volume embracing such an ambitious research agenda? First, the editors have opted to privilege a multidisciplinary approach; this is one of the book's defining features. Art history, literary studies, and history cohabit under the book's umbrella to offer a "new movement of exchange" between fields (p. ). Largely grounded in the concerns of postcolonial theory, the volume's interest in the interpretative possibilities and limitations of early modern documents, including archival records, normative texts, material culture, and visual artefacts, comes as no surprise. As happens with books aiming to push disciplinary boundaries, many readers will find this choice appealing; others will find it more a statement of intention than a fruitful exercise. Secondly, variety defines the locations under consideration in the chapters. The variegated places in which the Iberian empires were present is well covered in the book, including present-day Mexico, China, Colombia, Peru, Paraguay, India, and the Philippines. Besides focusing on those local observatories, this book also underscores the importance of some of the Iberian highways to globalization, such as the entanglements weaved across the Pacific Ocean, the infamous transatlantic slave trade, the Peruvian silver world commerce, and the global activities of Iberian and Catholic missionaries. Territories falling under the jurisdictions of the Spanish Empire, especially in Spanish America, are better represented than those spaces claimed by the Portuguese. Perhaps closer attention to the Portuguese experience in the Indian Ocean would have strengthened the contributions of María Elena Martínez and Bruno Feitler, who touch upon Goa in their studies. Likewise, some chapters concentrate on people of African origin in the Americas (Rachel O'Toole and Anna More), but a more detailed focus on the Iberian presence in West Africapartially explored in Feitler's and More's essayswould have dramatically rounded up an already rich variety of vantage points and case studies. Finally, in addition to combining methodologies and diversifying the cases and the locations under examination, variety also defines the collective profile of the authors. The volume includes scholars with and from different academic backgrounds, based in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Mexico, and the USA. To avoid making global history a new version of traditional northern-European narratives about the Rise of the West, historians need not only to widen the actors, objects, and geographies under study, but also the analytical and

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 2018

This special dossier of JILAS brings together nine essays that shed new light on several important aspects of the political history of the Spanish-Atlantic world c. 1750-1850. 1 As specialists will be well aware, this century, spanning roughly from the Seven Years' War until Spain's African War, has been the subject of renewed historical interest. Undoubtedly, the acute crises facing democracies and republics on both sides of the Atlantic, together with the vicissitudes of citizenship and political participation, have stimulated historians to search for the origins of contemporary political systems. Some themes and topics have been utterly transformed by a new generation of scholarswriting in several European languagesoften working in transnational, global, and Atlantic frameworks scarcely imaginable a few decades ago. Though the advances in the historiography have been formidable, many topics and themes remain either underresearched or else new work has provoked fresh questions requiring more research. This dossier therefore aims to pursue new directions as well as to push historiographical advances still further, helping to consolidate gains already made One of the notable shifts of the past few decades has been the steady narrowing of the gulf that previously separated these scholarly communities working in different locations and languages from one another. The structural factors producing this change are numerous, but some of it may be attributed to European Union-driven academic internationalization, the annihilation of barriers to scholarly exchange by the Internet, and the migration and movement of scholarly communities. The proliferation and deepening of networks has occurred not only within Europe, but also beyond it. One of the most visible changes of recent decades has been the intensification of interactions between the scholars in Europe and those based in the Americas, particularly Latin America. Emphasis on structural and material forces, however, should not distract attention from intellectual developments. The rise of Atlantic History in the immediate post-World War II period, building on Braudel's insights about Mediterranean civilization, promoted a focus on connections and convergences, inching ever closer to a post-national, cosmopolitan approach to the past. The 1960s were a key moment in a renewed interaction between scholars both from both of the Americas, North and South (Tirado 2014). In the Anglophone world, this orientation toward histoire croisée, served as an impetus for myriad ground-breaking books on the early CONTACT Gabriel Paquette

Journal of Global Slavery, 2017

This article explores the linkages between the slave trades to Spanish and Portuguese America during the Iberian Union (1580–1640). Drawing upon legal suits, it argues that Brazilian port cities were both destinations and hubs for the re-exportation of West Central African captives to Spanish colonies. Vessels frequently “stopped over” in Brazilian ports following the Atlantic crossing due to navigational exigencies and to avoid paying the higher duties on captives levied in Spanish American ports. This article demonstrates that the integration of the slave trades to Spanish and Portuguese America facilitated the spread of slavery well beyond sugar-producing regions.

Bulletin of the Comediantes Volume 70, Number 2, 2018 pp. 137-142, 2018

this compilation professes two aims: to add information about the entangled histories of the British and Iberian empires within a traditional Atlantic periodization and to problematize the narrative of United States exceptionalism, which twists conceptions of the past to the best interests of politics and economics. Certainly Cañizares-Esguerra's sharp eye is oriented in a new direction, not only to review Atlantic history, but also to pay attention to memory: how our Atlantic past is remembered—although not experienced ("prosthetic memory," according to Alison Landsberg)—by the general public; why it is so; and how to change it. Our memories (and bodies) are embedded with fragments of histories, ways of reading our past; they are embodied, being part of our own identities. Below, my review proposes an evaluation of this collection in light of these pressing issues of our time, with insights (and a few useful references) drawn from my own research, which has been supported by the research project, Postory: historiadores, mnemohistoria y los artesanos del pasado en la era posturística ([AGREEMENT NUMBER: 2013–1572/001 - 001 CU7 MULT7], funded by CE. EACEA. Culture. Multiannual Cooperation Projects. 2007–2013).

The American Historical Review, 2008

Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2018

Renaissance Quarterly, 2009