Global Trade before Globalization

2012

Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2021

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

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

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

Review Essay in JCCH: Baskes, Bleichmar, Grafe, Portuondo, Fradera, Schmidt-Nowara

Renaissance Quarterly, 2009

In the closing chapter of this collection of case studies, Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla asks, “Do cultures dialogue only through oral and written words or also through the exchange of material goods?” (277). The answer to Yun-Casalilla’s question provided in the 15 essays gathered in this anthology is a nuanced yes. The exchange of material goods sets up the framework in which intercultural dialogue occurs, it prompts conversations that would have otherwise not taken place and it determines the scope and aim of cultural exchanges. This anthology, edited by Bethany Aram and Yun-Casalilla, continues the efforts of Iberian Atlantic studies to describe this Atlantic network while avoiding the Eurocentric pitfall of the model developed by Fernand Braudel as well as the North-American-centric model that characterized early configurations of the field.

Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2020