Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492-1824

Circulation, Resistance and Diversity

B. Aram, B. Yun-Casalilla, B. Aram, B. Yun-Casalilla

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137324047
• eBook ISBN: 9781137324054
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Drawing upon economic history, cultural studies, intellectual history and the history of science and medicine, this collection of case studies examines the transatlantic transfer and transformation of goods and ideas, with particular emphasis on their reception in Europe.

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Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492–1824

State of the Art and Prospects for Research

Bethany Aram

Atlantic history, defined by Alison Games as global history applied to the Atlantic world, has inspired debates and forums, scholarly journals, monographs and an impressive number of edited collections in recent years.¹ The ocean’s historiography, populated by prolific scholars, teems with synthetic approaches and theoretical analyses, published continually.² In such deftly traveled waters, at first glance it would appear difficult to make an original contribution.

The monumental Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c.1450–c.1850, edited by Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan in 2011, has provided an indispensable reference, while focusing and renewing the state of the art. In an extended review of the work, Cécile Vidal noted that Atlantic history continues to be centered mainly upon the Americas.³ Vidal relates this “amerocentrism,” perhaps more precisely “north-amerocentrism,” in present-day Atlantic history to the fact that many of its most prestigious practitioners, and certainly most of those involved in recently published collective volumes, are based at universities in the United States. The state of the art, logically, has been shaped by the availability of academic funding. Recently, it has also been enriched by the growing availability of primary source material through the internet.

The Atlantic, as Karen Kupperman has pointed out, is an anachronism.⁴ Although scholars of Iberian empires developed Atlantic approaches as early as the 1940s and 1950s, the field emerged explicitly an area of study in the 1960s following the interest of Jacques Godechot, Robert Palmer and Bernard Bailyn in “Atlantic revolutions.”⁵ In the aftermath of World War II and at the onset of the Cold War, these scholars called attention to the “democratic values” and “common political heritage” articulated in the North American and French upheavals of the eighteenth century. Some early proponents of the Atlantic approach, associated with the defense of “Western civilization,” have even been seen as lending academic credibility to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.⁶ Their emphasis on revolutions, in any case, remains alive and well within Atlantic history, and has been fruitfully extended to Haiti.⁷ At times, however, the field’s foundational concern with the Enlightenment and “democratic” thought has privileged the eighteenth-century north Atlantic world.⁸ Exacerbating this tendency, the institutionalization of “Western civilization” at some United States universities, also in the context of the Cold War, inexplicably marginalized Ibero-America.

On the eastern coast of the United States, programs in Atlantic history founded at Harvard University and at the Johns Hopkins University have been especially influential, training and attracting generations of scholars. Anchored slightly further south, the Johns Hopkins Program, whose founding fathers in the 1970s included Philip Curtin, Jack Greene, Richard L. Kagan, J. G. A. Pocock and A. J. R. Russell Wood, embarked upon a less primarily Anglo-American trajectory toward global history. This tendency finds continuity in Philip Morgan’s collaboration with Nicholas Canny, former director of the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway.⁹

More surprisingly, each of the main North American schools of Atlantic history published a collective volume in 2009. These collections, edited by Bernard Bailyn and Patricia Denault on the one hand and Jack Greene and Philip Morgan on the other, exemplified the divergence of the pioneering Atlantic schools in the United States. While Bailyn highlighted northern “currents” in the field and derided “elusive Braudelians,”¹⁰ Greene and Morgan addressed the major criticisms regarding Atlantic history.¹¹ Meanwhile, dynamic contributions to the field have emerged at other centers: New York University’s program in Atlantic History, founded in 1994; the Universidad Pablo de Olavide’s graduate program in “Historia de Europa,” “El mundo mediterráneo y su difusión Atlántica,” inaugurated by Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, Cinta Canterla and Giovanni Levi in 2001; the Centro de História d’Aquém e d’Além-Mar (CHAM) in Lisbon and the Azores established in 2003; and Mondes Américains, Sociétés, Circulations, Pouvoirs (MASCIPO), active in France since 2006. All of these complement an Ibero-American tradition in Cologne, Hamburg, Graz and Munich, to name only some of the most active centers.¹²

African and Iberian contributions to Atlantic history have proliferated, although specialists in the North American Atlantic world have not always been receptive to them. A revival of scholarly interest in the African Atlantic, led by Linda Heywood, John Thornton and David Eltis among others, re-vindicates its cultural impact and demographic importance. The compilation and use of an online database of over 35,000 slave voyages pioneered by Eltis continues to revolutionize the field.¹³ Subtly shifting Atlantic history’s temporal and geographical orientation, recent efforts to write it from the “bottom up” socially as well as geographically have made the field more inclusive. The work of John Thornton and Herman Bennett, among others, has gone beyond the model of the plantation complex to recover the agency of free as well as enslaved Africans in the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Iberian Atlantic world.¹⁴ Recent syntheses, emphasizing interactions among Europeans, Africans and Native Americans, have also reflected this growing interest in exchanges among different groups, defined according to origin, occupation, religion or other affiliation, in a field where the ideas of political theorists and governing elites previously occupied center stage. In this way, Atlantic history would appear to be recovering its African and Afro-American origins.¹⁵

In contrast to the African Atlantic, much important early work on the Iberian Atlantic took place on the peripheries of self-proclaimed Atlantic historiography, without invoking it explicitly. A touchstone for the Iberian field, although detached from the impulses that inspired Palmer and Godechot, remains Pierre and Huguette Chaunu’s 12-volume Séville et l’Atlantique (1504–1650).¹⁶ Also predating the “Atlantic” label, the work of Charles Verlinden proved particularly influential in connecting the medieval Mediterranean to early Iberian expansion, while that of Antonio Rumeu de Armas related Castile to the African Atlantic.¹⁷ Other contributors, led by C. R. Boxer, Vitorino Magalhães Godinho and John H. Parry,¹⁸ emerged among experts in Spanish American legal systems (including Lewis Hanke, Manuel Giménez Fernández and Demetrio Ramos),¹⁹ migration (such as Magnus Mörner, Peter Boyd-Bowman or Ida Altman)²⁰ and historical demography (represented by Woodrow Borah and the “Berkeley school”),²¹ in addition to scholars of commerce and trade (Antonio Céspedes del Castillo, Antonio García-Barquero, Carlos Martínez Shaw),²² culture (Robert Ricard, David Brading, Carlos Alberto González Sánchez),²³ and networks (Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, Ana Crespo Solana),²⁴ as well as many others. In recent years, scholars of the Iberian Peninsula and Ibero-America have become more openly “Atlantic” and “global.”

Specialists in the Iberian Atlantic, including Kenneth Andrien, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, J. H. Elliott, Felipe Fernández Armesto, Tamar Herzog, Richard L. Kagan, Sabine McCormack, Anthony Pagden, Carla Rahn Phillips and Stuart Schwartz have addressed, and in some cases even joined, the New England establishment. They have emphasized that the early modern Atlantic world was overwhelmingly African and Iberian.²⁵ The innovative work of these scholars and others—particularly Serge Gruzinski, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Pedro Cardim²⁶—has begun to integrate the Ibero-American world into a global perspective. The eighteenth-century British Empire looks less ground-breaking as its Iberian predecessors become better known.

For scholars of Ibero-America, and particularly Spain, the attempt to apply the analytical model that Ferdinand Braudel developed for the Mediterranean to the Atlantic makes a lot of sense.²⁷ Interestingly enough, the Atlantic historians least receptive to Braudel’s work have been the most prone to inherit problems long identified in his Mediterranean: a Euro-centric emphasis on the “collective destiny” or unity of the oceanic world and an avoidance of its internal frontiers.²⁸ Conflict and violence, inevitably part of Atlantic (or any) history, may be better approached through local, contextualized scrutiny. Although few imperial histories have dared to overlook resistance, Atlantic history, marked by an enthusiasm for circulation and exchange, often avoids analysing impediments to it. Counteracting such impulses, the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of plantation slavery have long received attention, and scholars are now beginning to examine other, more ambiguous, processes of destruction and coercion associated with the migration of persons and the displacement of goods.

Another recommendation for elaborating Atlantic history from the “bottom up” endorsed by Alison Games has been the idea of following commodities around (and potentially beyond) the Atlantic.²⁹ The commodity biography, a genre pioneered by Sidney Mintz,³⁰ has gained popularity in recent years. Fruitful attention has been dedicated to products including chocolate and tobacco, cod, cotton and even books.³¹ Such approaches to Atlantic history have traced and sometimes even celebrated the circulation of peoples, products and ideas. Yet a resistance to change and innovation—rather than a desire for exchange—may have constituted the norm and offered advantages within many cultural, social, political and intellectual relations during the Old Regime.

The present volume makes no attempt at comprehensive coverage of any single territory or time period. Rather, it offers a multi-faceted collection of case studies designed to engage issues of resistance, diversity and globalization in different proportions, depending on each chapter’s focus and its author’s perspective. Like the compilation by Antonio Possevino studied in Chapter 4, the present volume aspires to be “selective, not exhaustive.” The editors have avoided imposing strict temporal or spatial frontiers in order to encourage authors to follow the commodities and ideas. Moreover, placing the Spanish Empire from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century at the core of our focus facilitates an understanding of its permeable and shifting borders. In some cases, transgressing these boundaries proves crucial in order to understand the role of the Spanish Empire in the process of globalization.

Unlike monographs devoted to single commodities, the case studies selected for this volume bring together original approaches to an empire from within and without as a dynamic, evolving and contested entity rather than a closed or complete framework. They explore how polities were crucial for the circulation of goods and their rejection in some areas, as well as how new products and forms of consumption, not to mention the divergent impact of global expansion, transcended political units. All of the chapters that follow explore asymmetrical processes of the acquisition, rejection, appropriation and transformation of information and products from the Americas. They suggest that the “conquest” of Europe by American goods may have been just as negotiated, selective and varied as that of America by European soldiers, settlers and missionaries. Along similar lines, the ecological impact of the spread of plants and animals on lands new to them remains an ongoing concern.³²

In Europe, the products of Atlantic exchange were neither immediately nor uniformly embraced. Some, in fact, were rejected and resisted for many years, as in the case of American maize in Piedmont or Asian silk in Seville, discussed in Chapters 6 and 9. Yet, in other cases, ruling elites, like the Burgundian Habsburgs (Chapter 7) or the Medici (Chapter 10), competed to acquire novel and rare goods of distant origins. A number of the studies collected here focus on specific commodities, including cochineal, tobacco and chocolate (Chapters 11, 12 and 14) in order to examine the choices and behaviors of the groups that rejected, sought, used, transformed and/or consumed these products. The need for concrete, local contexts has obliged many of the authors to situate their studies in the areas they know the best. For this reason, this volume applies the idea of examining the demand and uses ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• 1 Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492–1824: State of the Art and Prospects for Research
• Part I Cultural and Intellectual Constraints
• Part II The Social Use of Things
• Part III Connected and Contrasting Societies
• Final Thoughts
• Selected Bibliography
• Index