Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization

Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, Rachel Sarah O'Toole

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780826522535, 9780826522528
• eBook ISBN: 9780826522542
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

Through interdisciplinary essays covering the wide geography of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization investigates the diverse networks and multiple centers of early modern globalization that emerged in conjunction with Iberian imperialism.

Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization argues that Iberian empires cannot be viewed apart from early modern globalization. From research sites throughout the early modern Spanish and Portuguese territories and from distinct disciplinary approaches, the essays collected in this volume investigate the economic mechanisms, administrative hierarchies, and art forms that linked the early modern Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization demonstrates that early globalization was structured through diverse networks and their mutual and conflictive interactions within overarching imperial projects. To this end, the essays explore how specific products, texts, and people bridged ideas and institutions to produce multiple centers within Iberian imperial geographies. Taken as a whole, the authors also argue that despite attempts to reproduce European models, early Iberian globalization depended on indigenous agency and the agency of people of African descent, which often undermined or changed these models.

The volume thus relays a nuanced theory of early modern globalization: the essays outline the Iberian imperial models that provided templates for future global designs and simultaneously detail the negotiated and conflictive forms of local interactions that characterized that early globalization. The essays here offer essential insights into historical continuities in regions colonized by Spanish and Portuguese monarchies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Iberian Empires and a Theory of Early Modern Globalization
• 1. Precious Metals in the Americas at the Beginning of the Global Economy
• 2. A New Moses: Vasco de Quiroga's Hospitals and the Transformation of "Indians" from "Bárbaros" to "Pobres"
• 3. Religion, Caste, and Race in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires: Local and Global Dimensions
• 4. The Portuguese Inquisition and Colonial Expansion: The "Honor" of Being Tried by the Holy Office
• 5. Jesuit Networks and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Alonso de Sandoval's Naturaleza, policía sagrada y profana (1627)
• 6. Household Challenges: The Laws of Slaveholding and the Practices of Freedom in Colonial Peru
• 7. The Reason of Freedom and the Freedom of Reason: The Neo-Scholastic Critique of African Slavery and Its Impact on the Construction of the Nineteenth-Century Republic in Spanish America
• 8. Jesuits and Indigenous Subjects in the Global Culture of Letters: Production, Circulation, and Adaptation of Missionary Texts in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
• 9. The Iridescent Enconchado
• 10. "Idolatrous Images" and "True Images": European Visual Culture and its Circulation in Early Modern China
• 11. Barlaam and Josaphat in Early Modern Spain and the Colonial Philippines: Spiritual Exercises of Freedom at the Center and Periphery
• Afterword: Reimagining Colonial Latin America from a Global Perspective
• Contributors
• Index