Search Results

This chapter relates the story of the Nation and the empire from the early 17th century to the restoration of the kingdom of Portugal's political sovereignty in 1640. It tracks the critiques and opposition that various groups and institutions within the Spanish empire built up against the Nation. Doing so helps illustrate how a relationship once founded on interdependence could be pushed toward fracture and how this movement led to the unraveling of the Nation as an Atlantic community.

This chapter discusses how leading members of the Nation entrenched themselves within the life of the royal court in Madrid. They allied themselves to key members of the aristocracy, including the count-duke of Olivares, favorite to Philip IV, and the leading statesman of imperial Spain. These alliances added a political dimension to the more economic affairs of the Portuguese Nation in Madrid, and opened the door to administrative offices, seats on the royal councils, and most especially, an opportunity to influence royal policy of trade in the Atlantic.

This chapter explores the twin roles of Manila as a colonial capital and an important node in early modern global networks. It gives a historical overview of the Spanish conquest, the foundation of Manila, and the economic development of the colony (together with a consideration of the trans‐Pacific galleon trade), besides offering analyses of artistic representations of the Spanish Empire and Manila. In investigating the “contrapuntal” nature of the city's ethnically diverse society, it examines the social and political structures of the three principal ethnolinguistic groups: Filipinos, Chinese, and Spaniards. The presence of other diasporas in the metropolis is also discussed. Manila is described as a point of global convergence for travelers and migrants from Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, acting as an attractive destination for merchants, missionaries, exiles, and explorers.

In the closing stages of the American war Britain gave priority to the defence of the West Indies, regarded as a British asset of the utmost national importance, over efforts to subdue the mainland colonies. The war had posed acute problems for the islands, but they quickly regained much of their prosperity through their slave‐worked plantation agriculture. Jamaica remained Britain's most valued colony. Although the Florida colonies had been surrendered to Spain at the peace, British governments were still interested in expanding Britain's stake in the Caribbean and around the Gulf of Mexico. The settlement of loyalists from the southern colonies in the Bahamas was supported, trade with the Spanish colonies was encouraged and plans for disrupting the Spanish empire by inciting Indian and creole revolts were revived in 1790 at the prospect of war with Spain.

This chapter discusses the search for the ten tribes in the Americas. It shows how the possibility to find the tribes in the Americas was “there” even before the discovery of the Americas ” through telling the story of Canary Island’s discovery several decades before. It also shows how the Ten Tribes were “removed” by European cartographers from their “original” locations in Ethiopia and Central Asia and placed in northeastern Siberia. From there they crossed the water barriers to the Americas. The chapter also discusses how the reformation affected Christian thinking about the ten tribes and heightened the debates about them among Christian thinkers, such as Sebastian Munster, John Calvin, and others. The chapter also discusses how the ten tribes became central in Spanish thinking after the conquest of America. Finally, the chapter shows how the story of the ten tribes became briefly fused with the myth of Atlantis and the history of the Scythians.

The introduction clarifies the terms of the discussion about the emotional attachments to Spain’s imperial past present in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century national imaginaries. It argues that the Spanish Empire was an overdetermined cultural emblem with an ambivalent presence in the turn-of-the-century cultural scene, and it suggests that such emblem was the object of a number of contradictory emotions that have gone largely unnoticed. It also claims that the essay, because of its generic and rhetorical particularities, is a genre distinctly suited for understanding how empire became an object of national emotions (as opposed to national affects).

This chapter discusses early modern Europe's engagement with western North American geography. Since Spain initiated the engagement, it is with the Spanish Empire that a study of the influence of western geographic ideas properly begins. From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, with the results of the last two and a half centuries of geographic investigation close at hand, it is remarkable how little early- and mid-eighteenth-century Spanish officials knew about the North American continent their empire had been colonizing since 1519. The effects of their uncertainty can be more completely and easily understood if the extent of and reasons for this Spanish geographic ignorance gets more attention.

This chapter discusses the aftermath of the unraveling of the core transatlantic networks of the Portuguese Nation. The end of the Nation engendered the beginning of new communities, each following its own trajectory in the broader evolution of the Atlantic.

This chapter focuses on the Spanish Empire, the policies of which—because of its geographic position, lingering power, and manifest potential—rival mid-eighteenth-century French and British statesmen vied to bring in line with their own objectives. To contemporary French observers, and to later imperial and diplomatic historians, this policy has presented something of a riddle. In particular, Spanish relations with Britain were warmer and Spanish relations with France more distant than circumstances would seem to dictate. Between 1748 and 1756, while France and Britain tottered from tension to hostility to war, Spain stood largely apart from Anglo-French conflict, maintaining civil relations with both powers but following the lead of neither. Not only did Spain avoid allying with France until 1761 but, in a century marked by six Anglo-Spanish wars and countless skirmishes, Anglo-Spanish relations between 1750 and 1757 were remarkably cordial.

This chapter discusses the protection program of the Spanish empire, which effectively replaced the previous annexation plans of Britain. It notes that during the Peninsular War, British writing about Spanish America seemed to turn away from previous works that had expressed sympathy for the Spanish American natives with British imperialism. It then studies several works that concealed Britain's unabated interest in starting commercial dominance in Spanish America. The chapter also considers the question of how to present Britain's emancipation efforts as consistent with their promise to protect the Spanish empire.

This chapter examines the natural history expeditions of the Spanish Empire and outlines the mode of work. It explains that the expeditions were part of ambitious program of imperial science which pursued multiple and interconnected objectives and brought together European and American naturalists, artists, administrators, and various local inhabitants. It also highlights the role of visual materials in the investigation of New World nature.

The historical events central to Chapter Five, “The Politics of Imperial Pride and Shame,” concern the cultural and political impact of Catalan nationalism in Spain. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this movement sought to achieve the Catalan bourgeoisie’s hegemony within the Spanish state, greatly impacting the Spanish élites. Chapter Five looks at the work of Enric Prat de la Riba, and particularly at his essay La nacionalitat catalana (1906), trying to account for Prat’s silence regarding Spain’s American empire—a silence that is all the more telling when one realizes that Catalonia was deeply involved in Spanish imperialism during the nineteenth century. It argues that such silence depends upon a previous characterization of the Spanish empire as a source of shame, and that such shameful characterization is a condition for the expression of collective pride in Catalonia’s imperial prospects.

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the role of local people in the success or failure of imperial expansion. Far from being mere victims, these people found ways to profit from imperial maneuverings: they could find employment and profit as allies, or they might direct the interests and energies of imperial powers against their traditional enemies. Indeed, imperial “expansion” was very often illusory, and Europeans' ability to project power actually depended entirely on local cooperation. The remainder of the chapter discusses the model set by the Spanish empire to which other European powers aspired; and the importance of intercultural alliances in the success of imperial expansion, which in turn resulted in new forms of warfare.