'Spiritual Empire’: Spanish Diplomats and Latin America circa 1926 (original) (raw)
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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
(Comparativ 3_4/2020): Comparing Colonialism: Beyond European Exceptionalism
Comparativ, 2020
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/161 Editorial The topic of empire continues to keep the social sciences at large busy. After it had seemed for a long time as if the topic had definitely been handed over to historians, who are concerned with a past phenomenon that only occurs as a nostalgic reflex in the present, empires are suddenly also of interest again to the social scientists concerned with the present under quite different aspects. The question of whether the United States was and still is an empire and whether such imperial configurations were needed to maintain an international order after the multilateralism of the Cold War had come to an end played a crucial role in relaunching the debate about empires. A second layer of interest was informed by postcolonially inspired interest in the continuing mechanisms of earlier colonial empires now striking back in various ways and thus remaining present in today’s seemingly post-imperial world. At a third level, observations that view empires as a rather loose association of rule with unfinished territorialization came to the fore in interpretations of empire as a more appropriate form of governance under conditions of global or at least transregional weakening or even dissolution of boundaries. While we recently looked back at the similarities and differences between empires for the historical period from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in a historically comparative thematic issue of this journal (no 3/2019), the current double issue, conceived from the perspective of historical sociology, is concerned with a geographically even broader comparison that seeks to revise the thesis of a European exceptionalism in the history of colonialism and imperialism that is often put forward implicitly rather than explicitly. This makes it necessary, first of all, to look for colonial imperial expansion also outside Europe and not to construct a “non-European world” as the target of expansion, as an overseas history, now out of fashion, did for a long time. This means not only to question the geography of comparative studies of empires, but also to reflect critically on their privileged time frame and to include examples that lie beyond the particular European expansion period that is often portrayed as starting in the fifteenth century. In a third level, the nesting of empires is at stake, because the confrontation with imperial conquest from outside by no means put an end to state-building processes inside the imperially overformed regions, from which a whole complex of new questions about the relationship of the various empire-building processes can be derived. Colonialism, in this perspective, is not a relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans, but a much broader, almost universal kaleidoscope of subjugation, settlement into regions other than the one of origin, and arrangements between external and internal elites. What distinguishes pre-modern forms of imperial rule and colony-building from those since the late eighteenth century, however, are (1) their positioning in struggles for dominance at a global scale, (2) the complicated blending between the formation of nation-states and ongoing attempts at imperial expansion, which can by no means be reduced to a teleology from empire to nation, and (3) the relationship between capitalist adventurism and political projects of empire building, which follow different logics but always interact. To abstract these processes in such a way that they can be made available as theoretical elements to other disciplines requires at the same time a wide range of expertise for many case studies, an important selection of which is brought together in this issue. Specialists will read these case studies as enriching knowledge about individual empires, while the thematic issue as a whole, not least with its introduction by the editors and its afterword by Frederick Cooper, pursues an ambition that goes beyond the individual case and at the same time offers a broadening of perspective beyond meticulously deconstructed European exceptionalism and a contribution to a general theory of empires.
Open Library of Humanities, 2023
This text proposes the consideration of the political culture of Spanish colonialism and the Hispanic imperial project from a historical perspective concerning so-called 'Spanish fascism'. This contribution argues that Spanish fascism was the consequence of colonial ideology derived from the Spanish Empire in a context that could be considered as the return of coloniality into the Iberian Peninsula in the 1930s, after the closure and failure of the Spanish colonial enterprise first in the Caribbean and then, second, in Africa. This article proposes a journey through the first third of the 20th century, from the end of the Spanish colonial presence in Latin America, the Caribbean and the North of Africa, to the return of the Africanist military, imperial ideology, and colonial violence into the Peninsula. The paper considers the period from the Battle of Annual (1921) to the revolution in Asturias (1934), the military coup in 1936 and the colonial military's establishment of the Francoist dictatorship.
New directions in the political history of the Spanish-Atlantic world, c. 1750–1850
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 groundbreaking books on the early CONTACT Gabriel Paquette
European Imperialism, its histories, its ideology, and related criticism
This paper begins with a brief introduction to the core ideology justifying European imperialism and the criticism toward the ideology. It then present several independent sections which different aspects of European imperialist history in chronicle order from Christopher's time to World War 2. The last part of the paper detail the racism against black, the means to justify those racism, and the covert prestige of 'Aryan' in American and Canada.
The present book is the result of the conference ‘Renovatio, inventio, absentia imperii. From the Roman Empire to Contemporary Imperialism’, held in Brussels at the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Academia Belgica in Rome (September 11-13, 2014). At the heart of the conference was the ‘reception’, ‘Nachleben’ or ‘permanence’ of the Roman Empire, of an idea and a historical paradigm which since classical Antiquity has supported the most widespread claims to obtain and consolidate power. The volume’s focus is on culture in a broad sense, i.e. including besides the arts, philosophy, religion and, most importantly, discourse. As such, a wide array of themes are subjected to academic scrutiny. Whereas the main focus is on Europe and North America, some contributors also reach out towards non-Western contexts, whether or not directly related to the Roman example. A theoretical and sociological dimension is also added thanks to the discussion on methodological issues. More specifically, the following question(s) receive particular attention: what is our position as researchers, embedded in a contemporary, often Western, democratic and capitalist context; what about the notion of empire itself, its constituent elements and the kind of ideological prerogatives to which it is generally subjected; in other words, apart from the many historical variants and instances of reception of empire, through which filters can, and inevitably do, we approach this topic? A question that has become ever more pregnant since the beginning of the twenty-first century, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the events of September 11, which have revivified what could be called American ‘imperialism’, and at a time when an essentially economic variant, driven by ‘emerging’ powers such as China, has increasingly contested existing power structures. In light of such meta-historical awareness, this book touches as much on the nature of the Roman Empire as it does on its historical legacy and, more importantly so, on who claims the latter inheritance throughout the most diverse epochs. By discussing some highly contrasting views upon this topic, participants explore issues that are of fundamental importance to the writing, not only of cultural history, but also of history itself.
Revista Mexicana del Caribe, 2001
T the so-called "Columbian Encounter." Throughout Latin America governments sponsored countless exhibits, parades, conferences, and books to commemorate the "discovery" of America. Progressive scholars and community activists also took the opportunity to point out the negative repercussions of European expansionism on non-western peoples across the globe. Since 1992, an increasing number of insightful studies have revisited Eurocreole constructions of national and regional identities and histories in Latin America. This appeal stems partly from the convergence of several inter-related factors: widespread dissatisfaction with institutional histories written by and about the European and Creole elites; the concomitant search for the submerged voices of subaltern groups who have been marginalized in the canonical narratives; the growing interest in the significance of Trans-Atlantic and global exchanges and the ongoing recasting of early Latin American history that stresses developments in the colonial periphery. This essay reviews three works, written within the past few years, which typify these trends. Despite differences in methodologies and scope, these works confirm the links between history-making and the European colonization of Latin America.