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.

This open access book analyses Iberian expansion by using knowledge accumulated in recent years to test some of the most important theories regarding Europe’s economic development. Adopting a comparative perspective, it considers the impact of early globalization on Iberian and Western European institutions, social development and political economies. In spite of globalization’s minor importance from the commercial perspective before 1750, this book finds its impact decisive for institutional development, political economies, and processes of state-building in Iberia and Europe. The book engages current historiographies and revindicates the need to take the concept of composite monarchies as a point of departure in order to understand the period’s economic and social developments, analysing the institutions and societies resulting from contact with Iberian peoples in America and Asia. The outcome is a study that nuances and contests an excessively-negative yet prevalent image of the Iberian societies, explores the difficult relationship between empires and globalization and opens paths for comparisons to other imperial formations.

This book presents an unusual view on one of the most influential periods in world economic history: the Early Globalization. By this term, the notion that a process of genuine globalization took place in the Early Modern Era is defended. The authors propose that the canonical globalization—that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—was preceded by a century-long increasing economic integration between continents that were non-existent before 1492. The economic aspects of the Early Globalization, like market integration, price co-movements and international silver circulation, were very important. Notwithstanding, other dimensions of human life, which were affected by unprecedented intercontinental contacts, including free and forced migrations, changes in tastes and consumption, etc. The Fruits of Globalisation deals with some of the most important issues among the former and the latter. The book combines approaches from different disciplines, including quantitative and non-quantitative economic history, econometrics, international trade and demography. Overall, the vision of the Early Globalisation offered in this book is less pessimistic than in mainstream literature on the period.

The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic as a hemispheric system? : English merchants navigating the Iberian Atlantic / Mark Sheaves -- Agents of empire : Africans and the origins of English colonialism in the Americas / Michael Guasco -- Empires on drugs : pharmaceutical go-betweens and the Anglo-Portuguese alliance / Benjamin Breen -- Marrying utopia : Mary and Philip, Richard Eden, and the English alchemy of Spanish Peru / Christopher Heaney -- The pegs of a wider frame : Jewish merchants in Anglo-Iberian trade / Holly Snyder -- Entangled Irishman : George Dawson Flinter and Anglo-Spanish imperial rivalry / Christopher Schmidt-Nowara -- Planters and powerbrokers : George J.F. Clarke, Interracial Love, and allegiance in the revolutionary circum-Caribbean / Cameron B. Strang -- The "Iberian" justifications of territorial possession by pilgrims and Puritans in the colonization of America / Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra -- "As the Spaniards have always done" : the legacy of Florida's missions for Carolina Indian relations and the origins of the Yamasee War / Bradley Dixon -- Reluctant petitioners : English officials and the Spanish Caribbean / April Hatfield -- Enabling, implementing, experiencing entanglement : empires, sailors, and coastal peoples in the British-Spanish Caribbean / Ernesto Bassi -- The Seven Years' War and the globalization of Anglo-Iberian imperial entanglement : the view from Manila / Kristie Flannery

This Handbook re-examines the concept of early modern history in a European and global context. The term 'early modern' has been familiar, especially in Anglophone scholarship, for four decades and is securely established in teaching, research, and scholarly publishing. More recently, however, the unity implied in the notion has fragmented, while the usefulness and even the validity of the term, and the historical periodisation which it incorporates, have been questioned. The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350-1750 provides an account of the development of the subject during the past half-century, but primarily offers an integrated and comprehensive survey of present knowledge, together with some suggestions as to how the field is developing. It aims both to interrogate the notion of "early modernity" itself and to survey early modern Europe as an established field of study. The overriding aim will be to establish that 'early modern' is not simply a chronological label but possesses a substantive integrity. Volume II is devoted to "Cultures and Power", opening with chapters on philosophy, science, art and architecture, music, and the Enlightenment. Subsequent sections examine 'Europe beyond Europe', with the transformation of contact with other continents during the first global age, and military and political developments, notably the expansion of state power.

A vivid reading of globalization through centuries of Iberian peoples, places and encounters.

Reveals how global trade shaped early modern economic, social and political development, and inaugurated the first era of globalization.

In this important new book the renowned historian Serge Gruzinski returns to two episodes in the sixteenth century which mark a decisive stage in global history and show how China and Mexico experienced the expansion of Europe. In the early 1520s, Magellan set sail for Asia by the Western route, Cortes seized Mexico and some Portuguese based in Malacca dreamed of colonizing China. The Aztec Eagle was destroyed but the Chinese Dragon held strong and repelled the invaders - after first seizing their cannon. For the first time, people from three continents encountered one other, confronted one other and their lives became entangled. These events were of great interest to contemporaries and many people at the time grasped the magnitude of what was going on around them. The Iberians succeeded in America and failed in China. The New World became inseparable from the Europeans who were to conquer it, while the Celestial Empire became, for a long time to come, an unattainable goal. Gruzinski explores this encounter between civilizations that were different from one another but that already fascinated contemporaries, and he shows that our world today bears the mark of this distant age. For it was in the sixteenth century that human history began to be played out on a global stage. It was then that connections between different parts of the world began to accelerate, not only between Europe and the Americas but also between Europe and China. This is what is revealed by a global history of the sixteenth century, conceived as another way of reading the Renaissance, less Eurocentric and more in tune with our age.

Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a person of mixed European and American Indian ancestry. Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in The Mestizo Mind. Looking at the fifteenth-century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the mélange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial government; and Amerindian visualizations of Jesus and Perseus. These physical and cultural encounters created a new culture, a new individual, and a phenomenon we now call globalization. Revealing globalization's early origins, Gruzinski then fast forwards to the contemporary mélange seen in the films of Peter Greenaway and Wong Kar-Wai to argue that over 500 years of intermingling has produced the mestizo mind, a state of mixed thinking that we all possess. A masterful alchemy of history, anthropology, philosophy and visual analysis, The Mestizo Mind definitively conceptualizes the clash of civilizations in the style of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock.

From the late fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the Hispanic Monarchy was one of the largest and most diverse political communities known in history. At its apogee, it stretched from the Castilian plateau to the high peaks of the Andes; from the cosmopolitan cities of Seville, Naples, or Mexico City to Santa Fe and San Francisco; from Brussels to Buenos Aires and from Milan to Manila. During those centuries, Spain left its imprint across vast continents and distant oceans contributing in no minor way to the emergence of our globalised era. This was true not only in an economic sense-the Hispano-American silver peso transported across the Atlantic and the Pacific by the Spanish fleets was arguably the first global currency, thus facilitating the creation of a world economic system-but intellectually and artistically as well. The most extraordinary cultural exchanges took place in practically every corner of the Hispanic world, no matter how distant from the metropolis. At various times a descendant of the Aztec nobility was translating a Baroque play into Nahuatl to the delight of an Amerindian and mixed audience in the market of Tlatelolco; an Andalusian Dominican priest was writing the first Western grammar of the Chinese language in Fuzhou, a Chinese city that enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Spanish Philippines; a Franciscan friar was composing a piece of polyphonic music with lyrics in Quechua to be played in a church decorated with Moorish-style ceilings in a Peruvian valley; or a multi-ethnic team of Amerindian and Spanish naturalists was describing in Latin, Spanish and local vernacular languages thousands of medicinal plants, animals and minerals previously unknown to the West. And, most probably, at the same time that one of those exchanges were happening, the members of the School of Salamanca were laying the foundations of modern international law or formulating some of the first modern theories of price, value and money, Cervantes was writing Don Quixote, Velázquez was painting Las Meninas, or Goya was exposing both the dark and bright sides of the European Enlightenment. Actually, whenever we contemplate the galleries devoted to Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán, Murillo or Goya in the Prado Museum in Madrid; when we visit the National Palace in Mexico City, a mission in California, a Jesuit church in Rome or the Intramuros quarter in Manila; or when we hear Spanish being spoken in a myriad of accents in the streets of San Francisco, New Orleans or Manhattan we are experiencing some of the past and present fruits of an always vibrant and still expanding cultural community. As the reader can infer by now, this book is about how Spain and the larger Hispanic world have contributed to world history and in particular to the history of civilisation, not only at the zenith of the Hispanic Monarchy but throughout a much longer span of time.