Table Of ContentTheorising the Ibero-American Atlantic
The Medieval and Early
Modern Iberian World
(Formerly Medieval Iberian Peninsula)
Edited by
Larry J. Simon (Western Michigan University)
Gerard Wiegers (University of Amsterdam)
Arie Schippers (University of Amsterdam)
Isidro J. Rivera (University of Kansas)
Mercedes García-Arenal (CCHS/CSIC)
VOLUME 53
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/memi
Theorising the Ibero-American
Atlantic
Edited by
Harald E. Braun
Lisa Vollendorf
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2013
Cover illustration: 1835 Thomas Bradford Atlas Map: Atlantic Ocean. Courtesy of Mr. Murray Hudson
and Alabama Maps, University of Alabama
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Theorising the Ibero-American Atlantic / edited by Harald E. Braun, Lisa Vollendorf.
pages cm. -- (The medieval and early modern Iberian world, ISSN 1569-1934 ; volume 53)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-21610-5 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-25806-8 (e-book) 1. Atlantic
Ocean Region--Civilization. 2. Latin America--Civiliztion--Spanish influences. 3. Latin America--
Civilization--Portuguese influences. 4. Spain--Civilization--Latin American influences. 5. Portugal--
Civilization--Latin American influences. I. Braun, Harald (Harald Ernst) editor of compilation.
II. Vollendorf, Lisa, editor of compilation.
D210.T46 2013
980--dc23
2013028209
This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters
covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the
humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 1569-1934
ISBN 978-90-04-21610-5 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-25806-8 (e-book)
Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
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Fees are subject to change.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
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CONTENTS
Foreword ...................................................................................................................vii
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Introduction
The Atlantic Turn: Rethinking the Ibero-American Atlantic ........................1
Harald E. Braun and Lisa Vollendorf
PART ONE
DEFINING THE IBERO-AMERICAN ATLANTIC
The Iberian Atlantic: Ties, Networks, and Boundaries .................................15
Francisco Bethencourt
Understanding the Lusophone Atlantic ...........................................................37
David Brookshaw
The Iberian Atlantic, 1492–2012 .......................................................................51
José C. Moya
“A Hemisphere to Itself ”: The American Revolution and the
Entangled History of the Western Atlantic .................................................75
Eliga H. Gould
PART TWO
EARLY MODERN EXCHANGES: IDENTITIES AND TIES (1492–1850)
Gender in the Atlantic World: Women’s Writing in Iberia
and Latin America .............................................................................................99
Lisa Vollendorf and Grady C. Wray
Between Ethnicity, Commerce, Religion, and Race: The Elusive
Definition of an Early Modern Jewish Atlantic ......................................117
David Graizbord
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vi contents
Scientific Practices in the Sixteenth-Century Iberian Atlantic ...............141
Mauricio Nieto Olarte
Literary Exchange in the Portuguese-Brazilian Atlantic
before 1822 .......................................................................................................159
Vanda Anastácio
PART THREE
TRANSATLANTIC MIGRATIONS: CULTURE AND HISTORY
RECONSIDERED (1850-TODAY)
The Origins of Atlantic Modernism and the Spanish-Speaking
World ..................................................................................................................175
Andrew Ginger
Hidden in Plain View: Catalans and the Making of Modern
Uruguay .............................................................................................................199
Thomas Harrington
Theses on the Politics of Memory across the Atlantic ...............................221
Luis Martín-Cabrera
Domesticity, Motherhood, and Transnational Reproductive Work
in Contemporary Latin American Immigration to Spain ....................241
Daniela Flesler and N. Michelle Shepherd
Epilogue
Transatlantic Hispanism or Ibero-Atlanticism? ..........................................265
Joan Ramon Resina
Works Cited ...........................................................................................................273
Notes on Contributors ........................................................................................303
Index ........................................................................................................................309
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FOREWORD
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
There was no such thing as the Iberian Atlantic, yet this is a book about
it. One resorts to the category of the Iberian Atlantic often in despair.
Take, for example, the 2007–2008 traveling British Museum exhibit
of John White’s watercolours, a collection of some 70 stunning images of
the peoples and nature of Roanoke Island produced by White between
1584 and 1590. Both the curators and the experts commissioned to write
the catalogue did not notice that White used Spanish and Portuguese
taxonomies to name dozens of plants, fish, birds, and animals.1 That such
a prominent feature of the plates went unnoticed is emblematic of a
much larger and deeply troubling pattern in the scholarship on colonial
British America. Clearly the so-called Iberian Atlantic determined the
ways the English understood the natural history of Roanoke. A history
of colonial Virginia that does not take into account the history of the
Portuguese and Spanish expansion in the South Atlantic is blinkered
and provincial, as has been demonstrated by Linda M. Heywood and John
K. Thornton. Most of the slaves who arrived in Jamestown in the first half
of the seventeenth century were taken by Anglo-Dutch pirates from
Portuguese slavers off the coast of Kongo and Angola. The hybrid Ndogoo-
Kongo-Portuguese slaves left a lasting cultural imprint on Virginian plan-
tation societies well into the eighteenth century.2 The Iberian Atlantic
therefore comes in handy to bludgeon scholars into understanding the
obvious: processes initiated in the South profoundly affected historical
developments in the North.
In most textbooks, 1492 represents the onset of modernity. It allegedly
marks the year in which the resources and labor of an entire new conti-
nent (America) launched another (Europe) into ascending global domi-
nance. The cost of modernity, however, proved enormous: “germs and
steel” wiped out entire Amerindian civilizations, and millions of Africans
1 Kim Sloan, ed., A New World: England’s First View of America (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2007).
2 Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the
Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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viii jorge cañizares-esguerra
were forcefully taken across the Atlantic to work as slaves. Mountains of
American ores extracted from cavernous, hellish mines became the silver,
gold, diamonds, and emeralds that opened for Europe long-sought Asian
markets. African demand for American cachaza and tobacco helped pay
for the African slaves needed to keep the American ports, ships, mines,
households, ranches, and plantations running. Through the law of unin-
tended consequences, however, this system of institutionalised brutality
helped foster new humane institutions back in Europe: science, free mar-
kets, and democracy. This curious narrative has neatly managed to sepa-
rate modernity geographically, situating its nefarious underbelly far from
the location of its alleged humane breakthroughs. The “Black Legend” has
long done this dirty political work: it places modernity’s most unappeal-
ing aspects in the southern, Iberian half and its most redeeming features
in the northern half.
The Black Legend has yet to lose its grip on Atlantic historiography.
Take for example John Elliott’s monumental Empires of the Atlantic World.
Through a stunning work of synthesis, Elliott demonstrates the changing
patterns of the British and Spanish Atlantics, focusing both on their
resemblances and differences. According to Elliott, it was the chance
encounter with inexhaustible silver mines in Mexico and Peru and large
settled indigenous populations located right next to the mines that
allowed the Spanish crown to have the wherewithal to develop dense lay
and clerical bureaucracies. These bureaucracies limited colonial auton-
omy and stifled religious and legal pluralisms. In the British Atlantic, on
the other hand, the crown lacked the resources to impose religious
and political will, creating a more decentralised system. Although both
Atlantics did expand through institutionalised brutality, only one, the
British, developed the two most distinctive, redeeming features of moder-
nity: democracy and religious pluralism.3
How to counter such segregated cultural cartographies of modernity?
In his extraordinarily provocative essay, José Moya goes beyond an
emphasis on institutionalised brutality to focus on the Iberian Atlantic
as the incubator of large-scale urbanization, industrial economies of scale,
massive transatlantic voluntary migrations, and linguistically homo-
genous populations. Moya brings nuance to those most reductive
narratives of the Iberian Atlantic. There are other contributors to this
3 John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
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