Abstract
This chapter reviews some of the terms and concepts used in recent decades in the study of the Iberian empires, particularly composite imperial monarchies, compensatory history, and polycentrism. It asks to what extent this terminology facilitates or hinders dialogue with specialists of other empires. Attention is drawn to the similarities between recent approaches in Iberian and other historiographies, including the new imperial history, as well as to the difficulties for the globalization of historiographies that this specific vocabulary entails. To mitigate such problems, this chapter recommends emphasizing the content of ideas rather than a terminology frequently based on clichés that tends to underscore historical exceptionalism. From this perspective, the interrelations between global history and imperial history, on the one hand, and area studies, on the other, are also discussed, as well as the danger of a "nationalization" of global history and of the history of globalization already perceptible in some countries.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter has been written within the framework of the FEDER research group UPO-1264973 “In search for the Atlantic aristocracies. Latin America and the peninsular Spanish elites, 1492–1824” PI, Bartolomé Yun Casalilla; and of the PAIDI research group HUM 1000 “The history of globalization: violence, negotiation and interculturality,” of which the principal investigator is Professor Igor Pérez Tostado. Both projects are financed by the Regional Government of Andalusia. I thank Bethany Aram for her help in the writing of this text.
- 2.
Though in that book I referred mainly to the European territories, the proposal comprises also American areas as well as the Philippines and the Atlantic world in order to suggest a vision that, while it takes a different perspective, also complemented the concept of composite monarchy (Yun-Casalilla 2009, p. 14).
- 3.
This radical presentation comes also from a perhaps forced critique made by the defenders of the term regarding previous views, including that of the composite monarchies, which they consider depart from the idea that “the ‘true’ [sic] politics only occurred in Madrid and Lisbon, while the periphery [everywhere else] was a mere receptor that could accept or reject what the center had to offer” (Cardim et al. 2012, p. 5). Such criticism of the idea of composite monarchies hardly fits with the attempt to break with the idea of political action as dictated only from the center that is crucial for Elliott and Königsberger. It fits even less with their research on the functioning of the monarchy from the periphery—in Sicily and Catalonia—and these polities’ conflicts with the Crown. The rapid reception of the polycentric paradigm and terminology in Latin American historiographies appears understandable and even positive, inasmuch as they stress subaltern agency, although their novelty with respect to the “compensatory history” of Russell Wood and the Brazilian historians is less evident.
- 4.
Ghosh obviously referred to the classic study Gallagher and Robinson (1953) and to other analyses in the same directions such as Eric Wolf (1982).
- 5.
This outcome has not been the case with the concept of composite monarchies. John Elliott’s essay speaks of this sort of political formation as something present in most of the European monarchies of the early modern period, though different balances among the different polities and between each of them and the ruling dynasty were present.
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Yun-Casalilla, B. (2023). Concepts and Viewpoints in Early Modern Iberian Imperial History and the Globalization of Historiographies. In: Hyden-Hanscho, V., Stangl, W. (eds) Formative Modernities in the Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8417-4_1
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