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Theorising the Ibero-American Atlantic

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2802582

1527-1900

James M. Boyden,

Historical Studies in Latin America

Curiously, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra begins his foreword to this book by asserting that “there was no such thing as the Iberian Atlantic” (p. vii). He objects to stereotypes in Atlantic history that contrast a brutal, backward South with a more enlightened, forward-looking North, and his solution “requires that we step back from typologies based on generalizations about various national-imperial Atlantic experiences” (p. xii). While this rejection of a subdivided Atlantic historiography is thought provoking, it sketches a problematic brief for the editors of a volume focused on the Ibero-American Atlantic. To the credit of both the editors and authors, however, the essays collected here present valuable insights into the entangled histories of Spain and Portugal and their former American colonies.In addition to the foreword, the editors' introduction, and an epilogue by Joan Ramon Resina, the volume includes 12 essays ranging temporally from the Columbian encounter to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and in scope from the ambitious attempts of Francisco Bethencourt and José Moya to sharpen and expand definitions of the Iberian Atlantic world to finely wrought miniatures like Thomas Harrington's study of the role of Catalans in forging Uruguayan identity. All the contributions are worth reading, and some link together nicely to provide valuable perspectives on the field and its future direction.Francisco Bethencourt underscores the important role of the Portuguese in the Iberian Atlantic and in an incipient global economy, noting the Lusitanian permeation of the Spanish empire even before the union of 1580–1640, the domination by Portuguese asentistas of the slave trade to Spanish colonies between 1595 and 1640, and the related drain of contraband silver via the Río de la Plata, which financed Portuguese trade for East Asian goods when returns of African gold had dwindled. David Brookshaw also stresses the centrality of the Lusophone Atlantic, perhaps overstating it when he asserts that “it also should be remembered that the Portuguese role in the traffic of humans and cultures backwards and forwards across the Atlantic was far more important than that of the Spanish” (p. 37). Nevertheless, insistence upon the broadly Iberian heritage of what is perhaps too often envisioned as the Spanish Atlantic is one of the signal virtues of this collection.Its most valuable contribution, though, is to advance comprehension of the Ibero-American Atlantic as a human and cultural system that has far outlived the usual encounter-to-abolition time frame of Atlantic world studies and that remains vital today. Bethencourt argues that “language, religion, and a model of social interaction” comprise the lasting legacies of the Iberian Atlantic (p. 35). Where Cañizares-Esguerra's foreword suggested the essential uniformity of race relations and racial attitudes in the north and south Atlantic, Bethencourt reasserts an older wisdom that Ibero-America continues to offer greater “space for ethnic mixing and individual mobility” (p. 36).José Moya's “The Iberian Atlantic, 1492–2012” is the volume's most ambitious and stimulating essay. Moya bluntly attacks historians' conceptualization of the Atlantic world as a phenomenon of early modern times without relevance much past 1800. His argument rests on striking statistics — for example, that “the volume of transatlantic trade in the three decades before 1914 surpassed that of the three centuries before 1800” (p. 51) — and on a masterful command of the history, volume, and cultural consequences of human migration in the Iberian Atlantic. He argues that transatlantic mixing has often been underestimated: “The Iberian cultural imprint [in the Americas] often became invisible precisely because it was so deep and buried in time that it appeared to most observers as local, natural, and indigenous” (p. 60). Noting the massive influx of Latin American immigrants to Spain around the turn of the twenty-first century, Moya observes “that the Iberian Atlantic may have begun with the end of Amerindian empires but it did not end with the demise of Iberian empires” (p. 73). He insists that this system lives on because it remains unmatched in the history of imperial ventures for “the density and longevity of human migrations and the resulting high levels of social and cultural contact, connection, and circulation” (p. 73).In their essay analyzing the contours and consequences of recent female Latin American immigration into Spain, Daniela Flesler and N. Michelle Shepherd document a disheartening dimension of this ongoing circulation of peoples and cultures. They argue persuasively that Latin American nannies and maids, “many of whom have left their children in their countries of origin, allow middle-class Spanish women to work outside of the home without having to share domestic and care work equally with their husbands, thus maintaining a patriarchal structure” (p. 243). But if this study depicts the lingering bonds of empire as rather more surly than they appear in Moya's portrayal of the Iberian Atlantic, there can be no doubt of their continuing significance.There are other treasurable essays here, and anyone with a scholarly interest in the field should read this collection. Harald Braun and Lisa Vollendorf deserve praise for bringing together talented contributors with diverse viewpoints. Taken together, these essays demonstrate that in theorizing — or merely studying — the Ibero-American Atlantic, we ought not underestimate the duration of its history or the Portuguese role in its forging.