Trajectories of Reform in the Spanish World: Careering, Networks and Empire under the Early Bourbons (1700-1759)

This project explores how early modern empires were built through the experiences, relationships and careers of individuals whose lives were spent in multiple sites of empire. It challenges our tendency to study 'composite monarchies' as sets of bilateral relations between a dominant centre and multiple peripheries, highlighting both the dialogic nature of these relations and the importance of periphery-periphery connections and interactions. Its main aim is to study how ideas, institutions and social structures often associated with the 'centralising absolutism' of the early-Bourbon monarchy in Spain were influenced by travel to and contact with different sites of empire across the Spanish world. By analysing the careers, networks and writings of royal officials involved in the design or implementation of reform in the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish Circum-Caribbean and the Andean highlands, the project will show that experiencing various sites of empire shaped their understanding of the constituent territories of the monarchy, their views of the empire as a whole, opinions of what needed to be reformed, and of how such reforms should be introduced. Simultaneously, by studying their careers and the familial and patron-client networks they built, the project will contribute to our understanding of how different parts of the Spanish world contributed to the formation and transformation of institutions and personnel associated with imperial reform, thus further problematizing our understanding of the relationship between sites traditionally described as centres and peripheries.
The project adopts a geographical approach determined by the 'life trajectories' of the men studied, transcending both the boundaries of the modern nations of the Iberoamerican world and the politico-administrative units of the early modern Spanish Monarchy; it offers an organic understanding of the Spanish world centred around the lived experiences of the imperial subjects of the early Bourbons. By stressing movement and connections through space, rather than focusing on moments spent in a specific territory, the project sheds new light on the structures, connections and itineraries which bound the Spanish world together. It testifies to the complex, interwoven networks and structures characteristic of the early Bourbon Spanish world and early modern Atlantic empires more generally.
The project combines detailed case studies of royal officials who served in various parts of the Spanish world with prosopographical analysis of their professional trajectories and personal links. Due to its emphasis on exploring experiences in and of different sites of empire, it will draw on correspondence, notarial records, and published works in multiple repositories. Through extensive analysis of sources spanning royal officials' imperial careers, it is possible to study the evolution of how they presented themselves and their aspirations and how they imagined the empire; crucially, these sources will also allow us to think about 'trans-imperial practices', the ways in which these lives built the empire. The cases studied represent various middling royal officials, (provincial governors and corregidores or provincial magistrates), from different backgrounds (lawyers, soldiers and members of the provincial nobility), and from different parts of the empire (Navarre, the Canary Islands, South America) whose lives were spent across multiple destinations (from Spanish Flanders to Seville, Florida, the Caribbean and the Andes).
The 23-months project will lead to a series of academic outputs (including a symposium, journal articles, an edited volume and a monograph) of benefit to scholars interested in the history of empires, Latin America, the Atlantic world and enlightened reformism, amongst others. It will also produce a website, an online exhibition and a selection of high school-level teaching materials aimed at non-academic beneficiaries.

The project seeks to encourage non-academic audiences, primarily in the Hispanic world but also in the UK, to change their assumptions about Latin America's early modern history. In the Hispanic public imagination, this period is still often considered static and monotonous, characterised by Spanish oppression and teleologically defined as a prelude to the early nineteenth-century Wars of Independence. The project proposes two key, interconnected dissemination activities articulated around the project website and linked with stakeholders in various parts of the Hispanic world.
We will put together a free, bilingual, online exhibition comprising a collection of documents and objects connected with the lives, networks and places studied in the project. This will include examples of correspondence produced by our subjects, historical maps and images of the places where they lived, and visualisations of the networks they built. Drawn from a range of museums, archives and cultural institutions in Spain and Spanish America, the items will illustrate the conceptualisation of various sites of empire, officials' self-perceptions and career aspirations, the development of early Bourbon reforms, and the ways in which the personal and professional networks and experiences of royal officials contributed to binding the empire together. By emphasising experiences and developments shared across the region, the exhibition aims to challenge prevailing national narratives and encourage the visitor to reconsider what they know about Spanish America's early modern past.
An online exhibition has been chosen over a material one because, through the web, we can reach a much wider audience including local communities and the wider public across Spain and Latin America. We will promote the exhibition through channels including the Spanish and Latin American cultural institutions which hold featured objects, and discussion networks and websites with a strong presence among historians and history enthusiasts in the Hispanic world. It will be launched at a public event in central Manchester aimed primarily at the Spanish and Spanish-speaking community in Greater Manchester and the North-West of England. Like our audiences overseas, they will benefit from the project by being encouraged to reconsider how they think about the early modern Spanish world, moving away from narratives focused on modern nation states, and recognising instead the interconnected nature of the region's early modern past.
We will also develop a history lesson plan and selection of primary sources, drawn from the project's results, aimed at high school students in the Spanish-speaking world. The materials will be hosted on the project's website, freely available for teachers across the world, and will link with the content of the online exhibition. In Latin America, the teaching of the region's early modern history occupies minimal space in official curricula at elementary and middle school levels and its teaching at high school level, both in terms of how much is covered and how it is taught, is often at the discretion of individual teachers. The teaching materials will help high school history teachers in Spain and Latin America expand their knowledge of how imperial reality was created at the local level, on an every-day basis by individuals in early modern Spanish America. This will help teachers and pupils better understand the connections, exchanges and circulation between different parts of the Spanish world, and revaluate their pre-independence histories. This output will draw on the CoI's experience training high-school teachers in Spain, together with the PI's previous experience of, and contacts from, teaching high school students in Mexico City. Further links with schools in Latin America, through which we can encourage the use of this resource, will be built while the team members are conducting archival research in the region.