Economic, Geopolitical, and Ideological Transformations in Iberian Colonial Landscapes

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel traces the role played by particular financial interests, the administrative crisis of Iberian-Colonial institutions within the incorporation of the Americas and the Pacific into non-Iberian European markets and ideological cultural landscapes from the mid-sixteenth to the eighteen centuries. Ben Post (Murray State University) reexamines Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora’s Los infortunios de Alonso Ramírez alongside several understudied works of poetry and prose to show the religious and political dangers posed by the New Spain’s oceanic trade. Through an analysis of treasure artifacts encountered in the New Spain and their respective narrative representations, Alexandria Dienstbier (Indiana University) studies the configuration of an Iberian vision of the New World and the development of an imperial construct that altered European political and religious institutions. Finally, Raúl Alencar (Tulane University) explores the undercover relations and trade in Lima between French and Peruvian merchants in the first decades of the 18th century and how these connections challenged the authority of the Iberian monopoly. These interdisciplinary approaches allow us to explain the encounters, tensions, and oppositions that characterized the economic opening of the New World between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Session Organizers

• Raúl Alencar

• Mariana-Cecilia C Velázquez, University of Nevada

Chair

• Raúl Alencar

Individual Presentations

• Smuggling Religious Difference into Colonial Mexican Literature - Ben Post, Murray State University

• Building an Empire from the Gold Up: Form, Function, and Finance in New Spanish Treasures - Alexandria Dienstbier, Indiana University

• War, Honor, and Contraband in the Spanish Caribbean: The social networks of Francisco Díaz Pimienta (1596-1653) - Leonardo Moreno-Alvarez

• Negotiate, Adapt and Mingle: The Merchants of Saint-Malo in Lima (1710-1720) - Raúl Alencar