Portuguese-Spanish Interactions in Colonial South America

Abstract

On 7 June 1494, Portugal and Spain signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, an agreement that divided the world by a line that cut from pole to pole and began 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. This line allowed Portugal to claim possession of the coast of Brazil but it was quickly ignored by westward exploration movements that brought Portuguese, Spanish, Indigenous people, and people of African descent into contact and provided grounds for numerous conflicts in the following centuries. Even with the diplomatic efforts that led to the treaties of Madrid (1750) and San Ildefonso (1777), the boundaries between Iberian domains in South America remained porous and uncertain. A quick look at a map of South America allows us to see that from the Río de la Plata to Amazonia and from Paraguay to Guayana, the possibilities for interaction between Natives, Iberians, and people of African origins were numerous; if we include the major ports of South America (Buenos Aires, Callao, Guayaquil, Cartagena, Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro) and the proximity of Angola, these possibilities, including legal and illegal trade, multiplied exponentially. We must not forget that Portugal and Spain did not remain opposite political entities during the early modern period. There were periods of political and diplomatic rapprochement and, of course, the years between 1580 and 1640, when Portugal was united with the Spanish empire in the so-called Iberian Union. Moreover, what it meant to be Portuguese—and what it meant to be Spanish—were also being defined. For these reasons, it is not surprising that historians have been concerned with the interactions between the Portuguese and Spanish in South America for a long time. Until the mid-20th-century, topics such as diplomacy, territorial demarcation, and military conflicts received more attention. In recent decades, however, historians have been more attentive to the interactions between individuals and groups “on the ground,” with special emphasis on the agency of Indigenous peoples, smugglers, merchants, slave traders, enslaved people of African origin, cartographers, and others. Modern historians have sought to understand how these frontier interactions influenced the formation of individuals’ identities, the personal and commercial networks they wove, and the knowledge about the environment they provided. Another topic of great importance concerns how Native peoples maintained their autonomy despite the expansion of the Iberian empires, especially during the eighteenth century. This article presents some of the most prominent works on each of these themes and resources for scholars to find relevant materials. Some studies are listed by theme (cartography, demarcation, diplomacy, etc.), while others are listed according to geographical subdivisions. Naturally, the studies that appear in thematic topics could also fit within regional categories, but we prefer to separate them by their relevance to the specific theme. In the regional topics, the “on the ground” interactions of Indigenous people with people of African, Spanish, and Portuguese origin stand out. Finally, it is important to note that in this essay, we concentrate on the colonial period, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and that we do not present references pertaining to the independence processes of South American countries, as we believe that this topic demands a separate essay.