The Luso-Spanish Composite Global Empire, 1598–1640

Abstract

AbstractBreaking with a tradition of studying the Spanish and the Portuguese empires separately, this chapter adopts a global perspective to analyse imperial networks and the way family and personal relations and informal institutions articulated them. The asymmetries in information and agency at a local level also elucidate the terms of negotiations between the metropolis and the colonies, the difficulties in controlling the different imperial nodes and the problems of regulation and arbitration from Madrid and Lisbon.Though these empires had been agents of globalization, this chapter argues that globalization became their main enemy. It enhanced the negotiational power of local elites and created new routes of trade escaping the metropolis’ control and weakening the states. The study of the European wars (1621–1648/59) from a global perspective shows that tensions in the periphery of the empires were at the base of the Hapsburgs’ difficulties and in the increasing conflict between Lisbon and Madrid, thus viewed from a new perspective. Contrary to the traditional image, the chapter demonstrates the relevant contribution to warfare by non-Castilian territories and that the mobilization of military and financial resources kept working as a decentralized apparatus, thus enhancing the power of local elites, particularly in the case of America, which kept an increasing proportion of its fiscal output.