The [Oxford] Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World

Abstract

This collaborative Oxford Handbook of Borderlands in the Iberian World integrates interdisciplinary approaches to illustrate the historical processes that produced borderlands in the Americas and connected them to global circuits of exchange and migration in the early modern world, extending from the fifteenth to the nineteenth-centuries. It brings together specialists in the Spanish and Portuguese imperial spheres, their geographic and cultural borderlands in both South and North America, and their maritime networks across the Caribbean, Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Its objectives emphasize (1) scholarship published in Latin America as well as new research published in diverse academic communities; (2) transdisciplinary research in fields such as ecology, archaeology, art history, geography, musicology, and anthropology that inform the current field of borderlands scholarship; (3) accessible language and imagery to make this work appeal widely to students, teachers, and scholars. “Borderlands” as a concept and a field of academic inquiry has opened new dimensions of interdisciplinary and critical thought in the last quarter-century at the same time that ethnohistorical approaches to imperialism and colonialism have produced critical analyses of European imperial spheres in the Americas and other world regions. This Handbook offers new research on environmental change, powerful indigenous federations in both North and South America, gendered histories in the mixed and volatile social fabrics of borderlands, indigenous enslavement and the complex degrees of difference between freedom and bondage, Afro-descendant populations in the Spanish and Portuguese borderlands, interethnic relations, and cultural productions in the arts and sciences.