This Option Paper is designed to explore the global empires of Spain and Portugal in the early modern period through methodological issues raised by their archives. It focuses on the entangled interactions of the people who carried out, contested, and negotiated Iberian exploration and expansion from Africa to the Americas to Asia, and poses critical questions about how the production of knowledge about these people and processes is informed by archival practices (historical and present). A guiding aim of the course is to think about how our understandings of the Iberian empires change when we place at the center of our inquiry questions about the archive—not merely as a repository of historical texts and objects, but as a complex web of structures, processes, and epistemologies.
Special attention will be given to the many ways in which those living under the Spanish and Portuguese empires experienced, described, and opposed their rule, as well as to the external challenges that the Iberian powers faced in the age of Eurasian empires. Along the way we will ask: How might we define the archive(s) of the Spanish and Portuguese empires (as a concept, place, institution, practice)? How do our notions of archive affect our approach to the historical record? Where do Iberian archives begin and end? To what extent can we use them to reconstruct histories of race, slavery, and indigenous groups? How, and why, do certain archives and institutions collect what they do? How does belonging to a particular archive or collection change the meaning of an object, text, or piece of visual evidence as well as how we think about the people who used, produced, and preserved it? This paper combines a specific focus on the archive with the methods of comparative history and connected history to allow students to develop an appreciation of global trends across the Iberian world alongside a clear sense of the differences existing at local levels.
