Formative Modernities in the Early

Modern Atlantic and Beyond: Identities,

Polities and Glocal Economies
Veronika Hyden-Hanscho
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/formative-modernities-in-the-early-modern-atlantic-an
d-beyond-identities-polities-and-glocal-economies-veronika-hyden-hanscho/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Economies of Literature and Knowledge in Early Modern

Europe: Change and Exchange Subha Mukherji

https://ebookmass.com/product/economies-of-literature-and-
knowledge-in-early-modern-europe-change-and-exchange-subha-
mukherji/

Tudor Empire: The Making of Early Modern Britain and

the British Atlantic World, 1485-1603 Jessica S. Hower

https://ebookmass.com/product/tudor-empire-the-making-of-early-
modern-britain-and-the-british-atlantic-world-1485-1603-jessica-
s-hower/

Agents beyond the State: The Writings of English

Travelers, Soldiers, and Diplomats in Early Modern
Europe Mark Netzloff

https://ebookmass.com/product/agents-beyond-the-state-the-
writings-of-english-travelers-soldiers-and-diplomats-in-early-
modern-europe-mark-netzloff/

The Madman and the Churchrobber: Law and Conflict in

Early Modern England Jason Peacey

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-madman-and-the-churchrobber-
law-and-conflict-in-early-modern-england-jason-peacey/
Opera in the Tropics: Music and Theater in Early Modern
Brazil Rogerio Budasz

https://ebookmass.com/product/opera-in-the-tropics-music-and-
theater-in-early-modern-brazil-rogerio-budasz/

Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s

Collaboration (Early Modern Literature in History) 1st
ed. 2017 Edition Patricia Pender

https://ebookmass.com/product/gender-authorship-and-early-modern-
womens-collaboration-early-modern-literature-in-history-1st-
ed-2017-edition-patricia-pender/

Mind and Body in Early China: Beyond Orientalism and

the Myth of Holism Edward Slingerland

https://ebookmass.com/product/mind-and-body-in-early-china-
beyond-orientalism-and-the-myth-of-holism-edward-slingerland/

Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern

Europe 1st Edition Helen Hills (Editor)

https://ebookmass.com/product/architecture-and-the-politics-of-
gender-in-early-modern-europe-1st-edition-helen-hills-editor/

Medicine, Magic and Art in Early Modern Norway 1st ed.

Edition Ane Ohrvik

https://ebookmass.com/product/medicine-magic-and-art-in-early-
modern-norway-1st-ed-edition-ane-ohrvik/
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
COMPARATIVE GLOBAL HISTORY

Formative Modernities
in the Early Modern
Atlantic and Beyond
Identities, Polities and Glocal Economies

Edited by
Veronika Hyden-Hanscho
Werner Stangl
 Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History

Series Editors
Manuel Perez-Garcia, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
Lucio De Sousa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Tokyo, Japan
This series proposes a new geography of Global History research
using Asian and Western sources, welcoming quality research and
engaging outstanding scholarship from China, Europe and the Americas.
Promoting academic excellence and critical intellectual analysis, it offers a
rich source of global history research in sub-continental areas of Europe,
Asia (notably China, Japan and the Philippines) and the Americas and
aims to help understand the divergences and convergences between East
and West.

Advisory Board
Patrick O’Brien (London School of Economics)
Anne McCants (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Joe McDermott (University of Cambridge)
Pat Manning (Pittsburgh University)
Mihoko Oka (University of Tokyo)
Richard Von Glahn (University of California, Los Angeles)
Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla (Universidad Pablo de Olavide de Sevilla)
Shigeru Akita (Osaka University)
François Gipouloux (CNRS/FMSH)
Carlos Marichal (Colegio de Mexico)
Leonard Blusse (Leiden University)
Antonio Ibarra Romero (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico,
UNAM)
Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick)
Nakajima Gakusho (Kyushu University)
Liu Beicheng (Tsinghua University)
Li Qingxin (Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences)
Dennis O. Flynn (University of the Pacific)
J. B. Owens (Idaho State University)
Veronika Hyden-Hanscho · Werner Stangl
Editors

Formative Modernities
in the Early Modern
Atlantic and Beyond
Identities, Polities and Glocal Economies
Editors
Veronika Hyden-Hanscho Werner Stangl
Austrian Academy of Sciences University of Graz
Vienna, Austria Graz, Austria

ISSN 2662-7965 ISSN 2662-7973 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Comparative Global History
ISBN 978-981-19-8416-7 ISBN 978-981-19-8417-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8417-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Contributor: The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
For Renate Pieper—Colleague, Teacher, and Friend
 Foreword

A Personal Reflection on Experiences

of Globalization and Early
Modern Spanish History
Spain, alongside Portugal, certainly held an important position within the
so-called ‘era of European expansion’—nowadays referred to as the ‘age
of first globalization’ especially among modern historians—replete with
famous seafarers and conquerors. Numerous voyagers to seldom-known
or even completely unknown parts of the world achieved literary fame
through surviving accounts of their journeys, experiences, and observa-
tions. Both historians and literary scholars have analyzed such writings,
raising the profile of unknown figures with wartime experiences who had
written their autobiographies in their later years through the publication
of a volume in the well-known series Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (de
Cossio 1956). Do such veterans of European hegemonic warfare have
anything to do with globalization, however, even if it is only an ‘initial
globalization’?
An extensive number of contributions by leading scholars was recently
published on behalf of the Society for Overseas History (Gesellschaft
für Überseegeschichte) with the title Encyclopaedia of Overseas History
(Lexikon zur Überseegeschichte). The titles of the encyclopedia and the
society indicate that terms other than ‘globalization’—an epithet only
recently established—have been used for the history of the Early Modern

vii
viii FOREWORD

period beginning around 1500 (Hiery 2015, p. 922). Often derided as

‘Eurocentric’ much in the same way as ‘the history of old white men’, the
term ‘overseas history’ appeared not out of contempt for ‘non-European
peoples’ but rather because, as the United Nations recognized, most
written sources concerning overseas expansion remained stored within
European archives. Instigated in the 1950s with the support of the
UN, all public archival holdings pertaining to Latin America in Europe
have been compiled into bibliographic overviews (see, for example,
Schwebel 1972; Walne 1973; Archives Nationales 1984). Additionally,
attempts to broaden the field through terms such as ‘universal history’
(‘Universalgeschichte’) or world history (Weltgeschichte) have largely come
to nothing since the German term for history itself (Geschichte) derives
from the word for ‘occurence’ (Geschehen). In the Romance-language
countries, however, variable prefixes to the Latin baseword historia—
which actually derives from the Greek term for ‘inquiry’ (ƒστoρία)—has
long since prevailed. Yet even in these countries, journals with titles such
as Histoire d’Outre Mer or d’Oltra Mare preceded these terms due to the
fact that history, as a discipline, only emerged in the nineteenth century
via a distinct reverence for empirical sourcework.
Within the history of the Americas, renowned historians frequently
published bibliographical overviews of thematically specialized archival
holdings based upon their foreign research stays and exchanges (Meißner
1994, pp. 823–1032; Danwerth 2021). These publications resulted from
central archives, especially on the Iberian Peninsula, becoming a gath-
ering point for international researchers after the First World War. The
World’s Fair in Seville during the 1920s brought about a further influx
of visitors to the Archivo General de Indias, the primary archive of the
Spanish Crown for overseas territories based in Seville since the eigh-
teenth century. The Archivo General de Indias, organized according to
the ancien-régime criteria of the Spanish Crown, allowed for optimal
research into Spanish colonial history since this older archival system was
familiar. In contrast, most archival repositories of the independent Latin
American states were either virtually inaccessible or completely unorga-
nized, deterring many young researchers on short-term travel grants from
undertaking prolonged and arduous investigations within these collec-
tions. To take one personal example, I myself encountered this situation
during a research trip to the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico
City in 1964 when asking for records following the 1821 independence
 FOREWORD ix

which, the archivist later revealed, were stored in the so-called Casa Amar-
illa or ‘Yellow House’—an offsite multi-story building completely closed
to the public. After arranging access to this archival trove in the company
of the archivist, I discovered a veritable mountain of papers and files,
some with a bullet or bayonet holes and covered in a thick layer of dust
which hid the true extent of disorder and made research entirely impos-
sible. Only decades later did these records become accessible following
renovation and reorganization. Yet my experience illustrates one of the
predominant reasons why histories of the post-independent Latin Amer-
ican states remained in the sole purview of domestic researchers for a
significant period of time and, moreover, why they only became known
outside this region through the International Congress of Americanists
held quinquennially between the Americas and Europe.
We should not overlook, however, the founding of the journal
Hispanic American Historical Review in the United States in 1918 as well
as the rise of Latin American studies within the American Historical Asso-
ciation following the end of the First World War. By the mid-twentieth
century, these two institutions imparted a considerable influence over the
wider field of Latin American history. In Europe, on the other hand, insti-
tutionalization of Latin American history first began in the 1950s when
specific university professorships and institutes appeared across eastern and
western Europe. Concurrent with the events of the 1920s mentioned
above, Spain played a leading role through the journals Revista de Indias
and Anuario des Estudios Americanos published in Madrid and Seville.
In 1968, the Sevillian holder of the Chair of the History of Discovery,
Francisco Morales Padrón, initiated a summer course for European histo-
rians of Latin America in Santander. Similarly, Professor Frédéric Mauro,
the leading European historian of Portuguese expansion of his time,
repeated such a meeting in Paris in 1973. Following another meeting at
the University of Cologne in 1975, the Association of European Histo-
rians of Latin America (Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanistas
Europeos ) or AHILA was founded formally in Torún, Poland, in 1978
as the first meeting in an Eastern Bloc state with representatives from
the Soviet Union, Poland, the German Democratic Republic (GDR),
Czechoslovakia, and Hungary being present. Members of AHILA have
since then organized an international congress approximately every three
years with participants from across the globe attending. At the same time,
it is also worth mentioning that AHILA used Portuguese and Spanish as
x FOREWORD

the sole means of communication and regularly published the conference

proceedings in those languages.
The GDR historian Manfred Kossok held a central role throughout
this period as an academic bridge between East and West. He also dealt
considerably with important methodological questions within the field
(Kossok 2000, pp. 297–307). In his 1993 essay on the problem of global
history, Kossok acutely pointed out, heeding the warnings of the Club of
Rome, how global history as an offshoot of globalization also forces us to
rethink the definition of the concept of progress. Kossok concluded his
considerations with this salient point: ‘If global history has a meaning and
a purpose, then it is certainly the push toward practical action through a
new awareness’ (Kossok 2000, p. 307). In a Festschrift from 2002 in
honor of Kossok, historian Jerry H. Bentley, Director at the Center for
World History at the University of Hawaii, followed up on this issue in his
‘From National History toward World History’ wherein he made refer-
ence to great oceanic world spaces and, after a bibliographical overview
and critique of Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ idea, he
pleaded for ‘world history’ as an open-ended concept (Bentley 2000,
pp. 169–182).
The 1980s witnessed a series of handbooks on the history of Latin
America following the widespread publication of archival guides, bibli-
ographies, and, for the first time, footage from the World’s Fair in
Seville in the wake of the Columbian quincentennial anniversary in
1992. Appearing in numerous European countries, often stretching across
several volumes and written by an array of interdisciplinary authors (e.g.
Bernecker et al. 1994), these handbooks provided further research stimuli
to the degree that it became commonplace to see the field represented by
large numbers within international debates.
Attention-grabbing anniversaries for journalists and politicians alone
do not account for the advancements within the field of Latin American
history, however. Instead, the reframing of colonial pasts within inde-
pendent states and the historical culture of remembrance within former
colonial countries serve to better explain the return of more traditional
themes such as spheres of influence, sovereignty, borderlands, as well as
debates on the role of multilateral organizations (such as the OECD),
colonialism, racism, and feminism within the current public mindset. Even
major media outlets such as the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) (Buch
2021; Corman 2021; Redaktion NZZ 2021; Rhyn and Büchenbacher
2021), the oldest German-language newspaper still publishing today, have
 FOREWORD xi

recently focused on these issues, underscoring the widely perceived uncer-

tainties about the dominant development trends in our present-day world;
namely, mass phenomena such as extensive migration movements and
militant pioneers of climate policy who radically challenge the effects of
globalization such as groups like Attac (Association for the Taxation of
Financial Transactions and for Citizens’ Action) or Extinction Rebellion
through political activism.
As the term ‘first globalization’ is now commonly accepted among
scholars, which in turn has come to encompass and even displace the
oft-used term ‘empires’ for early modern colonial regimes since the quin-
centenary of Columbus, a few conceptual and chronological explanations
are therefore warranted. ‘The first globalization’ is so ubiquitous and so
comprehensively applied early in all conceivable contexts that the term
is also synonymous with ‘interconnectedness’ on a large scale—some-
thing immediately apparent from just a few internet searches. Although
the term has been in use since the mid-twentieth century, concurrent
with the founding of the UN and its regional sub-organizations, the
concept of globalization, however, only became widespread during the
1990s following the economic and political collapse of the Soviet Union.
During the UN’s so-called ‘African Year’ of 1960 when eighteen
African states gained independence, the author of this text began his
studies at the University of Cologne where he specialized in ‘Latin Amer-
ican history’ after majoring in Romance Languages which required profi-
ciency in two romance languages. Professor Richard Konetzke was the
only scholar who offered a degree in Latin American history during those
years at Cologne. In Hamburg, apart from the Latin American compo-
nent within the geography discipline, one could specialize in the history
program on Latin America under Professor Inge Buisson. In Berlin, Latin
American history began only in 1966 despite the Latin American Institute
of the Prussian Cultural Hertiage Foundation (Preußischer Kulturbesitz)
having by far the best library in Latin America. The Institute only rose to
prominence following the later relocation of the German capital to Berlin.
The author considers himself a partial witness of globalization since he
helped to acquire foreign literature for the Cologne Institute from 1962
onwards.
Acquisition of foreign historical journals was extremely tedious during
those days. Issues appeared at regular intervals but only arrived sporadi-
cally through the correo ordinario via sea mail which meant items normally
took up to three months to arrive in a poor condition, and that was
xii FOREWORD

even if they arrived at all. The same problem occurred for catalogs of
Latin American booksellers who released overviews of new publications
about every three months. This scarcity of information meant we only
had enough details to inform our orders of relevant historical works
about every two or three years. These circumstances were such a hinder-
ance that the Rockefeller Foundation provided the department with an
annual grant for this purpose. The Mexican and Cuban embassies in Paris
supplied more up-to-date media information during this time. The former
issued the Nouvelles du Mexique while the latter distributed Granma, the
official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba under Fidel Castro.
Conditions were more favorable in Hamburg where the Lateinamerika
Verein (Latin American Association of German Commerce) had existed
since the 1950s. As a result of the Association’s insistence, the Insti-
tute of Iberian-American Studies (Institut für Iberoamerikan-Kunde) was
founded at Alsterglacis in the mid-1950s thanks to joint funding from the
federal government and the State of Hamburg. Under Wolfgang Grenz,
the Institute employed a number of qualified documentalists who were
responsible for evaluating the press releases sent over via sea mail by the
cultural departments within the German embassies. A collection of impor-
tant newspaper clippings, arranged according to subject area, began to
amass accordingly, and steadily formed a crucial corpus of information
for numerous scientific studies across several disciplines. This collection
remained the only publicly accessible source of Latin American news-
papers dealing with political and economic developments until the late
1980s. The dawn of the internet spelled the end of this documenting
practice which then came to an end. The Institute, now more focused on
research, no longer needed the collection. The author along with Wolf-
gang Grenz succeeded in transferring the collection into the current care
of the Linga Library of the State and University Library of Hamburg.
Finally, it must also be mentioned that the correspondent of the Frank-
furt Allgemeine Zeitung in Madrid, Dr. Walter Haubrich, also frequently
reported on political events in Latin America and made occasional trips
to this region.
Another relevant point is the scholarship obtained by the author in
1964 for collecting Mexican archival material for his doctoral thesis. Prior
to sailing on a cargo ship, scholarship holders attended a week-long
training event in Berlin organized by the German Academic Exchange
Service (DAAD) which instructed them in how to behave abroad as well
as lessons on the then East-West division of Germany and the Basic Law.
 FOREWORD xiii

As guests in a foreign country, we were reminded, scholarship holders

should not get into any political confrontations of any kind and under
any circumstances. We should, again, as guests, also behave politely and
inform the German embassy of our location. One of my first experiences
in Mexico was making a call to the department in Cologne where there
was a seven-hour time difference. In order to phone there, I needed to be
in a hotel in the city center at around 7 p.m. each day and wait for their
call which often ran between thirty and forty minutes in duration and cost
between 30 and 50 Deutschmarks at the time. Of course, the connection
was often so poor that it prolonged the conversation until any essential
information could be effectively communicated. At the end of the trip,
the return journey was via a flight with Lufthansa, then still state-owned,
and financed by the DAAD. This change reflected one element of glob-
alization, namely that between 1964 and 1966, air travel had become
cheaper than sea travel. The earlier crossing by cargo ship from Antwerp
to Veracruz had taken three weeks whereas the four-hour flight from
Mexico City to New York and from there to Cologne (including a six-
hour layover) meant the total travel time amounted to only twenty hours
in total (Pietschmann 2002, note 7).
Although the return flight from Mexico was cheaper, the long voyage
by sea still held certain advantages over flying. In terms of luggage
allowance, sailing provided far greater freedoms than flying via aeroplane.
An airline limited luggage to twenty kilograms, incurring considerable
surcharges which were necessary in my case after almost two years
abroad in Mexico and carrying a large number of books, souvenirs,
photos, microfilms, and much more. Ultimately, I decided to send a box
containing many of these items instead, and after a protracted journey
across the world, this shipment arrived in Hamburg two months later,
damaged and with some items missing. Such consignments probably took
just as long in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Finding myself at the start of 1967 back in Cologne in the exalted
position as a student assistant, I experienced perhaps the greatest ‘glob-
alization advantage’ when the university, in light of the difficult research
conditions, provided our small department with a Rank-Xerox copying
machine. Electric typewriters had already become a standard feature of the
institute, but the copy was something entirely new. An unusually large and
heavy behemoth, this metal machine could only be assembled by skilled
technicians who then gave us a tutorial on how to use it. The biggest
xiv FOREWORD

headache, however, was seeing to the reimbursement service (Geldan-

nahmestelle), which we had to organize since other institutions wished to
also benefit from the copier for an accepted fee. From then on, an assistant
dealt with the accounts and receipts but the availability of such a machine
provided a real boon to teachers and researchers as enormous amounts of
literature could now be quickly handled and shared in teaching.
I first encountered the Internet and personal computers during a
conference in Argentina as part of the Cologne working group ‘Spain,
Portugal, Latin America’. At the University of Córdoba, the dean of the
host faculty showed us into a large room filled with ten screens standing
side by side. To our ever-bemused faces, an Argentine colleague went up
to one device, turned it on and started writing a text upon a page. It
quickly dawned upon us all that our South American hosts were clearly
technologically superior to our German delegation of young and old
researchers. Utterly astonished and with our interest piqued, we imme-
diately asked the Argentines about the costs of such machines but soon
learned that an American company had donated those devices to the
University of Córdoba and reserved the rights for any further sales. At
this exact moment, I felt as if I were a Native American who had just
come face to face with Christopher Columbus for the very first time.
Upon assuming my position at the University of Hamburg in March
1985, I gained access to such a device, but it was only in January 2000
when I felt ready to use a PC by myself. In the intervening years, I
relied on the help of a secretary. Yet by my retirement in 2005, I had
lived through at least three distinct technological shifts: from writing
and typing my own dissertation by hand to the advent of computer
processing during my habilitation to a globally networked professor on
academia.edu.

Horst Pietschmann
University of Hamburg
Hamburg, Germany
 FOREWORD xv

Literature
Archives Nationales, ed. 1984. Guide des sources de l‘histoire de l’Amérique
Latine et des Antilles dans des Archives Françaises. Paris: Documenta-
tion Française.
Bentley, Jerry H. 2002. “From National History Toward World History.”
In Vom Brasilienvertrag zur Globalgeschichte. In Erinnerung an
Manfred Kossok anläßlich seines 70. Geburtstages, edited by Matthias
Middell, 169–82. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag.
Bernecker, Walther L., et al. ed. 1994. Handbuch der Geschichte
Lateinamerikas. Vol. 1. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Buch, Christoph. 2021. Die Karibik ist Paradies und Albtraum zugleich.
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Internationale Ausgabe, August 4, p. 17.
Cormann, Mathias. 2021. Die EU hat eine richtungsweisende Diskussion
angestossen. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Internationale Ausgabe, August 4,
pp. 18–9.
Cossio, José María de, ed. 1956. Autobiografías de soldados (siglo XVII).
Biblioteca de autores españoles, Vol. 90. Madrid: Ed. Atlas.
Danwerth, Otto. 2021. A Basic Bibliography on the History of Ibero-
America and the Spanish Caribbean in the Colonial Period. Max Planck
Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory Research Paper Series, no.
2021-01, Online journal, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3791964.
Hiery, Hermann, ed. 2015. Lexikon zur Überseegeschichte. Stuttgart:
Steiner.
Kossok, Manfred. 2000. “Von der Universal- zur Globalgeschichte.”
In Manfred Kossok, Ausgewählte Schriften. Vol. 3: Zwischen Reform
und Revolution: Übergänge von der Universal- zur Globalgeschichte,
edited by Matthias Middell and Katharina Middell, 297–307. Leipzig:
Leipziger Universitätsverlag.
Meißner, Jochen. 1994. “IX. Bibliographie.” In Handbuch der Geschichte
Lateinamerikas, edited by Walther L. Bernecker et al. Vol. 1, 823–
1032. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.
Pietschmann, Horst. 2002. “Das Lateinamerika-Werk Manfred Kossoks
aus der westdeutschen Perspektive eines jüngeren Zeitgenossen.” In
Vom Brasilienvertrag zur Globalgeschichte. In Erinnerung an Manfred
Kossok anläßlich seines 70. Geburtstages, edited by Matthias Middell,
133–39. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag.
Redaktion NZZ. 2021. Was heisst Souveränität in globalisierten Zeiten?
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Internationale Ausgabe, August 4, pp. 8–9.
xvi FOREWORD

Rhyn, Larissa, and Katrin Büchenbacher. 2021. So weit reicht Chinas

Einfluss auf Schweizer Hochschulen. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Interna-
tionale Ausgabe, August 4, pp. 26–27.
Schwebel, Karl H., ed. 1972. Führer durch die Quellen zur Geschichte
Lateinamerikas in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, revised by Renate
Hauschild-Thiessen and Elfriede Bachmann. Bremen: Schünemann.
Walne, Peter, ed. 1973. A Guide to Manuscript Sources for the History of
Latin America and the Caribbean in the British Isles. London: Oxford
University Press.
 Contents

Ideas and Identity

Concepts and Viewpoints in Early Modern Iberian
Imperial History and the Globalization of Historiographies 3
Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla
Art in Republics: Venice and the Netherlands 27
Michael North
Watchtowers in the Eighteenth-Century Philippines:
Material Representations of Colonial State Power 45
Eberhard Crailsheim

Agents of Modernities
Piracy and Local Alliances in an Empire of Archipelagoes 73
Elizabeth Montañez-Sanabria
The Phoenix and the Eagle: Catalan Political Economy
and the Habsburg Monarchy of Charles III/VI 95
William O’Reilly
“When a Snake Is Cut into Pieces”: Austria’s Imperial
Relations and the Downfall of Spain’s First Minister
Ensenada in 1754 125
Christoph Rosenmüller

xvii
xviii CONTENTS

Monopoly Claims and Moral Economy: Extralegal Practice

in British Global and Local Trade c. 1660–1800 145
Beverly Lemire

Formation of State Institutions

Troublemakers in a State-Run Enterprise: Conflict
Management and the Limits of Social Disciplining
in the Königliches Lagerhaus Berlin, c. 1720–1760 173
Jutta Wimmler
All Roads Lead to Mexico? The Postal Network of Late
Colonial New Spain as an Integrated Communication Space 197
Werner Stangl
A Parable and Ancient Fables: Shaping the Governance
of Mining Activities and the Silver Trade in Late Sixteenth
and Early Seventeenth-Century New Spain 225
Claudia Jefferies
Administration of Mining, Science, and Technology
in Europe in the Age of American Silver (1550–1700) 245
Domenic Hofmann, Harald Kleinberger-Pierer,
and Peter Paul Marckhgott

Glocal Economies
The Peso or the Marsilie—The Standard Currency Unit
of the Armenian New Julfa Merchants? 275
Markus A. Denzel
Foreign Merchants and the Introduction of New
Hot Beverages in the Prince-Bishoprics of Münster
and Paderborn During the Long Eighteenth Century 295
Benita Wister
Lighter and Brighter: Indian Cottons in Brussels
in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century 317
Veronika Hyden-Hanscho
 CONTENTS xix

Conclusion
Formative Modernities in the Early Modern Atlantic
and Beyond—Critical Remarks on Old Concepts 345
Veronika Hyden-Hanscho and Werner Stangl
 Notes on Contributors

Eberhard Crailsheim is a researcher (científico titular) at the Institute of

History of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). He received
his doctorate in history at the University of Graz, Austria, and conducted
research and taught in several research institutions and universities in
Germany and Spain. His research interest includes the socio-economic
history and the new political history of the Spanish Empire in the early
modern period, with a special focus on the Philippines. Among his
publications, the following books stand out: Image-Object-Performance.
Mediality and Communication in Contact Zones of Colonial Latin
America and the Philippines (2013), The Spanish Connection. French
and Flemish Merchant Networks in Seville, 1570–1650 (2016), and The
Representation of External Threats. From the Middle Ages to the Modern
World (2019). (http://cchs.csic.es/en/personal/eberhard.crailsheim).
Professor Markus A. Denzel , born in Nuremberg in 1967, studied
History and Catholic Theology at the University of Bamberg (diploma
in 1991, doctoral degree in 1994). He completed his habilitation in
economic and social history at the University of Göttingen in 1997
and was made an extraordinary professor in 2000. Since 2002, he
is full professor of social and economic history at Leipzig University.
From 2005 to 2008, he was Dean of the Faculty of History, Arts
and Oriental (now: Regional) Studies and, in 2021, he became Vice-
Dean of this faculty. Since 2018 he is also chairman of the Leipzig
Resilience Hub. Denzel held visiting professorships at the universities
of Kassel, Bamberg, Hamburg, Bayreuth, and Bolzano and was Fellow
xxi
xxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

of the Alfried-Krupp-Wissenschaftskolleg at Greifswald (2020/21). He

won the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz prize (1998) from the Federal Ministry
for Education, Science, Research, and Technology and the Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft. His current research covers the pre-modern
history of international commerce and its institutions (fairs, public
banks, stock exchanges, marine insurance), money and exchange, and
business history. https://www.gkr.uni-leipzig.de/historisches-seminar/
institut/professuren/sozial-und-wirtschaftsgeschichte.
Domenic Hofmann’s background is in economic history. He studied at
the University of Graz, the Vienna University of Economics and Busi-
ness (WU Wien), and at the Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. He wrote his
doctoral thesis on the effects of American silver on the administrative and
technological framework in the Spanish mining sector in the second half
of the sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries. He is inter-
ested in the economic impact of Spanish America on Spain and Central
Europe in the early modern period.
Veronika Hyden-Hanscho holds the prestigious Elise-Richter Fellow-
ship awarded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). She is Research
Associate at the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies at the Austrian
Academy of Sciences in Vienna. In 2011, she earned a Ph.D. at the
University of Graz (Austria). She was Lecture for Austrian Studies at the
University of Wrocław (Poland) from 2011 to 2013 and was a visiting
scholar at the University of Ghent (Belgium) in 2021. She is the author
of Reisende, Migranten, Kulturmanager. Mittlerpersönlichkeiten zwischen
Frankreich und dem Wiener Hof (1630–1730) (Stuttgart, 2013), co-editor
of Das Haus Arenberg und die Habsburgermonarchie. Eine transterri-
toriale Adelsfamilie zwischen Fürstendienst und Eigenständigkeit (16–20.
Jahrhundert) (Regensburg, 2019), and has published in the Journal of
Modern European History and the Journal of European Economic History.
She is currently working on a study of ‘Income, Management and
Economic Thinking: Noble Entrepreneurship in the Habsburg Monarchy
in the 18th Century’. https://www.oeaw.ac.at/ihb/personen/hyden-
hanscho-veronika.
Dr. Claudia Jefferies (née de Lozanne) is a Senior Lecturer in the
Department of Economics at the City University of London. Her main
fields of research are monetary and financial history. She received her
doctoral degree from the WWZ, University of Basel, Switzerland, in
1997, and has since then published monographs and articles on fiscal and
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxiii

monetary theory and policy in early modern societies, with a special focus
on Spain and the Americas.
Harald Kleinberger-Pierer works at the University of Applied Sciences
in Graz. In his Ph.D. thesis, he addressed the visual revolution of
machine imagery and the transformation of technical practice in the eigh-
teenth century. His main research interests are the history of science
and technology in the early modern period as well as visual culture
and public science. Recently, he was part of an inter- and transdisci-
plinary research project (Connecting.Ideas4Research) which dealt with
crowdsourcing, participatory methods, and aspects of digital ethics in the
practice of research organizations. In this context, he published a paper
on participation as a method in the history of technology in the journal
Technikgeschichte 2021.
Beverly Lemire is a Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair, Univer-
sity of Alberta, and was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada
in 2003. Her work examines intersecting areas of material culture,
gender, race, and fashion from c.1600–1840 in British, imperial, and
comparative global perspectives. Recent works include Global Trade
and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures. The Material World
Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge, 2018). She headed the “Object
Lives” collaborative project (www.objectlives.com) which resulted in
the edited volume: Object Lives and Global Histories of Northern
North America: Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980 (McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2021). A recent open-access article, published
by the Yale University Center for the Study of Material and Visual
Cultures of Religion, explores the material practice of tobacco. “Material
Technologies of Empire: The Tobacco Pipe in Early Modern Land-
scapes of Exchange in the Atlantic World,” MAVCOR Journal 5, no.
1 (2021), https://mavcor.yale.edu/mavcor-journal/essays/material-tec
hnologies-empire-tobacco-pipe-early-modern-landscapes-exchange.
Peter Paul Marckhgott holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of
Graz. For his dissertation, he researched the role of public administration
in the revival of the Spanish mining sector in the seventeenth century. He
conducted research stays in Spain and Chile, and participated in the inter-
national research project “Información y cultura material en América bajo
el gobierno de los Austrias”. As a postdoctoral researcher, he was part of
the interdisciplinary digital humanities project “HistoGIS” at the Austrian
xxiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Academy of Sciences. Currently, he is designing, coordinating, and imple-

menting EU-funded educational projects. Trained in early modern and
modern economic history, his main research interests are the interrela-
tions between economic history and the history of public administration
in Spain and Austria.
Elizabeth Montañez-Sanabria is a historian from the Pontificia Univer-
sidad Católica del Perú and holds a Ph.D. in History from the University
of California at Davis. She was Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellow
at the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- & eighteenth-Century Studies
(USA) and Fondecyt Postdoctoral Researcher at the Pontificia Univer-
sidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile). She directed the research project
“Información y cultura material en América bajo el gobierno de los
Austrias, s. XVI-XVII” between the PUCV (Chile) and the University
of Graz (Austria) financed by the Chilean Research Council of Science
and Technology. Currently, she is a Visiting Researcher at the Austrian
Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include piracy in the modern
age, transatlantic history, circulation of information, and cartography.
Michael North, who started his career as assistant curator at the Museum
für Hamburgische Geschichte, has been Professor and Chair of Modern
History at the University of Greifswald. He has received honorary doctor-
ates from the Universities of Szczecin and Tartu, was director of the
Graduate Program ‘Contact Area Mare Balticum’ from 2000 to 2009,
director of the International Graduate Program ‘Baltic Borderlands’ from
2009 to 2019, and is a speaker of the Interdisciplinary Centre for
Baltic Sea Region Research (IFZO). His many international publica-
tions include: A World History of the Seas: From Harbour to Horizon
(London/New York, 2021); Das Goldene Zeitalter global. Die Nieder-
lande im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 2021); The Baltic: A History
(Cambridge MA, 2015); Meditating Netherlandish Art and Material
Culture in Asia (ed. together with Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann); and Art
and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven/London, 1997).
William O’Reilly teaches at the University of Cambridge, where he is
Associate Professor in Early Modern History. He has worked on a range
of topics in early modern European and Atlantic history and is particularly
interested in Habsburg History and in the history of European migration,
colonialism, and imperialism.
Taking his D.Phil. at Oxford, he taught at the National University of
Ireland, Galway, before moving to Cambridge in 2005. He has received
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxv

the Philip Leverhulme Prize for his work in European and Atlantic
History and the Cambridge Pilkington Prize for Teaching. He has been a
visiting professor at Harvard University, at Universities Paris I-Panthéon-
Sorbonne and Bielefeld; he has been a fellow at the Weatherhead Center
for International Affairs, Harvard, and is a Fulltime Fellow of the Insti-
tute of Advanced Study, CEU Budapest and Vienna. Since 2018, he is an
honorary Leibniz Professor in History at the German National Maritime
Institute.
Christoph Rosenmüller is a professor of Latin American history at
Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He
served as visiting scholar at the universities of Graz and Münster, the
Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, and El Colegio de
México. His recent publications include the book Corruption and Justice
in Colonial Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2019). The University
of New Mexico Press has accepted his latest book on informality, rituals,
and politics at the viceregal court of mid-eighteenth-century Mexico.
Werner Stangl is lecturer of Economic History at the University of Graz,
Austria, and currently works for CNRS-CREDA within the TopUrbi
project at the École de Haute Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His
main areas of research are colonial Spanish America, historical geography,
and digital humanities. After his thesis on private correspondence written
by Spanish emigrants, published with Böhlau in 2012 under the title
Zwischen Authentizität und Fiktion. Die private Korrespondenz spanischer
Emigranten aus Amerika, 1492–1824, he led the HGIS de las Indias
project as a principal investigator from 2015 to 2019 (www.hgis-ind
ias.net). From 2019 to 2021 he was part of the interdisciplinary Digital
Tokugawa Lab at Yale University—a project he continues to support as
a consultant. In 2021, he achieved his venia legendi for Economic and
Social History with specialty in digital humanities at the University of
Graz.
Jutta Wimmler heads the Research Group ‘The Concept of Slavery
in African History’ at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery
Studies in Germany. She received her Ph.D. in history from the Univer-
sity of Graz, Austria. From 2011 until 2020, she was a researcher and
lecturer in Economic and Social History at the European University
Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), where she co-directed (with Klaus Weber)
the DFG-funded project ‘The Globalized Periphery. Atlantic Commerce,
xxvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Socioeconomic and Cultural Change in Central Europe (c.1680–1850).’

She has studied the entanglements of France and Prussia with the early
modern Atlantic world, with a special focus on early modern textile indus-
tries, as well as West Africa’s contributions to European technological and
industrial developments. In her current research project, she investigates
how European travelers to Africa described and constructed ‘slavery’ in
African societies with their travel writings.
Benita Wister studied International Cultural and Business Studies at
the University of Passau (Germany) as well as History at the Univer-
sity of Graz (Austria). She earned her Ph.D. in Economic and Social
History from the University of Graz in 2012 with a dissertation on trade
and consumption patterns of chocolate in Central Europe (focusing on
Styria and Westphalia) entitled ‘Kakao: Vom Habsburgischen Hofgetränk
zur niederländischen Kolonialware. Der Diffusionsprozess der Schoko-
lade in Mitteleuropa vom 17. bis 19. Jahrhundert vor dem Hintergrund
eines konsumspezifischen Kulturtransfers am Beispiel der Steiermark und
Westfalens.’ She has published several articles on related topics and
presented her research at national and international conferences such as
the 2016 international colloquium ‘De la “boisson des dieux” aux salons
du chocolat: variations sur le cacao américain’ in Paris.
Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla is currently Full Professor at Pablo de Olavide
University, Seville (Spain). He has been Full Professor at the European
University Institute of Florence (2003–2013) and head of its Depart-
ment of History and Civilization (2009–2012). He specializes in the
study of political economies of the Iberian Empires, the history of
consumption in a global context, and in the history of the European
aristocracies in a cross-border and trans-Atlantic perspective. His last
monographs are Iberian Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–
1668, Palgrave Macmillan: Singapore 2019 (translated into Spanish and
Portuguese), and Historia global, historia trans-nacional e historia de
los imperios. El Atlántico, América y Europa (siglos XVI–XVIII), Insti-
tución Fernando el Católico, Zaragoza, 2019. He recently co-edited
with Omar Svriz and Ilaria Berti American Globalization, 1492–1850.
Trans-Cultural Consumption in Spanish Latin America, Routledge: New
York and London, 2022. https://www.upo.es/investiga/globalhistory/
miembros/bartolome-yun-casalilla/.
 List of Figures

Watchtowers in the Eighteenth-Century Philippines:

Material Representations of Colonial State Power
Fig. 1 View of a tower and part of the village of Zamboanga.
Fernando Brambila: 1789–1794, España. Ministerio de
Defensa (© Archivo Museo Naval de Madrid [AMN]
Ms.1724 [18], public domain) 52
Fig. 2 Guardhouse in Zamboanga. Atlas pittoresque, planche 143,
in: Journey to the South Pole and Oceania on the Corvettes
L’Astrolabe and La Zélée to Execute the Order
of the King during the Years 1837–1838–1839–1840
under the Command of Dumont d’Urville. Pictorial Atlas.
Paris: Gide 1846 (© Public domain on https://commons.
wikimedia.org/ [12/8/2021]) 53
Fig. 3 Watchtower in Balaoan (© Photo by Eberhard Crailsheim,
2011) 55
Fig. 4 Watchtower in Luna (© Photo by Eberhard Crailsheim,
2011) 56

Piracy and Local Alliances in an Empire of Archipelagoes

Fig. 1 Map of the Pacific Coast from Waggoner of the South Seas,
c. 1683. Notice that the gateways to the Pacific Ocean
are portrayed, as well as “King Golden Cap of Durian”
and the Potosi mine (© Courtesy of the Free Library
of Philadelphia [Elkins 169]) 75

xxvii
xxviii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2 Planisphere of Domingo Teixeira 1573 (© Wikimedia

Commons) 77
Fig. 3 Remains of the Dutch settlement in Valdivia in Mapas de las
costas de América en el Mar del Sur, seventeenth century (©
Courtesy of the National Library of Spain) 83
Fig. 4 “Don Andreas. Emperour of Darien” from A journal,
kept by Capt. Bartholomew Sharp, c. 1680 (© Courtesy
of the British Library. British Library Board [Sloane 46B,
fol. 6]) 87

The Phoenix and the Eagle: Catalan Political Economy

and the Habsburg Monarchy of Charles III/VI
Fig. 1 The “Passarola”, a primitive flying machine devised in 1709
by Father Bartholomew Lawrence of Gusmão, Chaplain
of the Portuguese King, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
département Estampes et photographie, FOL-IB-4 (© Public
domain Wikimedia Commons) 97
Fig. 2 The conquest of Barcelona by the Habsburg troops
in Catalonia, etching by Romeyn de Hooghe 1705,
published by Daniel de Lafeuille (© Rijksmuseum
Amsterdam, public domain http://hdl.handle.net/10934/
RM0001.COLLECT.444588) 105
Fig. 3 Portrait of Charles of Austria, King Charles III of Spain,
engraving by Pieter van Gunst before 1711 (© Rijksmuseum
Amsterdam, public domain http://hdl.handle.net/10934/
RM0001.COLLECT.336365) 106
Fig. 4 Map of New Barcelona (Nagybecskerek, now Zrenjanin)
in the Banat of Timisoara, 1766 (© Österreichisches
Staatsarchiv, Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv, SUS KS, O-039) 115

Monopoly Claims and Moral Economy: Extralegal Practice

in British Global and Local Trade c. 1660–1800
Fig. 1 Map of the Indian Ocean by Pieter Goos (1616–1675)
printed in Amsterdam by Johannes van Keulen, c. 1700,
on vellum, MS. 1288, f. 6. Oost Indien, (East India) (©
Bridgeman Images) 152
 LIST OF FIGURES xxix

Fig. 2 Bombay on the Malabar Coast, belonging to the East

India Company of England. Etching for the Universal
Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure based on the 1754
oil painting by Jan van Ryne (© Universal History
Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images) 154
Fig. 3 A scene between decks of an East Indiaman. A young
woman is being kitted out with goods to be run on shore,
untaxed, including tea, perfume, and arrak. Thomas
Rowlandson, 1810. 1872,1012.4954 (© The Trustees
of the British Museum) 161

Troublemakers in a State-Run Enterprise: Conflict

Management and the Limits of Social Disciplining in the
Königliches Lagerhaus Berlin, c. 1720–1760
Fig. 1 The Lagerhaus in the mid-eighteenth century. Etching
by Johann Friedrich Walther, c. 1730 (Title: Das
Königliche Waaren-Lager-Haus) (Source Sammlung
Stadtmuseum Berlin, SM 2016–4075. © Stadtmuseum
Berlin. Reproduction: Michael Setzpfandt, Berlin) 176
Fig. 2 The entry gate of the Königliches Lagerhaus. Lithographic
print by Hans O. Herrmann, c. 1830 (Title: Der
Wollmarkt/Königl. Lagerhaus) (Source Sammlung
Stadtmuseum Berlin, VII 64/476 w. © Stadtmuseum Berlin) 177
Fig. 3 Hierarchies and the “petitions cycle” in the Lagerhaus.
Elaborated by the author 181

All Roads Lead to Mexico? The Postal Network of Late

Colonial New Spain as an Integrated Communication
Space
Fig. 1 Cordilleras and Travesías according to Fray Pablo Beaumont
(ca. 1788). (Cartography Werner Stangl; Sources Tovar
Alcaraz 2020; Beaumont 1788) 202
Fig. 2 Post offices by general region, 1772–1810. (Cartography
Werner Stangl; Source Stangl 2019) 204
Fig. 3 Tariff-groups for mail from New Spain to the wider world
(Cartography Werner Stangl) 207
Fig. 4 Logistical hubs of New Spanish mail (Cartography Werner
Stangl) 211
Fig. 5 Distances of post offices to Mexico City (in leguas)
(Cartography Werner Stangl) 214
xxx LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6 Full cycle of correspondence to and from Mexico City

(Cartography Werner Stangl) 215
Fig. 7 Connection from Ixtlahuaca to Cuautla and Chalco, 1776
(Cartography Werner Stangl; Basemap Open Street Map) 217
Fig. 8 Relative distance of post offices to Mexico (Cartography
Werner Stangl) 218

A Parable and Ancient Fables: Shaping the Governance of

Mining Activities and the Silver Trade in Late Sixteenth
and Early Seventeenth-Century New Spain
Fig. 1 Wood carving from Steinhöwel’s 1486 Latin edition
(Steinhöwel 1486 f.s.n.) © Library of Congress, public
domain 239

Lighter and Brighter: Indian Cottons in Brussels in the

First Half of the Eighteenth Century
Fig. 1 Ostend East Indiaman under the imperial flag in the Chinea
festivities of 1729, a tribute of the kings of Naples
to the Pope in Rome, etching on paper by Gabriele
Valvassori and Filippo Vasconi 1729 (© Albertina, Wien,
Inventarnr. DG2020/5/30/2) 318
Fig. 2 Gender aspects in the Savage sales book of 1734–1736: 80%
of the revenues in Brabant guilders were placed by women 329
Fig. 3 Investments of married females in quantity of pieces
and total investments in Brabant guilders from the Savage
sales book 330
Fig. 4 Investments of unmarried females in quantity of pieces
and total investments in Brabant guilders from the Savage
sales book 332
 LIST OF FIGURES xxxi

Fig. 5 (1+2) Fabric samples of coupies and cassas in chequers

and stripes from the salesbook of the GIC-ship Elisabeth
1729 from Bengal (© FelixArchief/Stadsarchief Antwerpen,
GIC#7511, pages 4 and 34) (3) An apron for women
made of printed cotton in grey checkered pattern
of unknown origin around 1750 (© Collectie Modemuseum
Antwerpen, collectie Jacoba de Jonge, T13/138/A354) (4)
A traditional (Dutch) breastcloth garment (kraplap) made
of eighteenth-century painted Indian cotton with floral
design in red, blue, green, yellow and purple on a white
ground (© Collectie Modemuseum Antwerpen, Collectie
Jacoba de Jonge, photo Stany Dederen, T13/86/A245)
(5) Dressing gown for men in Indian hand painted chintz
with rich floral design and a wool lining for warmth,
1720–1740 (© Collectie Modemuseum Antwerpen, collectie
Jacoba de Jonge, photo Stany Dederen, T12/28/G1) 333
 List of Tables

Art in Republics: Venice and the Netherlands

Table 1 Proportion of secular subjects in dated paintings in Western
and Central Europe, 1480–1539 37

Monopoly Claims and Moral Economy: Extralegal Practice

in British Global and Local Trade c. 1660–1800
Table 1 Stolen wares recovered by EIC agents 162

The Peso or the Marsilie—The Standard Currency Unit

of the Armenian New Julfa Merchants?
Table 1 The exchange value of the marsilie 284

xxxiii
Ideas and Identity
 Concepts and Viewpoints in Early Modern
Iberian Imperial History
and the Globalization of Historiographies

Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla

The last two decades have witnessed notable progress in the study of the
early modern Iberian worlds, including the Atlantic world.1 Such progress
has come hand in hand with increasing communication between histo-
rians from Europe and America (and particularly from Latin America)
and between scholars from the Lusophone and Spanish-speaking worlds.
As a consequence, scholars with very different academic, scientific and
linguistic backgrounds have gathered together in this field of study,
the outcome being a growing richness of viewpoints and intellectual

1 This chapter has been written within the framework of the FEDER research group
UPO-1264973 “In search for the Atlantic aristocracies. Latin America and the peninsular
Spanish elites, 1492–1824” PI, Bartolomé Yun Casalilla; and of the PAIDI research group
HUM 1000 “The history of globalization: violence, negotiation and interculturality,” of
which the principal investigator is Professor Igor Pérez Tostado. Both projects are financed
by the Regional Government of Andalusia. I thank Bethany Aram for her help in the
writing of this text.

B. Yun-Casalilla (B)
Pablo de Olavide University, Seville, Spain
e-mail: Bartolome.Yun.Casalilla@alumniprofs.eui.eu

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 3

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023
V. Hyden-Hanscho and W. Stangl (eds.), Formative Modernities in the
Early Modern Atlantic and Beyond, Palgrave Studies in Comparative
Global History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-8417-4_1
4 B. YUN-CASALILLA

proposals. This enrichment has been all the greater as far as these
researchers had contact with a huge variety of historiographies, some of
them dedicated to other imperial worlds and narratives, which have in
many ways influenced their own ideas and methodological approaches. It
is also a consequence of the swelling interest in the history of globaliza-
tion as well as an increasing globalization of historiographies, that is, the
growing convergence of viewpoints on the study of the same problems.
In the background of such a process is also the faster and easier commu-
nication of ideas in this wide field because of the use of digital tools. We
are experiencing a long-lasting trend that is crucial in the study of such
wide spaces as empires.
This subject has been analyzed in a general way in several publications
(Beckert and Sachsenmaier 2018). Many historians today—including
myself-think that both the history of globalization and the history of
empires are influenced by different researchers’ particular perspectives
(Espagne 2019; Sachsenmaier 2011). In other words, for the moment,
both approaches to the past are practiced by scholars who view it from
our own expertise and (spatial) fields of research. This bias, no doubt,
has collateral effects. One of them is that the researcher’s viewpoint
colors the outcome of the analysis. It also involves—and this is a second
effect—some problems for mutual understanding among the distinct
historiographic schools, some of them rooted in different national and
local frameworks and traditions, let alone national narratives. Finally,
nowadays historians try to contribute to the history of globalization (a
subject) or to global history (an approach), which obliges us to commu-
nicate with specialists in other empires and worlds as well as to enter
debates and subjects in which most of the specialists in Iberian history
previously have been absent (Yun-Casalilla 2022).
All of this is not in itself negative, but, on the contrary, a source of
fertility. Also, it fits with the assertion of many global historians—the
most eminent of them being Gunder Frank—that globalization cannot
be understood as something with its sole epicenter in Europe, but rather
as a process that started and was animated from different regions of the
planet (Frank 1998). It is also a source of richness as far as one can expect
that these convergent viewpoints, though sometimes causing apparent or
real contradictions, will illuminate the multifaceted character of globaliza-
tion and the polyhedric features of imperial histories. Furthermore, this
outlook is positive inasmuch as it is linked to a new vision of empires
that stresses the agency of the local societies and looks at them from
 CONCEPTS AND VIEWPOINTS IN EARLY MODERN IBERIAN … 5

below, thereby making visible their variety and diversity, which can only
be understood if the complex relation between the local and the global is
not forgotten. The glocal dimension stressed in this volume is, therefore,
crucial.
The question remains, however, to what extent we historians are
moving toward a convergence of knowledge and mutual understanding.
How are we proceeding and which concepts are we using to get closer
without impoverishing this diversity of historiographies? I would like
to reflect on the use we make of some terms and concepts, such
as composite monarchies, composite imperial monarchies or composite
empires, compensatory history, or polycentric monarchies. More partic-
ularly, I wish to reflect on the way these notions affect the dialogue
among specialists on the Iberian worlds and the way we can build a global
history of the Iberian empires that also favors intellectual exchanges with
specialists in other areas of the world, civilizations, or empires. No one
ignores–this is another aspect that interests me–that both the history of
globalization and the history of empires have collateral political impli-
cations on which we, as historians, should reflect when transferring our
knowledge to our societies and choosing our subjects of study.

∗ ∗ ∗

There is a general agreement among specialists in the field that the

term empire is polysemic and difficult to define. Most of us make
proposals that in fact entail ideal types in which we then fit the concrete
cases studied with their specificities. Even historians of the modern epoch
such as Osterhammel (2014, p. 403) have pointed out the difficulty
of establishing closed definitions. This difficulty becomes even more
apparent when it comes to early modern times and to the Iberian monar-
chies in particular, for which there are some interesting debates (Hausser
and Pietschmann 2014). What many historians understand as an empire,
in any case, is a sort of political formation linked to a metropole but made
of a plurality of “hybrid components, conflicting traditions, and unsettled
boundaries between races and peoples” (Darwin 2012, p. 6).
All in all, one could say that the political systems of the Spanish Habs-
burgs and the Portuguese Avis (and later on those of the Bourbons and
the Braganza) were embodied in monarchies, that is, in political schemes
grounded on a plurality of powers, jurisdictions, and overlapping and
often clashing sovereignties (Cardim and Hespanha 2018, pp. 76–77).
6 B. YUN-CASALILLA

This definition echoes, and in practice reproduces the idea of composite

states or monarchies coined by Königsberger (1978) and Elliott (1992).
The coincidence is not odd if one considers that all of these authors built
upon the same revisionism of the early modern state that took place in
Southern and Mediterranean Europe, and more in particular in Spain,
Portugal, and Italy, in the 1980s. Taking this idea as a starting point, some
other authors have used terms such as “composite empires” or “com-
posite imperial monarchies” (Yun-Casalilla 2019; Fradera 2019). This is
a way to acknowledge the plurality of juridical and political arrangements
fitting both the idea of empire and that of monarchy, by also stressing
the inequality among European and non-European components based on
their asymmetries in the use of institutional and physical violence. It is also
a way of emphasizing that not all the polities of these composite conglom-
erates had the same legal prerogatives over the empire. The Spanish
case was a composite monarchy in which one of the constituent polities,
Castile, had formed an empire in the broader, present-day sense of the
word. Hence the differences with respect to the role that, as institutions,
other kingdoms and dynastic possessions of the Habsburgs, such as those
of the Crown of Aragon, Naples, Sicily, Flanders, and others, could play in
America, the Atlantic world, and the Philippines. In the case of Portugal,
this was also decisive. Only in the period 1580–1640 was it in a situation
similar to that of Castile, that is, as a crown that was part of a dynastic
union with strong commitments in the rest of Europe, a “novelty” from
which the problems preventing Portugal’s easy insertion into the Hispanic
Habsburg monarchy emanated (Yun-Casalilla 2019, pp. 396–408).
It is also to be considered that the term “composite monarchy” or
“composite state” and the definition proposed by Hespanha and Cardim
refer to the monarchy’s formal sovereign institutions. Likewise, one has
to take into account that a key aspect of composite monarchies was “the
observance of traditional laws and custom” (Elliott 1992, p. 54), which
meant the acknowledgment, at least in theory, of the corporative character
and jurisdictional fragmentation at the foundation of the political body. In
other words, the composite monarchy was composite not only because it
consisted of different dynastic states but also due to their political config-
urations and recognition of the juridical power of the towns and cities,
the municipalities, the laic and ecclesiastic landlords, the judicial character
of the supreme councils (Consejos ), and so on.
While these ideas were coined mainly for the study of European
dominions, they also are useful for the analysis of composite imperial
 CONCEPTS AND VIEWPOINTS IN EARLY MODERN IBERIAN … 7

monarchies. The constitutional diversity implicit in the concept facilitates

its inclusion of extra-European variations and recognition of asymmetries
between European and non-European polities. This, in fact, reflects a
reality at the economic, social, and political levels, because the Indies,
which were incorporated by conquest, did not entirely fit the principle
of aeque principaliter that was often the case of the European political
entities. The political theory of the epoch considered these societies as
being in a state of “innocence,” which they only could overcome through
contact with the king’s laws and Christianity, and whose legal status had
to be theoretically respected through the Indian Laws. From the analyt-
ical side the very same notion of “composite” has interesting juridical
and political connotations, inasmuch as it underlines the idea that none
of these polities was obliged to help the rest financially and militarily,
unless the defense of Christianity was in danger. As far as we consider the
Indies as a part of Castile and the Asian, African, and Brazilian territories
as a part of Portugal, this idea has high explicative potential. It paves the
way for a reflection on to what extent these polities could be the base for
empires, that is, of very extended and diverse political formations whose
preservation required the mobilization and circulation of resources among
the different dominions (Yun-Casalilla 2019, pp. 396–408).
These terms and concepts overlap what Russell-Wood called “compen-
satory history” (Russell-Wood 2001, p. 15). The idea was developed by
a group of Portuguese and Brazilian historians in a very influential book
less known beyond Iberian historiography (Fragoso et al. 2001). With
the notion of “compensatory history,” Russell-Wood and his followers
called attention to the need to counterbalance the dominant narrative
of these empires’ history, which stressed the relationship between center
and periphery when it came to the study of their functioning and general
trends. This proposal provides a way of recognizing the “multiple colonial
status” of the different imperial provinces, as Antonio Manuel Hespanha
suggested in the same book and in one of his last works (Hespanha 2001,
2019). It is also a way to highlight the need to analyze the relations
between the different territories of these empires without making their
ties with the European metropoles the only ones that should affect the
empires’ history (Hespanha 2001, pp. 187–88). There emerged an idea
of relations between Iberian societies that did not necessarily pass through
the Court, to which some of us had already referred to when we drew
attention to the need to study the social networks that extended across
8 B. YUN-CASALILLA

the monarchy’s different components (Yun-Casalilla 2009, p. 14).2 This

view entailed an attempt to return their own historicity to the American,
African, and Asian territories and even to the non-Peninsular European
dominions in the understanding of imperial trends, therefore breaking
with the vision that considered them mere appendices and peripheries of
Madrid and Lisbon.
These ideas have been echoed—not to say repeated by a sort of promo-
tion—by the term “polycentric monarchies.” If I properly understand,
the term—may be too broad and therefore in need of some advocates’
ulterior clarifications—emphasizes the “political” relevance of the distinct
imperial polities and their mutual relations (Cardim et al. 2012). In a
way, the concept is not very different from previous ideas. At most, it
can be considered a rewording of the idea of compensatory history and a
complement to the notion of composite monarchies in its original formu-
lation, which potentially extends the view of decentered systems beyond
formal institutions, or, in other words, beyond what Hespanha called the
“official law” of these empires.
It is also worth reflecting on the nature of these conceptualizations. As
I have said, the term composite monarchies or empires refers to a feature
of some political organizations, independently of the new approaches to
those societies that it certainly generates. The notion of “compensatory
history” is different and does not refer to a characteristic of the territo-
ries studied. In reality, it is an approach—a point of view—which, when
adopted, emphasizes the role and agency of these societies in order to
counterbalance the center-periphery perspective. In this way, something is
added to the notion of composite monarchies that was not originally part
of the definition, partly because its creators saw America, the Philippines,
and the Portuguese overseas territories as an appendage of the crowns
of Castile and Portugal, respectively. I think I understand correctly if I
argue that in its origin polycentrism was also considered a characteristic
of those societies to which the term was applied but subsequently has
evolved more and more toward an approach. Today it may blend both
ideas, which sometimes can create confusion. Indeed, according to the
most significant text on the subject, its authors “argue that these political

2 Though in that book I referred mainly to the European territories, the proposal
comprises also American areas as well as the Philippines and the Atlantic world in order
to suggest a vision that, while it takes a different perspective, also complemented the
concept of composite monarchy (Yun-Casalilla 2009, p. 14).
 CONCEPTS AND VIEWPOINTS IN EARLY MODERN IBERIAN … 9

entities were polycentric” and by the same token refer to their “internal
structure” (Cardim et al. 2012, p. 4). But, as the term has been debated,
some of its most convinced supporters have spoken of a “polycentric
approach” as well as of a “perspective” (Ruiz Ibáñez 2016).
One can question the outcome of the use of these terms and concepts
to date, but in principle, it is not difficult to find a point in common.
Iberian imperial monarchies are understood as disaggregate systems of
power and political practices which, despite being subject to asymmetric
relations, are characterized by forms of negotiation and coercion typical
of societies with a variety of legal and normative regimes. Moreover, we
are dealing with societies and polities whose dynamics cannot be under-
stood if we do not consider the relations between them and not only
those between the “center” and “periphery”. Be that as it may, dialogue
between these visions, I believe, is possible as long as we do not fall into
a merely terminological and exclusive struggle.
This does not mean, however, that things are easy. One problem arises
when a concept such as polycentrism is presented not as a complement
or revision that rectifies or balances some semantic deviation, but as an
alternative to previous ones. The idea of polycentrism was launched as a
“radically different model,” not only to the traditional view of empires
as exclusively metropolitan-ruled power systems but also to the idea of
“composite monarchies” (Cardim et al. 2012, p. 4).3 This has been the
case even though polycentrism recalls concepts already present in those
previous notions.
It is common knowledge that the great problem with definitions and
characterizations—in these and other cases of our work as historians—
is that they normally convey a fixed and schematized picture of reality.

3 This radical presentation comes also from a perhaps forced critique made by the
defenders of the term regarding previous views, including that of the composite monar-
chies, which they consider depart from the idea that “the ‘true’ [sic] politics only occurred
in Madrid and Lisbon, while the periphery [everywhere else] was a mere receptor that
could accept or reject what the center had to offer” (Cardim et al. 2012, p. 5). Such
criticism of the idea of composite monarchies hardly fits with the attempt to break with
the idea of political action as dictated only from the center that is crucial for Elliott and
Königsberger. It fits even less with their research on the functioning of the monarchy from
the periphery—in Sicily and Catalonia—and these polities’ conflicts with the Crown. The
rapid reception of the polycentric paradigm and terminology in Latin American histo-
riographies appears understandable and even positive, inasmuch as they stress subaltern
agency, although their novelty with respect to the “compensatory history” of Russell
Wood and the Brazilian historians is less evident.
10 B. YUN-CASALILLA

This is evident, albeit to varying degrees, in all the cases cited above, and
calls for reflection. Some authors extend these concepts to the eighteenth
century. Although with great caution and nuances, Elliott did so for the
concept of composite monarchy (Elliott 1992) and other authors have
done the same for the case of polycentric monarchy (Grafe and Irigoin
2012). But it is also true that those political systems, their degree of
uniformity, and their internal power equilibrium witnessed deep changes.
This is implicit in Elliott’s analysis when he cautioned that the composite
monarchies could not be understood without patronage as a force that
contributed to maintaining their union and changed them over time, or
when he stressed the relevance of the military-fiscal state of the eighteenth
century for their transformation (Elliott 1992, p. 64). John Elliott spoke
of the eighteenth-century “fiscal-military state” as a force for change
in the early modern monarchies which, however, “remained essentially
composite; and closer integration, where sought, remained difficult to
achieve, as Joseph II discovered to his cost” (1992, p. 70). For Elliott,
“it was to be dynastic upheaval that provided the catalyst […] for new
moves toward unification” in Spain and Great Britain (1992, p. 67).
The same idea with a stronger accent on the transformative power of
the military-fiscal state appears in Storrs (2016). Hespanha also expressed
this idea when he warned that describing the “multiple colonial status”
of the Portuguese empire was only a preliminary way to define the rules
of the game. Then, he continued, we need to study how the different
actors play the game and how they changed those rules (Hespanha 2001,
pp. 186–87).
This is a particularly important fact that explains why some specialists
in the Bourbon and Braganza period have employed the term “integra-
tion”—perhaps more useful than the concept of centralism—to describe
the period’s readjustments (Paquette 2013). All these shifts in the reality
of early modern political organizations also make it necessary to privi-
lege the concrete analysis of different cases over the established general
formulas and ideal types. They oblige us to take all of the paradigms
cited above cautiously—that of polycentrism in particular—and with high
doses of relativism, leaving aside too radical expressions, which respond
more to their use as theoretical schemes than as analytical perspectives
with heuristic value, where, I think, the real usefulness of some of them
resides. Terms such as polycentrism may be handy as a form of simplistic
communication. But, because they emphasize one aspect of reality, the
historian should not forget that there is another part—the other side of
 CONCEPTS AND VIEWPOINTS IN EARLY MODERN IBERIAN … 11

the moon—which is that of the king’s regulatory, monitoring, enforcing,

and arbitrage power, without which the portrait of this societies would
remain incomplete, and the complexity of these polities would be lost.

∗ ∗ ∗

The question to consider is to what extent the terms and concepts

analyzed above facilitate dialogue between experts on Iberian empires and
scholars working on other empires. To address such a question requires
contextualizing developments in the history of the Iberian worlds within
more general trends, which is not always present in the way Iberian
historians conceive our own approach, maybe due to a certain separa-
tion between the different historiographies. In fact, an examination of the
general historiography of imperial history reveals a coincidence between
the analytical perspectives scrutinized above and the changes in paradigm
in the field in general.
This new imperial historiography, partly influenced by postcolonial and
subaltern studies, has also stressed the need to give a greater presence to,
and to recognize the agency of, the colonized and enslaved. In a histo-
riographical analysis of the trajectory of the new imperial history written
more than ten years ago, Durba Ghosh made an argument for the British
case that can be extended to the whole of this paradigm shift. The author
pointed out the crucial influence of the works by Robinson and Gallagher
(1953, 1961), who by the 1950s proposed the need for “an explanation
of historical change that emerged from the colonies rather than from the
metropoles” (Ghosh 2012, p. 776). Ghosh reviewed several works that fit
into “extra-European history’ in the United Kingdom” such as those of E.
H. Carr and E. Wolf and concluded that “the new global/imperial history
presumes a decentered narrative in which there was no one driving force
but rather multiple and unmanageable systems, processes, imaginaries
and contingent events that pushed a diversity of nations, empires, and
communities, and their subjects, in different directions” (2012, pp. 776–
78).4 Even historians who have stressed the nineteenth-century empires’
greater capacity to penetrate colonial societies in comparison with those
of previous periods (due to technological and military developments)
have drawn attention to the importance of negotiation and the autonomy

4 Ghosh obviously referred to the classic study Gallagher and Robinson (1953) and to
other analyses in the same directions such as Eric Wolf (1982).
12 B. YUN-CASALILLA

of the dominated societies. It is also interesting to recall that the way

in which the concept of empire has been opposed to that of a nation
by these historiographical movements stems from the recognition of a
greater degree of internal diversity in the former, supposedly far superior
to that of the national states, which are uniform par excellence, at least
in terms of their legal-political component (Burbank and Cooper 2010;
Osterhammel 2014, p. 404). In emphasizing diversity, all these trends
are close to the characterizations and perspectives on the Iberian imperial
monarchies discussed above.
These coincidences are even clearer when it comes to other early
modern empires in general. Today a vision has taken ground according
to which many other empires of the time (if not all) were spaces where
multiple negotiations took place, which is a way to recognize the protag-
onism of these so-called peripheries in the functioning of imperial political
formations (Daniels and Kennedy 2002). Even the British empire, in
the past often presented as a political formation well-structured from
above, has lost this character, according to studies that depict a system
composed of “a variety of bodies politic and hybrid, overlapping and
composite forms of sovereignty” including, of course, colonial territories
(Stern 2011, p. 3). Likewise, the improvised character of their formation
and evolution is acknowledged, as well as the tension between negoti-
ation and violence that governed the penetration of different societies,
which, together with the extreme diversity of those societies, generated
a high degree of complexity and internal differentiation (Darwin 2012).
Although dissimilarities among different political theories about empires
and their effects on the distinct models of political aggregation and impe-
rial expansion have long been recognized (Pagden 1995), historians today
also stress the importance of subaltern agency in all imperial systems.
One can conclude, therefore, that the changes in our view of the
Iberian empires do not differ from those taking place in our under-
standing of empires in general. This similarity, while logical on the one
hand, is explicable and also particularly interesting. It is explicable since,
although we lack studies on the genealogy of these paradigms’ changes,
the reciprocal cross-fertilization among historiographical traditions and
academic environments is an evident reason for such resemblance. Or, in
other words, the conceptual revisionism within the historiography of the
Iberian empires has been strongly influenced by changes in the field of
imperial studies in general and vice versa. Furthermore, we cannot over-
look the parallel influence for the raising of these new visions exerted by
 CONCEPTS AND VIEWPOINTS IN EARLY MODERN IBERIAN … 13

external trends, such as decolonization, the need for narratives in tune

with the rise of new nation states from the ashes of twentieth-century
empires, and the Copernican turns experienced in our vision of Europe
in the word and the critique of Eurocentrism (Chakrabarty 2000).
Such a similarity among historiographical paradigms is interesting in
two senses. First, because of the contrast between their common roots
and the—at least apparent—lack of explicit dialogue between Iberian and
more general historiographies, which is even more evident in the initial
and more radical propositions on polycentrism (Cardim et al. 2012).
This is highly significant, since a similar situation can be perceived from
“the other side.” Influential historiographic tendencies such as subal-
tern studies, focusing on India’s case, have ignored similar approaches
carried out by specialists on the Iberian worlds. Authors such as Wachtel
(1971), or intellectual and political movements such as indigenismo in
Latin American studies, have been absent therefore from subaltern studies
despite their accent on similar ideas (see inter alia, Guha 1987). Further-
more, in the case of Wachtel, his interest in the persistence of Latin
American original folklore as a hybrid but hegemonic culture fits perfectly
with subaltern studies’ key notion of dominion without hegemony (Guha
1987, p. Chapter 1). Similarly, when studying the development of the
imperial turn in the Anglophone academic world, Durba Ghosh (2012)
did not mention similar approaches taking place in other academic arenas,
such as Latin American studies and those of the Iberian world in general.
Secondly, such similarity is even more striking in the case of the idea
of polycentrism, insofar as its proponents have presented it as a particular,
almost unique, characteristic of the Iberian world, which has resulted in
a return to the supposed exceptionalism of the Iberian empires.5 It is
not odd in this sense that the term “polycentrism” has rarely—if ever—
been applied to other empires. To my limited knowledge, not even its
promoters have extended it to them, with the logical exception of the
Holy Roman Empire. This fact may be due to the restrictive formula-
tion of a term that, at the same time, is too vague and general to be
truly operative, rather than to the impossibility of its application to other
cases when taken from an analytical perspective. Extremely symptomatic

5 This outcome has not been the case with the concept of composite monarchies. John
Elliott’s essay speaks of this sort of political formation as something present in most of
the European monarchies of the early modern period, though different balances among
the different polities and between each of them and the ruling dynasty were present.
14 B. YUN-CASALILLA

of this situation is the fact that one of the few researchers who attempted
to contextualize Iberian empires in wider historiography, Antonio M.
Hespanha, did not use the term and reached a twofold conclusion:
first, the use of categories referring to formal institutions, which are
very present in the concepts previously analyzed, proves insufficient for
the comprehension of empires; and, second, once this barrier is over-
come, that realities emerge with many similarities to other empires and
to “traditional societies” (Hespanha 2019, pp. 13–15). This does not
mean—Hespanha continues—that all of those societies were the same.
On the contrary, important differences among them were due, in part, to
their distinct economic bases. The need to change our analytical perspec-
tive and to understand Iberian empires in a wider context that goes
beyond formal institutions emerges clearly.
The similarities and coincidences between recent trends in Iberian
and general historiographies on empires suggest possibilities for fruitful
communication. But they also suggest that those possibilities arise when
the terminology itself is left aside on behalf of its meaning, which has
not always been the case in recent years. It is important to note that
the previously cited Antonio M. Hespanha and other scholars who have
contributed to a fluid dialogue including the history of the Iberian
empires in a wider historiographical context have done so by making this
more practical and less terminological analysis a normal exercise. One of
John Elliott’s more influential books, published almost fifteen years ago,
exemplifies this way of writing the history of the Spanish (and British)
empire. Although one of the founders of the idea of the composite
monarchy, Elliott used the term sparingly. His scant use of the concept,
moreover, avoids its reduction to a sort of cliché underlying his findings
and even less as the basis for his comparisons (Elliott 2006). Authors such
as Burbank and Cooper—their book was published before some of these
terms and particularly that of the “polycentric monarchies” were coined—
refer to the Spanish empire as a political entity with a high degree of
internal disaggregation and diversity (Burbank and Cooper 2010); but
they do not present the Spanish empire as the unique paradigm in this
sense. On the contrary, the internal diversity within empires runs through
their book as a general characteristic of these polities. On his part, David
Ringrose has underlined the difficulties faced by all pre-modern imperial
formations when they tried to penetrate, and consequently homoge-
nize, the societies under their dominion, the Iberian case being only one
among others before roughly 1750 (Ringrose 2018). Similar insights can
 CONCEPTS AND VIEWPOINTS IN EARLY MODERN IBERIAN … 15

be found in the work of Krishan Kumar (2017), Sanjay Subrahmanyam

(2005), myself (Yun-Casalilla 2019), and many others.
All in all, there is a wide and fertile field for comparisons among
different empires; or, in another way, for the globalization of Iberian
historiography. It is in this sense that the new image we have of the
Iberian monarchic imperial formations can offer insights when compared
with others. Such comparisons can be carried out at different levels. One
of these levels—and not the least interesting—entails comparing the polit-
ical theories on which these polities relied, as Anthony Pagden (1995)
did years ago. But we should, perhaps, disentangle this exercise from
the discussion of the character—imperial or not—of these political forma-
tions. Moreover, one thing is the fact that early modern authors conceived
the term “empire” differently from nineteenth-century theorists, which is
evident and may lead to interesting analyses of the genealogy of concepts
and the epoch’s different political theories. Another, different, matter
is that, as historians seeking an understanding of how these political
formations evolved, we do not include them in a wider definition of
the term for analyzing their systemic dynamics or their impact on glob-
alization and the development of the local societies they subjugated or
tried to subjugate. The comparative analysis of imperial supra-structures’
political economies strikes me as equally promising, although still only
beginning despite abundant material. This may be the case due to the
difficulty posed by empires’ extreme internal diversity and institutional
plurality, which conforms very diverse rules of the game depending on
the levels, case studies, and social and economic spaces under scrutiny
and comparison. Finally, recent debates emphasize the need to compare
the way imperial systems interacted with local powers and actors. This
exercise of glocal history may lead us to compare not different empires
but, rather, different local societies under their umbrella that can be even
more dissimilar within the same empire than from one empire to another
(Yun-Casalilla 2022).

***
The crucial matter at this point is that most of the approaches discussed
are calling for a globalization and convergence of the different histo-
riographies. An oversized conceptual and terminological disparity does
not help generate dialogue. Such a disparity can be inevitable and useful
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
protest anywhere, the entire male population of the country between
the ages of twenty-one and thirty, inclusive, went to the registration
booths and registered for military service, and practically all the
returns were in Washington within twenty-four hours. Two
subsequent registrations of young men who had reached the age of
twenty-one after June 5th brought the number of registrants up to a
little more than 10,000,000 men.
On September 12th, 1918, occurred the registration under the
extended age limits of eighteen to forty-five when over 13,000,000
names were added to the list. Thus in a year and a half of war
America listed and classified as to physical fitness and occupational
and domestic status her full available power of 23,700,000 men. Out
of the first great registration and the two small ones supplementing it
and from the Regular Army and the National Guard there had been
sent overseas at the signing of the armistice, November 11th, 1918,
a little more than 2,000,000 men and there were in the United
States, ready for transportation to France, 1,600,000. The American
Army totaled at that time 3,665,000. A few of those who had gone
were in Italy, Russia, or elsewhere, but nearly all of them were in
France, trained, equipped and either on the fighting line, in
supporting divisions, or waiting in the rear ready for the front. Those
in the American training camps were being transported to France at
the rate of from 200,000 to 300,000 per month and would all have
been overseas by early spring of 1919. The work of classifying the
registrants of September, 1918, and of making the selections for
military service was already under way and the flow of these men
into the training camps had begun. The plans were all ready for
operation for calling into military service 3,000,000 more men from
this registration, for training them in the American camps two or
three months and then sending them to France for a final training
period of six or eight weeks. If the war had continued until the next
summer, as it was then universally believed it would, the United
States would have had ready for service at the front, within two years
of its declaration of war, an army of between 6,000,000 and
7,000,000 men, taken from civilian life, trained, equipped and
transported across the Atlantic Ocean within that time.
 The mechanism by which this army was gathered, examined,
selected, classified and sent to training camps worked as smoothly,
as efficiently and as swiftly as if the country had been trained for a
century in martial methods. The quotas to be furnished by states,
counties and smaller districts were apportioned and local boards
were appointed to have charge of the task of calling the selected
men, examining and classifying them and sending to the training
camps those finally chosen as physically fit for the service and able
to serve without injury to dependents or to essential industry.
Registration also had been carried on under these local boards,
each registrant being numbered in order. The draft call was made by
means of a lottery drawing in Washington where each number that
was drawn summoned all the men of the same registration number
in all of the 4,500 local boards throughout the country. The local
boards called in the men whose numbers were chosen, examined
them as to physical condition, considered their claims to exemption,
if such were made, on the ground of being the necessary support of
dependents or of being engaged in an essential industry, decided for
or against them and certified their names to the district board, which
acted as a board of review for local boards, as exempted or held for
service. If approved for service by the district board, the local board
inducted them into the service and sent them to a cantonment or
camp to begin their military training. Each of these 4,500 local
boards was officered by three men, one of whom had to be a
physician. All of them were civilians who worked practically without
pay, until, after some months, a small allowance was made for their
remuneration. They carried through the arduous work, frequently
entailing many hours per day, in addition to their regular business or
professional affairs, which had to be much neglected meanwhile, in
order that they might offer this important service to their country at
the moment of need. The draft organization, besides these 13,500
local board members, included over 1,000 district board members,
medical, legal and industrial advisers, clerks, Government appeal
agents, and others amounting, all told, to a compact, nation-wide
body of over 190,000.
 The democratic ideals of America have never had a more
searching trial or a more triumphant vindication than was afforded by
the swift and efficient making of this Army of Freedom. Columbia
stretched out a summoning finger, saying, “I need you!” and there
came to her service millionaire’s son and Chinese laundryman,
descendant of generations of Americans and immigrant of a day,
farmer, banker, merchant, clerk, country school teacher, university
professor, lawyer, physician, truck driver, yacht owner, down-and-
outer, social favorite—from village and country and town and city
they came, representing every occupation, every social grade, every
economic condition in the republic. On the democratic level of
service to the country they gathered in the barracks and without a
whimper or a word of protest the millionaire’s son cleaned out
stables, the young man reared in luxury washed his own mess kit
and served on the kitchen police, and all of them worked at their
training and their drill as hard as day laborers from dawn till dark.
Fourteen tribes of American Indians were represented among the
soldiers of the National Army, as the forces formed from the
Selective Service were called for more than a year, to distinguish
them from the Regular Army and the National Guards. Then all three
were merged into the single organization of the United States Army.
Among the most efficient soldiers were several regiments of
negroes. Every civilized nation on the face of the globe, every
language, and every important dialect were represented in the ranks
of the soldiers of freedom who carried the Stars and Stripes on the
battle fields of France. Through the office of the base censor of the
American Expeditionary Forces passed letters in forty-nine
languages. Chinese, Syrian and Dane, Persian and Irishman,
Japanese and Italian, Latin American and Swede, vied with the New
Englander, the Kentuckian, the Texan and the Kansan in loyalty to
the United States, in enthusiasm for our ideals and willingness to
defend them with their lives. In the September registration men of
fifty-two different tongues were listed in New York City. In the first
draft men were called and accepted who claimed birth in twenty-two
separately listed countries, while a contingent from Central and
South America was not credited in the official report to the separate
nations they represented and nearly two thousand men from
scattered and small countries were lumped together under the
designation of “Sundries.” But all of them zealously fought for
America.
A great many of these foreign-born men already spoke English.
And the education of those who did not began as soon as they were
inducted into the army and was continued along with their military
training. In every cantonment to which came men who did not
understand English schools were established in which they were
taught to speak, read and write the language. All the training and all
the life around them were in English and this constant association
and the daily lessons soon made most of the men fairly proficient.
Along with the training in English went instruction in American
ideals, in the reasons why America was in the war and in what the
war meant to them individually. The aim was to give to these foreign-
born men the kind of training in patriotism and in democratic ideals,
condensed into a few weeks, that the American gets by birthright
and surroundings. Many, varied and ingenious were the ways by
which this was done. There were short talks on war news, on
American principles of government, on why America was in the war,
on why it was a war for freedom, and similar topics. The special days
and the heroes of nations that have their own traditions of revolt
against tyranny were celebrated by “national nights” to which came
all the sons of that nation in the camp and as many others as could
crowd into the auditorium. There were music and speeches and
national songs and the hymns of the Allies and in all the talking the
speakers would link up American democracy, its mission in the world
and the reasons why America was in the war with the traditions of
freedom, the heroes of liberty and the sacrifices for democracy and
justice of the nation whose celebration was being held. Pamphlets
and leaflets, written by men of their own nationality, in English
usually, but in their own tongue for those who could not yet read
English, which explained the causes of the war, the aims of the
combatants and America’s motives and outlined American history in
a simple and readable way, were circulated among the men. In a
word, these foreign-born soldiers-in-the-making were educated and
broadened and so imbued with democratic principles and American
ideals that in spirit they rapidly became good Americans, even if they
elected to continue citizens of their native land.
But all who wished could be naturalized during their military
training. In every cantonment was a court of naturalization and by a
special law it had been made possible to shorten the time ordinarily
needed for this process. Any man who was going forth to fight the
battles of civilization in the American army could become an
American citizen, even if he had not previously declared his
intention, while he was being trained. In one day at one of the
cantonments men of fifty-six nationalities were naturalized. At this
camp sessions were held from eight till five o’clock and were often
continued until midnight, so many were there who wished to become
citizens. The majority of the aliens in the selective service did so
choose and the great bulk of the foreign-born part of the huge army
that was ferried across the Atlantic had acquired American
citizenship. Aliens who did not wish to serve could, and some
thousands did, claim, and were granted, exemption on that ground.
Now and then Columbia’s summoning finger brought to the
training camp a slacker, or a religious or a conscientious objector.
Patient and careful inquiry was given to every case and no effort was
spared to make sure that each was receiving exact justice. The
official report of the Provost Marshal General for the first draft
reckoned that out of the more than 3,000,000 called for service no
more than 150,000 of those who failed to appear on time were not
accounted for by enlistment, transference or death. The reports of
the local boards showed that the bulk of this residue was composed
of aliens who had left this country to enlist in their own armies. Out of
the remainder of 50,000 a great many of the failures to report were
due to the ignorance or heedlessness of workingmen who had
moved, between registration and the call, from one job to another in
a different locality.
The exemption usually given to religious objectors was extended,
after a few months, to include those who based their objections to
sharing in warfare upon grounds of conscience even if they were not
members of a religious organization. Out of the 3,600,000 men
inducted into the service a little less than 4,000 were accepted or
recognized as conscientious objectors. A large number of these
were assigned to work on farm or industrial furloughs. Some entered
non-combatant service and a few were allowed to join the Friends’
Reconstruction Unit. Several hundred refused any service whatever
and were sent to prison. In the training camps the conscientious
objectors were segregated and placed in the charge of an army
officer who was often able by tact and persuasion to influence them
to a different point of view. Some swallowed their objections very
soon, took up the work of training more or less sullenly, and
presently, seeing a better light and feeling the influence of the
patriotism and enthusiasm surging round about them, became as
good soldiers of Uncle Sam as any of their comrades. The problem
of the slacker and the objector was a small one in the making of the
great army that was sent overseas, but it was a vexatious one for the
honest-hearted men who had charge of it and who took infinite pains
to dispense even-handed justice in every case. “My company,” said
the captain in one large cantonment under whose command were
grouped the slackers, the religious objectors and the protesters for
conscience’s sake, “is the most interesting one in the camp—and the
most trying.”
Development battalions were established in nearly all the
cantonments and did a good work in raising the efficiency of some of
the men of the army by helping them to reach better physical
condition. To these battalions were sent men who developed minor
physical defects and the men sometimes received from the local
boards who fell short of the physical standards set by the army.
Medical treatment, courses of physical training and, if necessary,
surgical operations brought many of them to so much better bodily
condition that they could undertake limited service. Many were sent
to the forests of the Northwest as part of the regiment that did most
necessary work in helping to get out spruce lumber for airplane
construction. Others were prepared for clerical and semi-civilian
work in the army, thus releasing for active service those who had
had it in charge. A goodly number improved so much under
treatment that they were enabled to undertake active army service.
All told, about 250,000 men passed through the development
battalions, of whom nearly half were made fit for duty in either the
first, second or third class. Educational work was also carried on in
the battalions and many who were either illiterate or had had very
little schooling received elementary instruction from former school
teachers, of whom there were many in the ranks. Short talks on the
duties of citizenship, phases of American history, public questions,
and the causes and progress of the war and the encouragement of
discussion broadened the outlook and stimulated the minds of the
men.
The necessity of organizing and training a huge army in a few
months made equally necessary a revolution in some army methods,
a revolution that was brought about by the Committee on the
Classification of Personnel appointed early in the war. For most of its
work, which constantly broadened and became more and more
important, it had no precedents, for, except a little experimenting in
the British army, nothing like it had ever been attempted before. In
scope and function and purpose it was one of those bold innovations
upon army traditions and methods which the Secretary of War
introduced into the training of this new army of democracy, with
results so successful and important that when the complete story of
them is known it will be seen that they put a new spirit into military
training and were in no small measure responsible for the splendid
record made by the American army.
The Director of the Committee was a civilian, a university
professor and specialist in psychology who had won distinction by
his ability to give that science practical and fruitful application in daily
life. Its work was so varied and so well developed in all its phases
that it is possible to give here only the barest resume of its
achievements. By the methods it devised all the men who entered a
cantonment, after they had passed their physical examinations,
underwent psychological tests to determine the speed and accuracy
of their mental actions, the quality of their native intelligence and the
extent of its development. Then they passed on to interviewers who
examined and classified them according to their education and
training, their occupations and degree of skill. Afterward came trade
tests to discover whether or not the men had truly reported their
occupations and ability.
 These trade tests and the methods of their application, as finally
developed, were the result of much work and investigation by the
Committee that had brought in the services of psychological experts,
employment experts, statisticians and others. Their purpose was to
procure a dependable record of the special ability of every soldier
who possessed any kind of skill that would serve any one of the
army’s varied needs. Every army unit must have specialists of
several kinds and in an army that had to be built up at high speed it
was necessary to find these specialists among its numbers. Bitter
experience developed the fact, very soon, that the account of
themselves which the men gave in answer to the questions of the
interviewers frequently could not be depended on and the trade
tests, which were of three kinds, oral, picture and performance, were
devised to meet this necessity quickly and easily.
As the soldier passed through these various examinations his
interviewers entered upon his record card his physical and mental
qualifications, his trade or profession and his degree of proficiency.
Thus was tabulated, for the first time in the history of any army in any
nation, the exact physical, mental and industrial ability of every
soldier in the American army. These records were kept by the unit to
which the soldier was assigned, and followed him if he was changed
to another, for the information of the officers under whom he served.
A glance at such a card gave to an officer the knowledge he should
have concerning the aptitudes, the abilities and the character of any
of his men whom he might wish to assign to some particular service.
If skilled men were wanted in any of the scores of special
occupations which the modern army demands they could quickly and
easily be brought together, with the sure knowledge that they would
be able to do what was expected of them. One of the greatest of the
many problems facing those who had to make an army of millions of
men out of raw civilians in a few months was to be sure of getting the
right man for the right place, and the Committee on Classification of
Personnel, an innovation in the making of armies, solved it.
Similar tests helped to determine the qualifications of officers and
enabled their superiors to judge their fitness for any specified duty
with accuracy. The Personnel work was conducted by men chosen
for it because of their aptitude and their experience in civil life and
they were then trained especially for it in schools for that purpose
instituted at army camps.
These individual records and the service records of the entire
army, both privates and officers, with the history of each unit, are to
be preserved among the archives of the Government.
This great army, growing at the rate of a hundred thousand per
month, nearly the whole of it composed of civilians who had been
entirely lacking in military knowledge and training, without interest in
martial affairs and, in large part, averse to the principle of warfare as
a means of settling human disputes, had to be trained in the quickest
possible time for participation in the greatest, the most shocking and
the most scientific war of all history. The Regular Army and the
National Guard together could furnish no more than 9,500 officers, a
mere handful compared with the number needed. Beginning in May,
1917, four series of Officers’ Training Camps were held, each series
lasting three months, at which men studied and drilled with grueling
intensity twelve hours a day, fitting themselves for the work of
training the Selective Service men who began to be gathered into
the cantonments early in September. At these camps were trained,
all told, 80,000 officers, from second lieutenants to colonels,
although the higher commissions were granted only at the first two
series because of the urgent need, at first, for officers of all grades.
There were also several special training schools, one for colored
officers of the line, and others in Porto Rico, Hawaii and the
Philippines. Several thousand officers were trained and graduated
also from Reserve Officers’ Training Corps units established at over
a hundred colleges and universities.
French and British officers and British non-coms were sent by their
governments to the United States to aid by giving practical training
out of their own experience and their assistance was of great value.
After our own men began to go overseas and have training and
experience at the front many of them were brought back for the
higher importance of the instruction they could give.
View Across One End of a Cantonment Three Months After
its Construction was Begun
 Training a Machine Gun Company
From the training camp schools of intensive study and drill many
thousands of young men were assigned for work at the special
officers’ training camps where officers were prepared for the
specialized duties of the Signal, Engineer and Quartermasters
Corps, and for coast and field artillery and machine gun work. Here
also there were long hours and steady, close application. From these
special training camps 60,000 officers were graduated. A shortened
and intensified course at West Point greatly increased the number of
its graduates ready for officers’ service with the army.
In the autumn of 1918 five hundred colleges and universities
became a part of the great program of the War Department. Each of
these institutions was transformed into a martial training school and
nearly all the men students of the whole five hundred, about 170,000
in all, joined the Students’ Army Training Corps, thus becoming
members of the United States Army. But while these youths spent
much time on drill and training they also were expected to keep up
their other studies. For this was a scientific war and demanded for its
prosecution men skilled in many branches of learning. The young
men were being trained to be not only soldiers but also engineers,
chemists, physicians, geologists, physicists, and specialists in many
other lines. From their ranks the most promising were selected and
sent to military camps for six weeks of a course of rigid and intensive
military training in some special line of military service. West Point
graduates, army officers with experience on the other side, officers
loaned by our Allies, had charge of the military supervision and work
of this great body of students. And during the summer of 1918 7,000
members of university and college faculties attended special training
camps to prepare themselves to assist in this work. The school
year’s training was expected to yield, by the spring of 1919, from
60,000 to 70,000 officers.
Thus, by training, selection, rigid test, more intensive training, the
hardest of hard work, and still more training under men who had
proved their worth in battle and had brought back dearly won
knowledge of present day methods of warfare, the need for more,
and more, and ever more officers for the rapidly expanding army was
met. And in the camps and cantonments the daily drill, drill, drill, and
again drill, drill, drill, of a million and a half of soldiers was constantly
carried on.
Early in the course of all these activities it was perceived that it
would be advisable to reconstruct the entire plan of organization of
the army in order to make the size and number of its fighting units
correspond with those of the English and French armies and thus
simplify the brigading of our troops with the others and the
exchanging of units in the front lines. This reorganization was carried
out, as was also the merging together into one body of the three
organizations, Regular Army, National Guard and National Army, in
the midst of all the high-speeded preparations for war.
Another revolution in army methods, the result of the imperious
necessity for the highest efficiency possible to obtain, whether from
soldier or officer, individual or army, was the sweeping away of the
old system of promotion by seniority. All officers below the rank of
Brigadier-General, under these new regulations, had to undergo the
passing of judgment upon them every three months by their
immediate superiors. They were rated according to their physical
and personal qualities, capacity for leadership, intelligence, and
value to the service, and promotion depended upon how well they
passed these tests.
 CHAPTER II
HOUSING THE SOLDIERS AND THEIR SUPPLIES

While the machinery was being devised and set in motion for
forming a great army by means of the selective draft and officers
were being schooled for its training, immense camps had to be
provided in which hundreds of thousands of men could be trained,
warehouses had to be built in which to gather and store the
enormous amounts of supplies necessary for their maintenance and
equipment, huge plants had to be constructed for the making of
certain kinds of ordnance, and included in the vast scheme of
construction work, all of it necessary almost at once, were also flying
fields, embarkation depots, port and terminal facilities.
The work of building the cantonments was, alone, a very great
engineering achievement. It called for an expenditure within three
months of $150,000,000, more than three times that of the largest
year’s work on the Panama Canal, and it demanded the construction
of nearly a score of goodly sized cities, to be ready for occupancy by
the following September. For this huge job, when war was declared,
there was one colonel with four assistants and a few draughtsmen,
clerks and stenographers. Around that lone colonel there was built
up, almost over night, by telegraph and telephone, the organization
of the Government’s Construction Division, that carried through
successfully the whole vast program. For the building of the
cantonments, engineers, town planners and civilians having expert
knowledge came to its assistance, investigating possible sites and
studying their water supply, transportation facilities and availability of
construction materials. Contracts were let for sixteen National Army
cantonments and as many National Guard camps. These were all
signed between the fifteenth and twenty-seventh of June and in
three months some of them were in use, while in six months all the
work had been finished, plus many additions and betterments.
The building of each meant the creation of a city that would house
from forty to eighty thousand people. The ground surface had to be
prepared, hills leveled, valleys filled, trees uprooted, brush cleared
away and roads built. Then began the construction of barracks for
the men, officers’ and nurses’ quarters, hospitals, repair shops, and
all the other buildings necessary for the varied activities of the camp,
amounting to more than 1,400 separate structures in each
cantonment. Sewage systems and steam heating and electric
lighting plants were installed. An ample water supply, with plenty of
shower baths, was provided, allowing fifty gallons per day per capita,
which is eighty per cent more than the average allowance in
European army camps. Every care was used to assure the purity of
the water. When taken from rivers it was filtered and sterilized.
The total cost of the thirty-two cantonments and camps was
$179,607,497. Additions and betterments during the next six months
added $22,000,000. Every camp had its garbage incinerator, coffee
roasting plant, theater, repair shop and other buildings that added to
the comfort and morale of the men and the efficiency of the camp’s
work. Such care was taken in the sanitation of the training camps
and in the assuring of a pure supply of water—sometimes making
necessary the draining of surrounding areas—that the reports of the
Surgeon-General showed the practical elimination of water-borne
diseases among the troops in training.
Almost as rapid as the work on the cantonments and camps was
that which had to provide hospitals, flying fields with all their many
buildings for varied uses, huge storehouses and port and terminal
facilities. At half a dozen of the Atlantic Coast cities port terminals
with warehouses and wharves had been completed or were nearing
completion at the end of hostilities unprecedented in size and
completeness of equipment in our own or any other country. One
storage warehouse provided 3,800,000 feet of storage space and
another, for ordnance supplies, had 4,000,000 square feet of space
into which were fitted seventy-five miles of trackage and 9,000 lineal
feet of wharf frontage.
For the production and storage of certain kinds of ordnance great
plants had to be built at the highest speed and, for the most part,
because of their dangerous possibilities, in out of the way places
where the problem was complicated by the necessity of providing
housing not only for the workers who would operate the plant but
also for those engaged in its construction. An instance of one of
these, and there were many others, was a smokeless powder plant
the building of which in eight months transformed farm land along a
riverside to a busy town, containing 3,500 people, into which had
gone 100,000,000 feet of lumber. It had rows of barracks for single
men, blocks of cottages, other blocks of better residences, huge
storage houses, laboratories, manufactories. A pumping and
purification plant built among the first of the structures took from the
river 90,000,000 gallons of water per day and made it fit for use.
While the plant was being erected from 200 to 400 cars of freight
were unloaded daily. Construction projects of this class, including
plants for the production of gas, nitrate, picric acid, powder and high
explosives, presented complicated problems and their cost ran from
$15,000,000 to $50,000,000 each. And all were erected and in
operation within a few months from the day of the first work upon
them.
Eighteen months of war saw the construction of nearly five
hundred important projects of these various kinds at a cost of over
$750,000,000, all of them rushed to completion at the greatest
possible speed.
 CHAPTER III
FEEDING AND EQUIPPING THE ARMY

The Quartermasters Corps, which formerly totaled 500 officers

and 5,000 enlisted men, with its facilities and routine adapted to the
feeding and equipping of an army of 127,000 men, had at once not
only to meet the needs of the vastly expanding forces and to keep
abreast of the actual growth and immediate demands of the army as
it came into being, but it had also to anticipate and prepare to meet
what would be the much greater needs of a much larger army six or
eight months in advance.
While a million and a half of men were being examined, classified
and called to service and more than thirty cantonments and camps
were being built in which to house and train them and other
construction projects were being rushed forward, the Quartermasters
Corps had to provide their uniforms and clothing and accumulate in
storage the food for their subsistence. At the same time, it had to
make sure that it could meet the constantly enlarging needs of the
coming months when the army would grow like a Jonah’s gourd with
every passing week. Production had to be stimulated and turned
aside from its usual channels and enormous quantities of material
used for new purposes. It was an emergency that required the
practical making over of the methods and purposes of American
industry and in the process the Quartermasters Corps had to be both
the directing and supervising agency and the channel of
communication between industry and the army.
A soldier’s outfit of clothing for a year cost $65.51 and numbered
twenty-three different items of a dozen different branches of
manufacturing industry. The initial equipment for one man’s shoes
alone cost $14.25. During the sixteen months from April 1st, 1917, to
the end of July, 1918, the army was supplied, among other things,
with 27,000,000 pairs of shoes, field and marching; 29,800,000 pairs
of breeches, light and heavy; 19,800,000 coats, both wool and
cotton; 192,200,000 shirts, undershirts and drawers, for both
summer and winter wear; 156,600,000 pairs of stockings of cotton
and light and heavy weight wool; and 21,000,000 blankets. And by
the end of July the Corps already was taking measures to provide
the clothing necessary during the coming year for the army of
5,000,000 men for which the War Department was preparing. That
meant it must have on hand whenever and wherever they should be
required, among many other things, all of which at the signing of the
armistice it had either ready or in sight, 17,000,000 blankets,
28,000,000 woolen breeches, 34,000,000 woolen drawers,
8,000,000 overcoats, 33,000,000 pairs of shoes, 110,000,000 pairs
of stockings, 9,000,000 overseas caps, 25,000,000 flannel shirts.
Ten great storage depots were maintained in as many different
regions of the country where huge quantities of equipment were kept
and from which the camps in that district were supplied. Other
storage plants had to be kept full at the ports of embarkation from
which the troops bound for overseas service were outfitted. On the
other side of the Atlantic stock depots were maintained with
complete equipment for ninety days’ supply for all the troops,
numbering finally over 2,000,000, that were sent overseas. As an
indication of the enormous quantities of clothing which had to be
sent across the Atlantic, on the first of July, 1918, there were, along
with similar large quantities of other supplies, on docks in the United
States ready for shipment, 2,700,000 blankets, 840,000 pairs of
spiral puttees, 7,500,000 pairs of stockings, 1,400,000 pairs of field
shoes, 203,000 pairs of hip rubber boots, 713,000 overseas caps,
697,000 woolen breeches, 709,000 overcoats.
A force of inspectors kept the output of the manufacturing
contractors constantly under rigorous watch and whenever supplies
were not up to the specified standard they were rejected. Because it
is of the first importance that a soldier’s feet be always in the best
condition, great care was taken in properly fitting each individual. A
scientific means was devised of measuring the soldier’s foot when
he received his first pair of shoes and of testing the fit so that he
could be sure of entire comfort in his foot-gear, no matter what the
length of the hikes he should take. And after being perfectly fitted the
first time, with each successive pair—each year in the service in the
United States he received three pairs and four pairs for each year
abroad—he had only to ask for another exactly similar.
The American army has always been a well fed army. In the pre-
war days, when it was the smallest army maintained by any large
state, experts from other nations, versed in the quantity and quality
of army rations, said that the American was the best fed of all
armies. And this was still true during the great war, though its
numbers leaped on by magic strides. Whether in training at home, in
camp on the other side, or on the battle front, the American soldier
had better food and more of it than the soldier of any other nation.
For instance, extra rations from American supplies were issued to
American soldiers when brigaded with those of any other army, in
addition to those supplied by the commissariat of the army with
which they were working. No experiments were made upon the
doughboy in the matter of food and experts saw to it that his ration
was agreeable to the taste, well-balanced and nutritious. That it was
good was proved by the fact that the average soldier gained from ten
to twelve pounds in weight after entering the service.
Food experts were constantly busy devising the best means of
preserving the food until it reached the army kitchens, whether in the
home camps or behind the lines at the front. A part of their mission
was also to eliminate waste. Coffee roasting plants were installed in
all the large camps at home and overseas, for the double purpose of
giving the soldier better coffee—coffee made within twenty-four
hours after the bean had been roasted—and to prevent the waste,
about two cents on each pound, which results when the roasted
coffee is kept for long periods and so deteriorates in strength and
quality. A school was established to which men were sent to learn
the art of roasting coffee properly and after they became expert they
were detailed to the different camps at home and abroad to take
charge of the coffee roasting plants. Lemon drops were found to be
a desirable part of the army ration, as they supply needed factors of
food, help to quench thirst and are much enjoyed by the soldiers. To
make sure that the drops supplied should be of the best quality a
formula was prepared calling for pure granulated sugar and the best
quality of fruit and the candy makers taking the contract were held
strictly to that standard. The same care was taken to see that
manufacturers of chocolate candies should use the best cocoa
beans in making them. The candy ration for troops on overseas
service was a half pound every ten days for each soldier, and a great
deal of this was made, toward the end of the war, in factories which
the Quartermasters Corps established in France.
The American soldier’s daily ration consisted of twenty-seven
articles of food, weighing altogether about four and a half pounds
and costing about 50 cents per man, and it had to be ready for him
regularly and promptly every day, wherever he might be. No second
grade material of any kind was bought and constant inspection of
raw materials, of processes and places, of preparation and of army
kitchens kept the food up to the standard demanded. It was bought
in enormous quantities and, in order to stabilize prices in all sections
of the country, part of the supplies was secured through the Food
Administration and the remainder by means of a system of zone
buying. During the ten months from September 1st, 1917, to the end
of June, 1918, 225,000,000 pounds of sugar were required and from
the 1917 crop of vegetables and fruits the army bought and used
75,000,000 cans of tomatoes and 20,000,000 pounds of prunes.
From the listed amounts of thirty articles of food demanded for the
subsistence for one year of an army of 3,000,000 men, the
approximate size of the American army before the September draft,
the following items are taken. They will give an idea of the size of the
task which the Quartermasters Corps undertook in the feeding of our
soldiers at home and abroad: Fresh beef, 478,515,000 pounds;
bacon, 48,000,000 pounds; potatoes, 782,925,000 pounds; jam,
7,665,000 cans; flour, 915,000,000 pounds; coffee, 61,320,000
pounds; tea, 7,665,000 pounds; canned pork and beans, 4,000,000
cases; canned tomatoes, 6,000,000 cases; evaporated milk,
2,992,500 cases; butter, 15,330,000 pounds. More than six thousand
different packers supplied the canned vegetables bought for the
army in the summer of 1918, approximately 300,000,000 cans,
enough to girdle the earth if the cans were laid in line, end to end.
The necessity of conserving shipping space led to the use of
dehydrated vegetables, of which the Quartermasters Corps in the