Events

Wednesday, October 3, 2007, 4-6pm

Latin American Studies Speaker Series

Imperial Decadence – A roundtable on the late Spanish Empire. 3 October 2007 – 4-6 pm, Munk 208N

Relative Decadences: Spanish and Dutch Imperial Stability in the face of Mounting Challenges from France and Britain (from the second half of the Seventeenth Century onwards)

Manuel Herrero Sánchez, Universidad Pablo de Olavide – Seville, Spain

I wish to discuss the capacity for response and adaptation in both the Spanish and Dutch colonial empires, analysing their differences and similarities, their realms of collaboration, and also the mechanisms each employed to meet pressures arising in their overseas dominions – especially from activities supported by the increasingly vigorous English and French monarchies.

Slavery and the Decline of Spain's Empire in South America

Peter Blanchard, University of Toronto

One of the pillars of the Spanish empire in America was slavery. The institution experienced a number of contradictory pressures in the late Bourbon period: signficant increases in numbers in response to Bourbon free trade policies versus growing Enlightened opposition to the slave
trade and the fears raised by the Haitian revolution. Slavery, consequently, was under attack as the wars of independence broke out, and the events of the period, such as the liberal gestures of the cortes of Cadiz, the new states' anti-slavery legislation, and the recruitment of thousands of slave soldiers, challenged slavery. By extension, was it also weakening Spanish rule?

Predicting the Past? Premonitions of Spanish American Independence

Manuel Lucena-Giraldo, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain

Although imperial experience is often related to providencialism and historical pesimism, the case of Spain is quite amazing in the following sense: from the beginning there was a decided lack of trust in the possibilities for the monarchy as an imperial and global power. My talk will examine some writings from the 1780s which predicted Spanish American independence, not for teleological reasons, but rather for historical and functional ones.

Elite Perceptions and Uses of Quechua in Peru around Independence

Alan Durston, York University

What was the role of Quechua, as symbol and as means of communication, in Peru's
transition from late colony to sovereign republic? Both Bourbon and early
republican policies towards Quechua tend to be characterized in terms of either
full-out eradication or not-so-benign neglect. My talk will examine some
contemporary discourses on and uses of Quechua that suggest a more complex
picture.

on the participants / sobre los participantes

Peter Blanchard is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. His research interests include the social history of Spanish America in the 19th-century, slavery, and the Wars of Independence. He is presently examining the participation of slaves in the armies of the independence period. His publications include The Origins of the Peruvian Labor Movement, 1883-1919 (1982), Markham in Peru: The Travels of Clements R. Markham, 1852-1853 (1991) and Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru (1992).

Manuel Lucena Giraldo studies the History of the Americas and is a Research Fellow in the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in Madrid, Spain. He has held visiting professorships in Venezuela, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States. His publications include Tropical Laboratory. The Boundary Expedition to the Orinoco,1750-1767 (1993), Premonitions of the Spanish American Independence (2003), and work as contributing editor to The Malaspina Expedition 1789-1794. The Journal of the Voyage by Alejandro Malaspina , eds. A. David, F. Fernández-Armesto, C. Novi y G. Williams (2001-2004). His latest book, translated as On the four winds. Cities in Hispanic America came out in 2006. Profesor Lucena Giraldo is a regular contributor to the cultural supplement of the Spanish newpaper ABC, http://www.abc.es/abcd

Manuel Herrero Sánchez (Madrid, 1964) is a Professor of Modern History at the Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, Spain, where, alongside Professors Bartolomé Yun and Giovanni Levi, he coordinates a doctoral programme intitled “Europe, the Mediterranean World and its Atlantic Diffusions.” Professor Herrera completed his own doctorate at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and he has been a visiting researcher at the Institute for the History of European Expansion at Leiden University, at the Vrij Universiteit in Amsterdam, both in the Netherlands, at the Istituto Benedetto Croce in Naples, Italy, and at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid, Spain. His studies focus upon international relations in early modern times, bringing comparative analysis to bear on central roles played by Genoese and Dutch mercantile republics in the workings of the European dynastic systems through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His publications include Las Provincias Unidas y la Monarquía Hispánica, 1588-1702 (Madrid, 1999), El acercamiento hispano-neerlandés (1648-1678) (Madrid, 2000), España y la
s 17 provincias de los Países Bajos. Una revisión historiográfica (siglos XVI-XVIII), together with Ana Crespo (Córdoba, 2003), and “La República Génova y la Monarquía Hispánica” in the journal Hispania (2005).

Alan Durston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at York University. He studies the cultural history of the Andean region (primarily Peru) with special interests in Quechua and in language politics, and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He has taught Latin American history at DePaul University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame. His book Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550-1650 is being published by the University of Notre Dame Press in 2007.