Surveying an impressive array of sites in Europe and the Atlantic colonies, this 13-essay anthology offers the experience of Spain's ‘outsiders’ and their ‘processes of integration’ throughout the eighteenth century. Through quantitative, qualitative, and even linguistic analyses, this collection jettisons blanket notions of ‘foreign merchants and labourers’ and makes important strides to locate the trials and triumphs of the once largely undifferentiated masses, including important works on Genoese, Flemish, Portuguese, French, Greek, and North, West, and Central African, Andean, and Mapuche populations.
Not surprisingly, religion, economic means and proximity to slavery and royal institutions affected the level of tolerance and repression experienced by people in the Spanish realm. Elite foreigners, as Recio Morales outlines, relied on well-established avenues of ascendancy, including their own nobility and wealth. However, regardless of economic standing, as González Cruz makes evident, Spanish officials remained on high alert for foreign transgressors, as did the Inquisition. Adding exceptional depth to the history of the ebb and flow of religious tolerance, De Salvo presents a fascinating analysis of the social impact of an earthquake that prompted greater leniency towards religious diversity, especially for Jews and Muslims who could contribute economically after a natural disaster of this type. López highlights the impact of broader European conflicts, especially the French revolution, and the welcoming of Catholic subjects into the realm, locating Spain as a bastion of Christendom.
Many of the contributors assess the tensions of empire and the resulting social instability for people defined as ‘non-Spaniards’. Examining the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, Glesener explores how long-time privileged subjects, such as the Flemish, made sense of their change in status as ‘foreigners’. Glesener provides an excellent window into the most well-connected, where changes were slow and royal concessions and negotiations buffered their transition. Brilli describes the experience of Italian immigrants (mostly Genoese), which was rather more mediated by class: many settled permanently in the Spanish metropole because of deep networks across the economic spectrum, while few stayed long term in Spanish America owing to the steep competition for blue-collar work in the colonies. This trend, as we know, would change by the nineteenth century with high Italian immigration to South America. Díaz Blanco attempts to shed light on the understudied ‘masses’ by utilising innovative methodological approaches, such as analysing clothing details from hospital records. Díaz Blanco's work, like much of that in the first half of the collection, underscores that tolerance of foreigners and the more humbly born did not always correlate with acceptance, and those striving for social and economic mobility continued to experience various degrees of prejudice.
Moving to the colonies, Martín Muñoz offers a comparative overview of indigenous and African relations in the Louisiana and Florida territories. Given that Louisiana and Florida followed quite different trajectories as Spanish dominions, specifically identifying the indigenous groups involved would have helped contextualise the moments of coalition and conflict highlighted. With two such large territories to cover, perhaps the comparative approach precludes addressing this historian's great interest in knowing more about the dynamics of each site.
Slavery, as Izquierdo Labrado presents, succumbed to a ‘natural death’ in Spain by the end of the eighteenth century, with few slave-owners outside the Church and military. Izquierdo Labrado argues that clerics, in general, helped to better the lives of slaves. However, knowing more about the specific ways in which cleric and secular slave ownership differed in Spain – apart from the mandate for religious instruction – would serve as an important enhancement to the well-established scholarship of religious slave owning in the Spanish colonies.
Petit-Breuilh Sepulveda challenges us to reconsider the scale of fear provoked by the Tupac Amaru II movement. Why, she asks, did colonial authorities continue to circulate the myth about ‘dangerous Indians against the Monarchy’ when the rebellion was widely acknowledged to be a multi-ethnic and even cross-class effort? Petit-Breuilh Sepulveda demonstrates that through strategic propaganda campaigns, the empire attempted to unite in fear a deeply divided populace in the midst of a wave of uprisings and on the verge of independence.
Focusing on colonial negotiations, Salgado Ismodes analyses how the Mapuche co-opted a Spanish institution as a defensive tool against the policing and intervention desired by the Crown for its fringe territories. Finally Zavala Cepeda and Payàs Puigarnau integrate textual analysis and linguistics patterns to examine the continued push and pull of colonialism. By examining the discursive styles allowed in formal transactions, we see a willingness to accept that Castilian as a language was sometimes a deficient means to communicate indigenous concepts.
With a broader appeal to the social sciences, López echoes the call for a redefinition of ‘urban’, one that considers a qualitative and not only quantitative benchmark. For those of us who work on early modern sites outside of ports and capitals, this is one that is greatly to be welcomed. Iglesias Rodriguez's piece posits important, although probably unanswerable, questions: when does ‘otherness’ fade away? And, how can we ‘see’ this in the historical record? As scholars of this anthology demonstrate, gaining access to certain social sectors and establishing generations of Spanish residency did not necessarily translate into full and incontrovertible integration, evidenced by temporary restrictions or bans after years of ‘acceptance’. Importantly, a path of incorporation was not always desirable for some groups. De Salvo notes that the Greek Orthodox community wanted, above all, autonomy, not homogeneous integration into the Spanish world.
This compilation serves as an important resource for Europeanists, especially those interested in migration patterns and labour history. While there are fewer works on the Spanish colonies, the focus on fringe territories and inter-ethnic coalitions will appeal to a wide audience of colonial historians. Importantly, the collection calls upon greater specificity of experience, even for a place as diverse and transient as eighteenth-century Spain. Many of the authors acknowledge the limitations of their sources, especially those theorising population estimates and other quantitative analyses from scant sample sizes. While this data may be less reliable to extrapolate for demographic profiles, all of the essays further discussions on the state's notions of incorporation and the experience of multi-levelled checkpoints of acceptance in the Spanish Empire.
