‘Por toda la Tierra’, España y Portugal: globalización y ruptura (1580-1700)

The papers assembled in this book address Spanish-Portuguese relations between 1580 and 1700 from the viewpoint of global history. One can of course continue to read the Portuguese cycle of the Hispanic Monarchy in the terms of more or less conventional political, economic and social history. However, the globalist approach also helps reinterpreting the Hispanic imperial experience. Actually, the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries constituted the first phase of the contemporary globalising process. This is when its three decisive features were established: the conscious and irreversible planetary connection; the progressive and sometimes so dramatic economic integration, with its inequalities and dependencies; and cultural admixture, whether direct or mediatised, peaceful or violent.

Portugal inaugurated this new era before Spain did, although the union of both crowns in 1580 gave the process a renewing energy that was not without consequences. The protagonists of this book are the related scenarios of America, Europe, Asia and Africa, in order to seek answers to how and why a union that began by opening a limitless horizon to thousands of subjects and territories, failed because of a rebellion that started in the Peninsula but spread overseas. In a way, the Spanish-Portuguese 1640 split was also a struggle against globalisation, the repercussions of which affected Seville, Brazil, Mexico and Goa. Whatever the consequences of the Iberian breakup for Portugal and Spain, globalisation was already a fact.