Spanish Atlantic World

The Spanish Atlantic world cannot be understood as identical to the Spanish Empire or the Hispanic monarchy but is something that encompasses and transcends them at once. Considered in its horizontal dimension rather than its vertical one, this world does not reflect the territory of the Spanish monarchy since it puts in relation regions and areas—from Europe to Africa and the Americas—that did not belong formally to the empire. Furthermore, it is not a world made only of Spanish people, i.e., people born on the Spanish territories, but also of foreigners, people coming from other countries or empires. Their role in the conquest of the New World under the patronage of the Spanish Crown has been widely underlined by historiography; still their economic, political, and cultural activities in the Spanish Atlantic world did not end with the conquest but they continued in the following centuries. This space was indeed characterized by multiple transnational networks (German miners, engineers of Italian origin, and the capital of the Genoese, among others) that contributed considerably to its survival and efficiency in the long run. Another important characteristic of the Spanish Atlantic world is that it was not built on a vertical and bipolar relation of metropolis-colonies, but on a high level of provincial autonomy, to the extent that some scholars have talked about polycentrism in this particular aspect. Not only these autonomous areas shared linkages and complementarities which did not necessarily pivot on the metropolitan center, but sometimes they maintained strong ties with regions belonging to other empires. As some scholars have argued, all Atlantics are hybrid since they are the product of multiple “entangled histories”; consequently, no place in the Atlantic world contains a past that can be said to belong neatly and exclusively to one or another empire. Finally, and most essentially, it is a space that was shaped between the 16th and the 19th centuries by circulations of people, commodities, technologies, ideas, and information. Even though most works on the Atlantic Spanish world center on its maturity and decline, certain characteristics of this world had emerged since the 16th century. Following these assumptions, the entries of this bibliography, after having identified some key places and routes of the Spanish Atlantic, are not based on chronological or spatial divisions, but on what most characterized the Atlantic space in the early modern period, circulations and entanglements. This can help the reader look at the Spanish Atlantic world in a broader perspective, not limited to a formal and imperial-centered approach. At the same time, many of these concepts are strictly interrelated and in one section of this article we can find entries that are related also to other sections. However, the inclusion in a certain section agrees with the main focus of the works listed there.