The revival of Iberian Imperial States (1808-1930) : an original globalization? – GLOBIBER

Since the World history school emerged in the USA in the 1980s, it has seen strong growth in the Anglo-Saxon world. However, the decentring of perspectives proposed by that school seems to encounter difficulties when dealing with the Iberian Peninsula; according to this view, the loss of the American colonies between 1808 and 1825 signalled the definitive demise of Iberian imperialism. The loss of Spain’s last imperial possessions in 1898—the Disaster—and the subjection of the Portuguese empire to British suzerainty in 1890 supposedly confirms the notion that the fates of these former colonial powers, now considered decadent, were untypical. Challenging such a skewed view, this project seeks to show the importance of the imperial dimension of the Iberian States in the contemporary age (1808-1930).

In the Iberian Peninsula more than elsewhere, the imperial dimension is indeed essentially a legacy of the past: it would be naive to think that the independence of the Latin American colonies wiped out networks and flows of relations world-wide or destroyed the social dynamics that sustained empire for three centuries. Nor should we think that the Spanish and Portuguese nations that grew up from the 1830s on can be confined strictly to their peninsular horizons: the 1812 Constitution of Cadiz did after all define the nation as a meeting of two hemispheres, American and European. In Portugal, we know the extent to which empire has lain at the heart of national construction. The will to be part of empire is a primary foundation-stone, especially from a regional perspective, and the function of empire as the nursery of a new collective identity grew increasingly in importance throughout the 19th century, when colonial wars revived the imperial aspiration.

The present perspective views those Iberian States as composite political/administrative complexes, comprising a metropolis and overseas possessions, the parts of which were inseparable and in constant interaction. Our externalist, multiplex approach places the metropolis/colonies relationship at the heart of any analysis and breaks with nationalistic historiographic traditions that virtually ignore the importance of overseas possessions.

In the sphere of migratory flows, economic and social, cultural and intellectual relations, we are aware of the powerful forces that pervaded the Iberian world in the 19th and 20th centuries. Thanks to much ground-breaking work we can henceforth be sure that many colonial and metropolitan political problems shared common ground (anarchism, the slavery question and the labour question, for example), but nevertheless little work has been done to date on the problem of the formation of the State, crucial as it is.

In fact we believe that for a not-inconsiderable part of public opinion and for a major part of elite groups, imperial political reality was just as meaningful as national reality. According to Josep Ma Fradera, the Iberian empires are the first “modern" empires in history and as such are a field for the study of institutional and administrative systems which controlled large populations and immense territories and devised original systems of state control which were later imitated by the great colonial empires of the late 19th century. In addressing the question of the revival of the Iberian imperial States, this research seeks not only to lay bare the skein of relations and the strong interconnections linking metropolises and overseas possessions, but also to uncover the logic underpinning these networks. And finally, it seeks to demonstrate the resilience of the modes of organisation of power that survived the rifts of independence. This will therefore be fertile ground for Theda Skocpol’s famous proposal in Bringing the state back in, which called in particular for a redoubling of comparative historical studies.