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Postal networks and global letters in Cartagena de Indias: the overseas mail in the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century
Abstract
In the eighteenth century, all European colonial empires undertook the task of institutionalising their postal systems. Within the framework of the Bourbon reforms, the Spanish monarchy embarked upon reforming the postal system within the Spanish America with the aim of making transatlantic communications more reliable and regular. These plans, however, were hampered by an ongoing power struggle between all agents with a stake in the circulation of information. This is clearly reflected in the postal office in Cartagena de Indias, which was a key node for the Crown and a point of confluence for the strategies and interests of different local and global powers; the office, therefore, represented the polyhedric reality of postal communication. This paper shows that the institution had its own agency by constituting one of the main power tools, which is a reflection of the close relationship that exists between empire and communication.
En el presente artículo nos proponemos como objetivo analizar la instalación de la carrera postal Buenos Aires-Asunción y su rol dentro del esquema comunicativo planteado por la Corona española durante el siglo XVIII. Esta carrera tuvo lugar en el marco de un cambio de concepción del correo que se dio dentro de las monarquías absolutistas modernas en general, y en el caso Borbón en particular. Partimos de la hipótesis de que, más allá de los intentos de la Corona y de la propagación de las ideas ilustradas que sirven de marco a esos cambios, los agentes locales tuvieron un rol activo en la ejecución del esquema pensado desde arriba. De este modo, el estudio de una carrera en particular permite comprender los juegos de relaciones y los conflictos de intereses existentes que, finalmente, confluyeron en el rol y usos que asignaron al correo. Trabajamos con documentación disponible en el Archivo Nacional de Asunción (Paraguay) y en el Archivo General de la Nación (Argentina). Como metodología apelamos al análisis documental y empleamos las herramientas de los Sistemas de Información Geográfica.
In the sixteenth century, the transition from medieval unity to an expansionist state brought broader legal access and the bureaucratization of the Spanish Empire, leading to a diversified legal engagement among social groups. This backdrop is crucial in understanding how women from various backgrounds utilized the legal system. The article examines a set of letters (1560-1562) written by a Spanish widow to her son in Mexico and three judicial cases (1552, 1561, 1569) filed by transatlantic white women of different socioeconomic statuses, all seeking economic improvement. Through these examples, the article explores how these women navigated the legal system using what I have called affective mobility in early modernity, employing emotional, rhetorical, and narrative strategies. Their stories, mirroring popular chronicles, challenged the male-dominated legal sphere. The article highlights the prominent role of women in the colonial archive, intertwining their experiences with men’s, demonstrating their use of personal details and honorable depictions for legal and economic benefits.
Durante el último tercio del siglo xviii, los ministros españoles mostraron un creciente interés por el establecimiento de relaciones pacíficas permanentes con estados musulmanes del Magreb y del Mediterráneo oriental, como los imperios otomanos y alauíes, así como con todo tipo de pueblos amerindios en el valle del Misisipi, como los Creeks, Talapuches o Tunicas. ¿Cómo podemos explicar esta coincidencia? ¿Cómo analizar ese creciente interés hispano por turcos, moros, e indios bárbaros? Partiendo del uso de la microhistoria global, el presente artículo defiende la necesidad de analizar conjuntamente la diplomacia y las prácticas diplomáticas hispanas frente a estados no cristianos e independientes en diversos puntos del Mediterráneo y el Atlántico ilustrado, buscando entender las implicaciones de la globalización en la política imperial hispana y el creciente peso de esta para los Borbones. En línea con esto, el artículo explica la activa representación carolina y las convergencias en las prácticas de diplomacia transcultural, destacando la interdependencia global entre conflictos regionales en el desarrollo de la política hispana de Carlos III.
Durante el siglo XVIII la corona española llevó adelante una reforma postal que afectó a todo el imperio. Esta acción es estudiada por la historiografía, a partir de los intentos de la Casa de Borbón por instalar una monarquía administrativa para mejorar el control sobre sus territorios. Este artículo recupera el caso de la instalación de la administración de correos y postas en Corrientes, como parte de la carrera postal entre Buenos Aires y Asunción. El objetivo es explicar tanto la variante administrativa como la agencia delos sujetos. Para ello, se trabaja con reglamentaciones y ordenanzas reales, y con documentos de Gobierno disponibles en el Archivo General de la Provincia de Corrientes.
Este artículo analiza el entramado postal de la Nueva Granada durante la época colonial, centrándose en el siglo XVIII, mostrando las dificultades y contrastes de la circulación de la información a nivel local y regional enmarcado en un sistema postal imperial. A través del estudio de fuentes documentales españolas y colombianas, y la revisión de bibliografía sobre la historia postal hispanoamericana, la historia de América Colonial y las reformas borbónicas se examina la aplicación y el impacto de los proyectos postales en el espacio neogranadino. En el marco de los estudios sobre circulación de la información y agentes, esta investigación reflexiona sobre la participación de distintos actores que extendían sus propias estrategias de circulación de la información con el objetivo de establecer parámetros y articular prioridades en torno al uso socioeconómico y político-cultural del correo durante el reformismo borbónico. Este artículo demuestra cómo el entramado postal neogranadino constituyó un nodo en el que se articulaban intereses, información, ideas, y objetos a través de redes dinámicas de poder que creaban complejas relaciones comunicacionales flexibles y moldeables.
Este artículo ensaya una reconstrucción de la organización espacial del correo terrestre en el ámbito de la administración principal de correos de Cartagena, instalada en 1768. Se apoya esencialmente en dos informes manuscritos, uno de José Antonio de Pando de aproximadamente 1774 y otro anónimo (probablemente de Antonio de Miranda) de 1801. Ambos documentos contienen detallada información sobre la frecuencia de las carreras, los lugares de tránsito, las distancias entre ellos y la calidad de caminos. Usando información complementaria como carreteras actuales, datos GPS y mapas de la época georreferenciados, se reconstruyen las rutas con un sistema de información geográfica (SIG) en un proceso que al mismo tiempo permite ponderar sobre las prácticas de medir y expresar distancias en ese tiempo.
This article deals with communications between the Portuguese Crown and the governors of the captaincies of America on the 1798’s reform of the Maritime Post. The legislation about these reforms was accompanied by intense communicative production of the captaincy governments either before or after its launch. Based on the recent historiography on the distribution of power in the Portuguese Empire, the article tried to demonstrate that both the construction of the norms and its application was made from a dialogical process between the centre of the Monarchy and its local representatives.
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Rethinking the ways global history is envisioned and conceptualized in diverse countries such as China, Japan, Mexico or Spain, this collections considers how global issues are connected with our local and national communities. It examines how the discipline had evolved in various historiographies, from Anglo Saxon to southern European, and its emergence in Asia with the rapid development of the Chinese economy motivation to legitimate the current uniqueness of the history and economy of the nation. It contributes to the revitalization of the field of global history in Chinese historiography, which have been dominated by national narratives and promotes a debate to open new venues in which important features such as scholarly mobility, diversity and internationalization are firmly rooted, putting aside national specificities. Dealing with new approaches on the use of empirical data by framing the proper questions and hypotheses and connecting western and eastern sources, this text opens a new forum of discussion on how global history has penetrated in western and eastern historiographies, moving the pivotal axis of analysis from national perspectives to open new venues of global history.
Benjamin Franklin wrote his posthumously published memoir-a model of the genre-in several pieces and in different temporal and physical places. Douglas Anderson's study of this work reveals the famed inventor as a literary adept whose approach to autobiographical narrative was as innovative and radical as the inventions and political thought for which he is renowned. Franklin never completed his autobiography, choosing instead to immerse his reader in the formal and textual atmosphere of a deliberately "unfinished" life. Taking this decision on Franklin's part as a starting point, Anderson treats the memoir as a subtle and rewarding reading lesson, independent of the famous life that it dramatizes but closely linked to the work of predecessors and successors like John Bunyan or Alexis de Tocqueville, whose books help illuminate Franklin's complex imagination. Anderson shows that Franklin's incomplete story exploits the disorderly and disruptive state of a lived life, as opposed to striving for the meticulous finish of standard memoirs, biographies, and histories. In presenting Franklin's autobiography as an exemplary formal experiment in an era that its author once called the Age of Experiments, The Unfinished Life of Benjamin Franklin veers from the familiar practices of traditional biographers, viewing history through the lens of the literary imagination rather than the other way around. Anderson's carefully considered work makes a persuasive case for revisiting this celebrated book with a keener appreciation for the subtlety and beauty of Franklin's performance.
Resumen En este artículo nos centraremos en el Atlántico y las relaciones en clave cultural (de ida y vuelta) entre América y Europa. Analizaremos los estudios que se han ocu-pado de la cultura escrita, la historiografía sobre la correspondencia, la circulación de los textos y las redes de distribución de li-bros en las relaciones atlánticas, donde la comunicación estaba sujeta a un ritmo pro-pio de contacto y transferencia. La mirada en torno a los fenómenos atlánticos supone romper ciertas barreras, admitir la mezcla y lo diverso, no centrarse únicamente en las interpretaciones institucionales y jurídicas, ya que la norma se fija, pero su transgresión se da de manera habitual en las relaciones atlánticas. Abstract This study focuses on books that crossed the Atlantic in the two-way cultural rela-tionship between America and Europe. The study examines specifically aspects of written culture, the transmission of texts and the networks through which books circulated across the Atlantic. Analysis goes beyond formal, institutional and legal in-terpretation, and provides information on social and cultural contacts, as well as on the range of means of cultural interme-diation. Such study allows an analysis of norms and their transgression, a common circumstance in trans-Atlantic relations. La cultura escrita en el mundo atlántico colonial: claves historiográficas, retos y perspectivas*
In the 18th century there was a general interest in the overseas European empires to institutionalize the postal system. The Spanish Monarchy, under the paradigm of the Bourbon Reforms, promoted a project to reform the Spanish-American mail in the second half of the 18th century with the aim of making overseas communications more organized and regular. However, these plans for renewal came up against limits and power struggles between different agents interested in the circulation of information. This is reflected in the postal administration of Cartagena de Indias, which was a fundamental nucleus for the Crown where the interests of the different local and global powers converged, and where the difficulty of dominating the Spanish empire can be seen. This article analyses the contradictions and discrepancies of the postal reform project, examining it in a polycentric key through the communications node of the city of Cartagena de Indias.
This essay argues that American printers motivated by a deep commercial interest in fast and effective communication worked to overturn the British imperial postal service in 1774 and 1775. Printers enlisted merchants and members of the revolutionary elite, who also relied on long-distance communication through the post office for their own commercial and political purposes, to provide financial and political support. In making their case, printers mobilized a broad array of political ideology and imagery already familiar to colonists during the decade-long imperial crisis, emphasizing the political necessity of replacing the imperial institution. At the same time, they uncontroversially asserted that a new American post office would safeguard their precarious commercial ventures. The essay therefore demonstrates that printers were not “mere mechanics” but actively shaped the political debates leading to the American Revolution as part of a process that scholars have recently highlighted in a work on the economic and commercial influences on the Revolution. Furthermore, it grants the post office its due as part of the Habermasian public sphere; although understudied, the post office—both as a physical space and as a network through which information could travel—was a crucial means by which Americans developed a national infrastructure for political communications. Exploring the overthrow of the British post office, and the creation of an American post office, reveals an understudied but crucial episode to explain the symbiosis between politics and commerce during the American Revolutionary era.
This article offers a preliminary approach to the special volume entitled Business Relations, Identities, and Political Resources of the Italian Merchants in the Early-Modern Spanish Monarchy. It discusses the major issues and debates addressed in the five contributions collected here about the central role played by the Genoese, Florentine and Milanese commercial networks in the framework of a polycentric imperial structure as was the Spanish Monarchy.
During the period from 1808 to 1826, the Spanish empire was convulsed by wars throughout its dominions in Iberia and the Americas. The conflicts began in Spain, where Napoleon’s invasion triggered a war of national resistance. The collapse of the Spanish monarchy provoked challenges to the colonial regime in virtually all of Spain's American provinces, and colonial demands for autonomy and independence led to political turbulence and violent confrontation on a transcontinental scale. During the two decades after 1808, Spanish America witnessed warfare on a scale not seen since the conquests three centuries earlier.
This volume elucidates Bourbon colonial policy with emphasis on Madrid’s efforts to reform and modernize its American holdings. Set in an Atlantic world context, the book highlights the interplay between Spain and America as the Spanish empire struggled for survival amid the fierce international competition that dominated the eighteenth century. The authors use extensive research in the repositories of Spain and America, as well as innovative consultation of the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to bring into focus the poorly understood reformist efforts of the early Bourbons, which laid the foundation for the better-known agenda of Charles III. As the book unfolds, the narrative puts flesh on the men and women who, for better or worse, influenced colonial governance. it is the story of power, ambition, and idealism at the highest levels.
What is the state? The State of Freedom offers an important new take on this classic question by exploring what exactly the state did and how it worked. Patrick Joyce asks us to re-examine the ordinary things of the British state from dusty government files and post offices to well-thumbed primers in ancient Greek and Latin and the classrooms and dormitories of public schools and Oxbridge colleges. This is also a history of the ‘who’ and the ‘where’ of the state, of the people who ran the state, the government offices they sat in and the college halls they dined in. Patrick Joyce argues that only by considering these things, people and places can we really understand the nature of the modern state. This is both a pioneering new approach to political history in which social and material factors are centre stage, and a highly original history of modern Britain.
This essay argues that American printers motivated by a deep commercial interest in fast and effective communication worked to overturn the British imperial postal service in 1774 and 1775. Printers enlisted merchants and members of the revolutionary elite, who also relied on long-distance communication through the post office for their own commercial and political purposes, to provide financial and political support. In making their case, printers mobilized a broad array of political ideology and imagery already familiar to colonists during the decade-long imperial crisis, emphasizing the political necessity of replacing the imperial institution. At the same time, they uncontroversially asserted that a new American post office would safeguard their precarious commercial ventures. The essay therefore demonstrates that printers were not “mere mechanics” but actively shaped the political debates leading to the American Revolution as part of a process that scholars have recently highlighted in a work on the economic and commercial influences on the Revolution. Furthermore, it grants the post office its due as part of the Habermasian public sphere; although understudied, the post office—both as a physical space and as a network through which information could travel—was a crucial means by which Americans developed a national infrastructure for political communications. Exploring the overthrow of the British post office, and the creation of an American post office, reveals an understudied but crucial episode to explain the symbiosis between politics and commerce during the American Revolutionary era.
The link between enlightened historical narratives and imperial rivalry in Bourbon Spain is the subject of this article. The primary focus is the Duke of Almodóvar's translation of the Abbé Raynal's Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Établissements et du Commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes (1770), which bore only slight resemblance to the original in ideology, content, and structure. His five-volume work, which appeared as the Historia Política de los Establecimientos Ultramarinos de las Naciones Europeas (Political History of European Overseas Establishments), was published in Madrid between 1784 and 1790. It is the most distinguished Iberian contribution to the genre of the enlightened narrative, though it has been neglected by scholars. It provides an appropriate lens through which to observe the transmission, reception, and reconfiguration of foreign ideas in late eighteenth-century Spain.
The reception, translation, and dissemination of works of history, including Almodóvar's Historia, in Bourbon Spain were not passive processes. International rivalry provoked patriotic indignation which, in turn, engendered a genre of counterhistorical narrative which endeavored to reprove and contest the unflattering images of Spain promulgated by foreign writers. In addition, I contend, Spanish historians sought to glean practices of rival states which could be used either to vindicate existing policy or to provide support for a policy shift. Almodóvar's Historia sought to vindicate Spanish policy from foreign indictment neither by direct confrontation of the charges levied against it by purveyors of the Black Legend nor through effusive praise for Spain's conduct in its Atlantic dominions. Instead, he negatively depicted Spain's rival empires in the New World, especially that of Britain. Almodóvar's purpose, however, was not solely to deflect attention away from the ubiquitous Black Legend, but rather to prod Spain to renovate its empire through the critical emulation of its rivals.
Almodóvar's work is best appreciated against a broader historical panorama. In the final third of the eighteenth century, Spain's Bourbon monarchs were in the midst of a comprehensive reform of their peninsular kingdoms and overseas empire. The ministers who dominated policy making in the reigns of Charles III (r. 1759–1788) and his son Charles IV (r. 1788–1808) sought to replace the diffuse and unwieldy structures of governance inherited from their Habsburg predecessors. Striving to rejuvenate an imperial bureaucracy centered at Madrid, the Bourbon reformers revamped the state, equipping it with the revenue-generating devices required to restore the monarchy's prestige, to reestablish Spain as a leading force in both Atlantic and Mediterranean politics, and to defend its sovereignty over a scattered and porous empire against the relentless encroachments of non-Spanish commercial agents and predatory rival states.
In pursuing these geopolitical ambitions, Spain accelerated rivalry with other European colonial powers, most notably with Britain. While such renewed competition inevitably would result in military clashes, it also had intellectual repercussions. Politically engaged commentators contributed to heightening interstate rivalry through intellectual production. One of the paradoxes of this interstate conflict, however, was that each nation sought to emulate the most successful practices of its rivals and to adapt them to local conditions. By critically copying its rivals, each state sought to surpass the competition and to dominate international affairs. Although the emulation of successful practices of other states was urged, failed or misguided policies also served as albatrosses, symbols of potential actions whose replication would prove deleterious to the pursuit of geopolitical greatness. Political writers, therefore, dissected, analyzed, and either lauded or repudiated the ideas, institutions, reforms, and character of rival empires. Almodóvar's Historia, I argue, epitomizes this broader phenomenon.
I divide this essay into four interlocking sections: first, I explore the function of emulation in late eighteenth-century Europe and demonstrate its connection to international rivalry; second, I suggest how emulation and international rivalry jointly impacted the reception, translation, and production of enlightened historical narratives in Spain; third, I discuss Almodóvar's Historia in detail, with a dual focus on his defense of Spain against foreign critics and his call to emulate certain colonial practices of rival states, particularly those of Britain; fourth, I examine one specific British practice, the use of privileged...
Obra teórica de una sociología de las asociaciones, el autor se cuestiona sobre lo que supone la palabra social que ha sido interpretada con diferentes presupuestos y se ha hecho del mismo vocablo un nombre impreciso e inadecuado, además se ha materializado el término como quien nombra algo concreto, de manera que lo social se convierte en un proceso de ensamblado y un tipo particular de material. Propone retomar el concepto original para hacer las debidas conexiones y descubrir el contenido estricto de las cuestiones que están conectadas bajo la sociedad.
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An Exploration of Communication and Community
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From Pillar to Post: The Troubled History of the Mail
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Travelling Chronicles: News and Newspapers from the Early Modern Period to the Eighteenth Century
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- Christine Goring
- Watson
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- Martínez González
- Nelson Fernando