Mapping the Great South Sea: Spain and the Pacific Rim, 1521-1761: A Monograph on Spanish Contributions to Modern Globalizati

FAIN: FT-57084-09

Ricardo A. Padron
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903-4833)

I am developing a scholarly monograph on Spanish efforts to map the Pacific Rim during the early modern period, in the broadest sense of the term. Reacting to the work of economic historians and historians of material culture who have brought our attention to the importance of Spain's trans-Pacific trade during this period to the globalization of the economic and cultural life of the Euro-centric Atlantic world, I am examining how Spaniards conceptualized and gave meaning to the Pacific as a whole, and to individual countries along its shores, through cartography, history, and literature. In doing so, I propose to my colleagues in early modern studies that the period should be conceived in broad, global terms, taking into account Europe's confrontation not only with the Americas, which it subdued, but with cultures like those of China, which it could not hope to subdue. I plan to use the NEH Summer Stipend to work with primary sources in the Library of Congress.