SYMPOSIUM

April 17, 2020—Department of History, Purdue University, 

West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

Ibero-Dutch Entanglements in the Seventeenth Century: Conflict and Collaboration in Global Perspective

Ibero-Dutch entanglements during the seventeenth century are critical to understand regional histories in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and Southeast Asia. The political, military, and commercial conflicts among Spain, Portugal, and the United Provinces in the late sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth centuries have been well studied, including the intricacies of the Iberian Union (1580) and the way the Dutch Revolt (1568) against the Spanish Habsburgs extended overseas. While historians have examined these dynamics, they have paid less attention to the military, commercial, and diplomatic shifts that took place in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. At the center of this change was the end of the Iberian Union—a process that began in 1640 with the establishment of the Braganza dynasty in Portugal and ended in 1668, with Spain’s recognition of Portugal’s independence. This event brought significant changes in trans-imperial and inter-imperial dynamics. In 1648, Spain also recognized the United Provinces’ independence, gradually transforming Spanish-Dutch rivalry into a type of diplomatic and military collaboration that would have been unthinkable in the first half of the century. At the same time, Portugal ended the United Provinces’ temporary rule of Brazil (1630-1654) and regained its prized possession. The Portuguese victory over the Dutch further altered the diplomatic and political contours oftheir metropoles and overseas colonies. Entanglements between the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch Empires thus contributed to major geopolitical shifts in the various geographic regions in which they operated. 

We are seeking papers that explore different aspects of these shifting Ibero-Dutch relations in the seventeenth century. While political events serve as a breaking point, we are interested in papers that tease out transitions, transformations, and collaboration. In addition, we invite papers that considerthe Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and Southeast Asia or the connections between these regions. 

The closing remarks will be delivered by Professor Wim Klooster, author of the award-winning monograph, The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (Cornell University Press, 2016).

Topics for the one-day symposium may include but are not limited to: 

• Cultural and political diplomacy
• War: military and naval conflicts
• Finance and sovereignty
• Religion and prophecy 
• Women and empire 
• Slave labor and captivity
• Indigenous perspectives
• Legal and illegal trade
• Privateering and piracy
• Knowledge and governance
• Law and legal narratives 
• Migration and settlement

Submit abstracts with a short CV to Silvia Z. Mitchell and Erica Heinsen-Roach (mitch131@purdue.edu) no later than October 1, 2019. Abstracts should be approximately 500 words with a clear statement of the paper’s relationship to the general themes of the symposium, sources, and chronological and geographic scope. 

Silvia Z. Mitchell, Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History, Purdue University
Erica Heinsen-Roach, Visiting Assistant Professor of History, University of South Florida St. Petersburg