A Nation Upon The Ocean Sea: Portugal's Atlantic Diaspora And The Crisis Of The Spanish Empire, 1492-1640 University Press Scholarship Online

With the opening of sea routes in the fifteenth century, groups of men and women left Portugal to establish themselves across the ports and cities of the Atlantic or Ocean sea. They were refugees and migrants, traders and mariners, Jews , Catholics, and the Marranos of mixed Judaic-Catholic culture. They formed a diasporic community known by contemporaries as the Portuguese Nation. By the early seventeenth century, this nation without a state had created a remarkable trading network that spanned the Atlantic, reached into the Indian Ocean and Asia, and generated millions of pesos that were used to bankroll the Spanish empire. A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea traces the story of the Portuguese Nation from its emergence in the late fifteenth century to its fragmentation in the middle of the seventeenth and situates it in relation to the parallel expansion and crisis of Spanish imperial dominion in the Atlantic. Against the backdrop of this relationship, the book reconstitutes the rich inner life of a community based on movement, maritime trade, and cultural hybridity. We are introduced to mariners and traders in such disparate places as Lima, Seville and Amsterdam, their day-to-day interactions and understandings, their houses and domestic relations, their private reflections and public arguments. This finaly-textured account reveals how the Portuguese Nation created a cohesive and meaningful community despite the mobility and dispersion of its members; how its forms of sociability fed into the development of robust transatlantic commercial networks; and how the day-to-day experience of trade was translated into the sphere of Spanish imperial politics of commercial reform based on religious-ethnic toleration and the liberalization of trade. A microhistory, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea contributes to our understanding of the broader histories of capitalism, empire, and diaspora in the early Atlantic. By Recovering The Inner Life Of The Portuguese Trade Diaspora (1492-1640), This Book Explores The Relations Between Mobility And Community; Domestic Sociability And Trade Expansion; Commercial Experience And Early Capitalist Ideology; And Cultural Hybridity, Transnationalism, And The Spanish Empire. 1. Portuguese Nation And Spanish Empire In The Sixteenth Century -- 2. Settling Upon The Seas : A Maritime Community In Movement And Formation -- 3. Cada Casa, Un Mundo : The Domestic Foundation Of A Trading Community -- 4. A Vast Machine : The Nation's Atlantic Trading Networks -- 5. Representing The Market : From Day-to-day Experience To The Literature Of Commercial Reform -- 6. The Nation Unraveled Daviken Studnicki-gizbert. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [219]-236) And Index. Contents 10 Introduction: Ocean, Empire, Nation 14 Chapter One: Portuguese Nation and Spanish Empire in the Sixteenth Century 28 Chapter Two: Settling Upon the Seas: A Maritime Community in Movement and Formation 52 Chapter Three: ‘‘Cada Casa, Un Mundo’’: The Domestic Foundations of a Trading Community 78 Chapter Four: A Vast Machine: The Nation’s Atlantic Trading Networks 102 Chapter Five: Representing the Market: From Day-to-Day Experience to the Literature of Commercial Reform 134 Chapter Six: The Nation Unraveled 162 Epilogue 186 Glossary 192 Appendix 194 Abbreviations 196 Notes 198 References 230 Index 248 A 248 B 248 C 249 D 249 E 249 F 249 G 249 H 249 I 250 J 250 K 250 L 250 M 250 N 250 O 251 P 251 Q 252 R 252 S 252 T 253 U 253 V 253 W 253 Y 253