People of the Iberian Borderlands: Community and Conflict between Spain and Portugal, 1640–1715 (Early Modern Iberian History in Global Contexts)

By: David Martín Marcos

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Synopsis: This book is devoted to the inhabitants of the Spanish–Portuguese borderlands during the early modern period. It seeks to challenge a predominant historiography focused on the study of borderlands societies, relying exclusively on the antagonistic topics of subversion and the construction of boundaries. It states that by focusing just on one concept or another there is a restrictive understanding tending to condition the agency of local communities by external narratives. Thus, if traditionally border people were reduced by some scholars to actors of a struggle against a supposedly imposed border; in a more modern perspective, their behaviors have been also framed in bottom-up processes of consolidation of spaces of sovereignty in a no less limiting vision. Faced with both approaches, the objective of this work is not to deny them but, first and foremost, to situate the experiences of border populations outside of logics that I understand as originally alien to themselves, and to highlight their own subjectivity. Finally, it also demonstrates that most of the practices developed by border people were fundamentally aimed at defending their local communities. It will be useful for both audiences interested in early modern Iberia or border studies from a bottom-up perspective.

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