Abstract: Until recently most of the scholarship about the early modern Iberian world focused solely on one country and usually adopted a national perspective to analyze subjects and matters that rather than national, were instead multi-territorial and multi-“national”. The main result was a partial and distorted understanding of the Iberian world, one that regarded the Iberian past as a mere juxtaposition of two unified national histories. In the past two decades, however, knowledge of early modern Spanish and Portuguese history advanced substantially. Comparative approaches, as well as connected and entangled analyses, became more frequent, and the same can be said about the research on the interactions between the various parts of the Iberian world (including the non-European lands under the influence of Iberia). The aim of this presentation is to discuss such recent historiographical developments, as well as some of the theoretical implications of the methods and topics currently being explored. This presentation also discusses the epistemic demands posed by studying the Iberian world as an entwined ensemble, as a world with a complex, polyphonic and diverse past.
Bio: Pedro Cardim is Associate Professor of History at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL), and the author of various studies about Portugal and its relations with the Iberian world during the early modern period. He has been teaching courses on Western European history and the early modern European empires for the last ten years to both undergraduate and graduate students. In the last ten years he has organized or co-organized several international meetings on the history of the Iberian empires, and he is a member of the board of CHAM - Portuguese Centre for Global History (UNL). During the current academic year he holds the Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (New York University).
