Browsing by Subject "New Granada"
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Item Political economy, geographical imagination, and territory in the making and unmaking of New Granada, 1739-1830(2016-05) Afanador-Llach, Maria José; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Deans-Smith, Susan; Del Castillo, Lina; Appelbaum, Nancy; Hunt, BruceThis dissertation interrogates the intersections between political economy and territoriality during the transition from colony to republic in New Granada—modern day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panamá. It proposes a framework to analyze the discursive and on-the-ground impacts of early-modern political economy in pre-, and post-colonial politico-geographic debate. This dissertation sheds light on the territorial shifts and political debates between 1739 and 1830. First, it traces the imperial reform that led to the establishment of the viceroyalty of New Granada in 1739 and its territorialization over the course of the eighteenth century. Second, it analyses the fragmentation of New Granada into autonomous sovereign states starting in the 1810s. Third, it studies the Spanish military recovery of New Granada during the Reconquista wars. Lastly, it explores the unification of the Gran Colombian republic and its separation in 1830. To fully comprehend the political and territorial outcomes of the era, it is essential to understand that the coexistence of different spatial conceptions within colonial territories shifted both along geopolitical contingencies and spatial political economies that were long in the making. The rearrangement of territories from the eighteenth century to the republican era implied negotiations among often opposing ideas and interests over how to economically and politically organize and connect different spaces. Geographical imagination and ideas about nature played a central role in these processes. Throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, this tradition informed debates involving rights over municipal, imperial, and national spaces advancing conceptions of territory that shaped political debate. Because of its distinctive position, New Granada provides a useful perspective from which to explore key themes in the history of eighteenth-century imperial reform, the revolutionary period, and the early republican era.Item The unmaking of empire : nature and politics in the early Colombian imagination, 1808-1821(2011-05) Afanador, Maria Jose; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge; Deans-Smith, SusanIn this report I argue that during the independence wars from Spain and the first decade of republican rule, the learned elite of the viceroyalty of New Granada—present day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama—articulated narratives of nature and science to debates over provincial hierarchies, to justify provincial unity, foreign commercial integration, and the creation of political symbols for the new polity. In the process of undoing the Spanish empire, the lettered elite conceived of their homeland’s natural bounties as key cultural capital, and as the language with which to frame their aspirations as political community, as part of a national polity or of regional patrias. By using newspapers, constitutional debates, scientific writings, and visual evidence, I place the elite’s sensibilities and concerns about their fatherland’s nature in the wider context of political transformations that took place from 1808 and on. In the first section, I explore eighteenth-century assessments of New Granada’s nature, offering an overview of key conceptions of New Granada’s geopolitical situation and nature that shaped the Creole imagination. In the second section, I characterize the reforms brought about by the Bourbon monarchy in New Granada, giving weight to the socialization of practices of the utility of science among the learned elite. The third section illustrates how Neogranadians deployed nature in assessing provincial fragmentation, and in the debate over the preeminence of Santafé as capital when the monarchic crisis exploded. The fourth section explores how nature was employed as an argument in debates over the integration of present-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador into a single republic, and the adoption of a federal or a central state. Finally, section five discusses the role of New Granada’s natural landmarks in discourses of provincial and foreign commercial integration, along with a reflection on the use of nature as political symbol for the new republic. My aim is to explore the ways that the lettered elite incorporated nature into geopolitical discourses of a polity separate from Spain, and to uncover the tensions embedded in the ways they imagined their desired nation.