Location, synchronisation, and the emergence of the Western global in XVI C

Description

During the long XVI C, in the context of the Western exploration and intervention in vast parts of the world, imperial spaces of global governance were established for the first time. These were not single phenomena or processes, but the connection of multiple events where economies, cultures, and belief systems interacted involving complex agencies, multiple traditions of knowledge, forms of expertise and organization, improvisation, and a great amount of resourcefulness and creativity. Key to understanding the creation of these imperial global spaces, and the connectivity out of which they emerged, is the problem of location, which can be explored by investigating the epistemologies of space and time in specific particular empirical settings.

This seminar is part of a wider project that seeks to understand the conditions under which a particular idea of imperial globality emerged in the early XVI C. in relation to the trips and practices of discovery of the ‘New World’. Drawing on the ‘Spanish’ experience, it focuses on the problem of geographic location, with its spatial and temporal dimensions, as an epistemological problem from which to explore the creation of the spaces of governance that resulted from the Age of Discovery. In so doing, the project seeks to understand the epistemological terms upon which a particular form of imperial connectivity became possible in the form of stable global trade routes in the XVI C.

Periode	12-feb.-2020
Gehouden op	Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
Mate van erkenning	International