This study examines the conceptualisation and governance of the Monarquía Hispánica during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The study centres on three core territories: Spain, New Spain and the Philippines; reintegrating Spain’s prime Asian domain within study of the Monarchy, a region often neglected in modern scholarship on the Hispanic World, such as those by Elliott, Kamen and Lynch.
The progress of these twin processes, conceptualisation and governance, is considered through the official cartography of this period; that produced by or for the core institutions of the Monarchy: the Casa de la Contratación, the Consejo de Indias and the royal court. This official cartography visualised the geopolitical concerns of the period; urbanisation, territorialisation, the proliferation of Spanish-Catholic culture and global diplomacy. Within this study, a new, historically contextualised, geopolitical framework is offered which challenges the assumed modernity and secularity of geopolitics, further developing the work of Ó Tuathail and Agnew.
The official cartography of the Monarquía Hispánica is abundant and diverse. As such, this study structures cartographic analysis using a two-layered categorisation framework. Firstly, the common subjects mapped by early modern cartographers are acknowledged: urban, territorial and global maps. Secondly, the production context of specific maps and collections is considered. This new framework seeks to address the main problems presented by the influential schemas of Robertson and Mundy. Furthermore, the schema encourages comparison between works from a range of production zones; a comparative approach between European, American and Filipino material lacking in much existing literature, including works by Mundy, Quirino and Kagan.
Finally, this comparative approach highlights the integrated nature of cartography from the early modern Monarchy; a multi-scale discipline producing views which could be used side-by-side. This reflects the Monarchy’s geopolitical aspirations and activities, which operated at multiple scales and were not simply integrated but interdependent.
