Description
Book SynopsisThis book is devoted to the inhabitants of the SpanishPortuguese 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 themselv
Table of Contents
PART ONE: Communities between two communities 1. The Portuguese of Castile, the Castilians of Portugal 2. The unrepresented 3. Refuge and destruction 4. Contraband, modus vivendi PART TWO: War and the politics of daily life 5. On local truces 6. A grand yet local peace 7. ‘A wolflike urge’ 8. A rayano perspective on borderland custom houses PART THREE: At peace along the Raya 9. Restored sovereignties 10. ‘At the back of the world’ 11. Innumerable unresolved conflicts 12. The return of Mars
