Homebound Empire: Portugal, Spain, and Silver from the Indies, 1493–1640

Abstract

How did materials homebound from the Americas affect individuals who remained homebound on the Iberian Peninsula throughout the long sixteenth century? I argue that re-centering the Kingdom of Portugal in its crucial intermediary role in the transportation of precious metals from the Americas to Spain changes how we understand the Spanish Empire, which, from the perspectives of ordinary Iberian participants in transatlantic logistics, relied on intense cross-regional collaborations and generated greater global connections. By tracking stopovers through four consecutive Portuguese domains—the Azores, Lisbon, Algarve, and Alentejo—along the return itineraries of Spanish American vessels, this transimperial history reveals two important convergences resulting from the overseas expansion of Iberian polities. The first was the binding together of Spaniards and Portuguese through long-lasting and increasingly entangled attempts to manage the movement of commodities through shared spaces. The second was the binding together of parts of the world as “Indies” based on parallel and intersecting traffic from Africa, Asia, and America overlapping on the Portuguese coast. Legal, military, diplomatic, and administrative sources from archives across Spain and Portugal are read anew to recover the long-neglected oral communication that served as a local and transoceanic glue, mediating more familiar interactions between Spaniards and Portuguese, and deepening impressions of wealth and danger associated with overseas territories. This narrative of shipwreck, treasure, piracy, and smuggling, shows, for the first time and against accounts of overly centralized and elite Spanish governance, how routine infrastructure of transportation, storage, craftwork, and hospitality brought both Iberian neighbors and different parts of the world closer together.