Avaliação: Institutions of the Frontier: Authority, Mediation, and Negotiation in Colonial Latin America (1600-1850) –

Recent historiography has begun to rethink the classic center-periphery opposition in the studies on the early-modern Spanish and Portuguese empires, moving towards ideas such as the polycentric monarchy, understood as an empire governed by multiple centers and peripheries. Frontiers can also be rethought in this context. Frontiers often imply contact and interaction between different groups that share political, cultural, or economic borders. These frontiers sometimes involved inter-imperial interactions, interactions between colonizers and missionaries and native inhabitants, or often overlapping combinations of such interactions. Some frontiers were temporary, such as the Neo Inca state of Vilcabamba, while others turned out to be long-lasting, such as the southern frontier of the Kingdom of Chile across the Bio-bio river. Maritime frontiers are also important to consider, especially in areas in which imperial powers wrestled for control over routes and islands amongst each other and with marauding pirates. These multiple frontier contexts, which appear as spaces of interaction characterized by diffuse control and power, were however also spaces of highly structured interactions. The different groups adjusted to these conditions and often built-up institutions to regulate, negotiate, and mediate these interactions. This panel wishes to focus on the institutions, authorities, and strategies of mediation and negotiation that organized the frontier interactions among conflicting/competing groups and interests in colonial Latin America. We welcome papers into the context of the Spanish and Portugues empires, but also cases of interimperial borderlands

• Frontier
• Iberian empires
• Early Modern Spain
• Colonial history