Resumen: En este estudio se analizan algunos mapas manuscritos e impresos del Mar del Sur o Pacífico de los siglos XVII al XIX, que conserva la Real Academia de la Historia. Of them stands out a collection of manuscripts maps, unpublished, formed by Francisco Ponce de Orfila in 1701, and assembled and bound into a volume on parchment, containing some maps of the area of the South Sea. They are in various formats assembled in the Atlas entitled Mapas de América pertenecientes a la Real Academia de la Historia, in detached collections of maps ordered in information boards, in maps bound in some volume or manuscript or illustrating printed books. They are an interesting maps that were acquired by purchases and bequests over two centuries. Thus the initial Spanish plans to guarantee the establishment of a maritime lifeline with the Californias would ultimately evolve into a far broader system of trade and communication that stretched from the ports of the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain to the Californias and beyond to the emporia of Asia.Ībstract: In this study some manuscripts and printed maps of the South Sea or Pacific from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, preserving the Real Academia de la Historia, are analyzed. As Guadalajara and San Blas grew in importance, Hispanic merchants and their counterparts from New England and Britain cemented their relationships with marriage ties. Expanding commerce in the Spanish and later Mexican Pacific was made possible by changes in the system of colonial commerce due to English competition to war to trade undertaken by neutrals and finally by new measures implemented that expanded the number of people and places permitted to undertake trade within the Americas, between the Americas and Asia, and between Spain and the Americas and Asia. San Blas transformed itself little by little from an outpost of the Spanish Royal Navy into a commercial and international port-a process accelerated by the collapse of Spanish empire after 1810.
The naval presence Gálvez established at San Blas was intended not simply as a supply base for the expanding northern frontier, but also a means of countering the stranglehold on Pacific commerce currently enjoyed by the merchant guild of Mexico City through its port of Acapulco. In 1767, as part of a general renewal of colonial government, economy, and defense, Inspector General José de Gálvez established a new naval supply depot and shipyard at the relatively isolated port of San Blas on the Pacific coast of what was then the Spanish empire’s most prosperous possession – the viceroyalty of New Spain. To do so, we explore the different cartographical practices deployed during the Spanish Enlightenment to produce inland and coastal spaces in America, and the symbiotic connection between geographical information and political context. Our approach, however, seeks to explore a more subtle role for the empty spaces in maps, one that is not so closely related to an exclusionary ethos, but rather one that illustrates imperial desires to establish separate legislative and managerial orders (biopolitics and geopolitics) that called for different degrees of stability.
Brian Harley has stated that unintentional (not explicitly commanded) cartographic silences are due to the elimination of uniqueness imposed by scientific standardization, and that the affirmative support they give to the political status quo is related to an unconscious rejection of social groups by the powerful upper classes. A reading of such empty spaces is needed to understand the development of maps as historical documents rather than as repositories of true and accurate information. These spaces, which Anne Godlewska has attributed to a “sense of geographical ignorance,” actually gained progressive strategic importance in the interpretation of maps over the course of the eighteenth century.
By the last quarter of the 18th century, the information traditionally present in Spanish maps disappeared from the new cartography, replaced by empty, blank spaces.
0 kommentar(er)
