Workshop at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in cooperation with Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG)
On 6-7 October, the workshop analyses global Europe in the long ninenteenth century by focusing on the Spanish Atlantic. Participants from UPF and IEG as well as Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Sevilla) and EHESS (Paris) discuss how the history of this period can be written from a global perspective.

Cádiz: Plaques at Oratorio de San Felipe Neri commemorating the first Spanish constitution of 1812, presented in 1912 amongst others “By the Spanish of the Americas in Honour of the American Deputes at the Cortez of Cadiz”; similiar ones from Montevideo and Puerto Rico.
In writing the history of the long nineteenth century, historians have traditionally concentrated on given macro-spaces reproducing present-day loci of power: China, India, the United States, and Europe. However, such a perspective neglects important regions and their significance for global history. In this regard, the absence of the Spanish Atlantic is most striking, especially since Spain and her Empire were both crucial for the first wave of globalization and embodied imperial decline in the course of the nineteenth century. Reflecting on Spain in her connections, encounters, and entanglements offers new insights into a global Europe in the long nineteenth century. This will bring together two strands of research in global history – i.e. Spanish Imperial history and European history in its global contexts – represented by researchers from the UPF and the IEG.
The workshop will address three mayor aspects: First, the issue of sovereignty and the transition from empire to nation state, which especially affects Spain throughout the nineteenth century, from the loss of the American colonies in the 1820s to the final loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in 1898. Second, the many faces of colonial slavery in the Spanish Atlantic ranging from its revolutionary abolition on Saint Domingue to its maintenance in Cuba until the 1880s. Third, the formation of political cultures and the shaping of liberalism in the Atlantic highlighting the circulation of ideas and actors between Europe and the Americas.
This fresh perspective will contribute to understanding nineteenth-century Europe and the Spanish Atlantic as a more complex, interrelated space, with new connections, encounters of different actors, and manifold entanglements. This global history calls for globalizing Europe as such and take into account European realms beyond Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Interrelating central and Eastern Europe with the Southern parts of the continent and their links to the Hispanic America and the Philippines will contribute to extend the picture of nineteenth-century European history in its global dimension.
The workshop has been organised by Dr Jorge Luengo, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. For further details see programme.