Introduction: “ongoing” mobilities in the Early-Modern Spanish world

ABSTRACT

Lives characterised by staggered, stepwise or “ongoing” mobility were ubiquitous in the Early-Modern Spanish world. However, individuals who repeatedly alternated long-distance relocation with prolonged periods of sojourn in different places have attracted limited attention from historians. Contemporary migration studies, by contrast, increasingly stress the importance of considering experiences of mobility from a longitudinal perspective. By doing so, they highlight how, over time and through repeated migrations, individuals and families often transcend official immigration categories, acquire and deploy skills, rely on, create and destroy relational networks, and produce narratives that allow them to make sense of both their trajectories and their experiences of social and place insertion. Drawing on insights from this scholarship and the “new mobilities paradigm,” adopting a narrative, biographical or life-cycle approach, to the mobile lives of enslaved individuals in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, of mestizo children travelling to and from Spain, of Canarian migrants, royal officials and merchants, the contributors to this special issue aim to further our understanding of how the experiences of these individuals were central to the construction and transformation of religious ideas, personal and political identities, and familial, commercial and patronage networks that articulated the early modern Spanish world.

KEYWORDS:

• Staggered mobility
• family networks
• migrant identities
• religious knowledge
• enslaved mobilities

Vice Admiral Antonio de Ulloa died in Cadiz in 1795, holding the second highest rank in the Spanish Navy.¹ He is perhaps best known for his participation, alongside Jorge Juan, in the scientific expedition to South America that first measured a degree of longitude along the Equator in the late 1730s and early 1740s.² However, Ulloa’s life was characterised by constant “ongoing,” staggered, or stepwise mobility: it included multiple transatlantic voyages interspersed with periods of sojourn in various locations across and beyond the Spanish world.³ While historians tend to think of him primarily as a scientist and naval officer, his life trajectory reveals a more complex story. Ulloa travelled and settled in many different capacities; his movement, the ways in which he made sense of it, and the practices it embodied reflect specific sets of social and cultural configurations that changed overtime. Moreover, neither his geographical nor his social mobility were exclusively the result of strategic planning and calculated decision-making. They were, in many ways, contingent, non-linear and multidirectional, subject to uncertainty and serendipity; they reflected, affected, created and severed social connections; and they were intimately linked to the mobility of others, at times spurring it and others preventing it.

More importantly, perhaps, Ulloa’s life and trajectory were in no way atypical. Experiences of staggered or “ongoing” mobility crop up everywhere in the Early-Modern Spanish world as soon as one starts to keep an eye out for them. Crucially, they were not exclusively the preserve of royal administrators, but rather as the articles in this special issue suggest, they affected men and women, free and enslaved individuals, of various ethnicities, religious beliefs and places of origin, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on insights from recent migration scholarship and the “new mobilities paradigm,” the essays in this special issue analyse from a longitudinal perspective a range of lives characterised, like Ulloa’s, by staggered, “ongoing” mobility. Jointly, they paint a picture of how of experiences of stepwise mobility created interconnections and interdependence across oceans and continents, grounding the social fabric of the Spanish world. As the articles show, the ways in which individuals experienced staggered mobility were culturally and chronologically defined and reflected specific intersectionalities. But they were also formative and transformative processes for the individuals themselves, for the ways in which they understood and embodied movement, for the networks they moved through, the places they sojourned in, and the early modern Spanish world as a whole. By focusing on mobility as an open-ended or staggered process and stressing its non-sequential, contingent, and multidirectional character, the articles in this special issue also stress the need to seriously think of mobility in its proper historical dimension, abandoning simplistic interpretations of the “modern” nature of complex forms of mobility and hopefully furthering the dialogue between debates and methods prominent in migration and mobility studies and in history.

The following pages aim to clarify what we mean by “ongoing” or staggered mobility and how we think of this process. We begin by offering a more detailed reconstruction of Ulloa’s life-trajectory as a paradigmatic example of a life on the go in the early modern Spanish world. We then turn to a discussion of movement and mobility, and of how insights from the “new mobilities paradigm” and contemporary migration studies can help us better analyse these experiences. Finally we expand on how the six articles comprised in this special issue contribute to furthering our understanding of historically contextualised mobility, of the early modern Spanish world, and of lives characterised by staggered mobility.

Early modern lives on the go: Antonio de Ulloa (1716-1795)

Although biographers often tend to elide failure, uncertainty and serendipity in their accounts of Antonio de Ulloa’s life, his vital trajectory was far from a story of sustained success. Almost from the start, Ulloa’s movement was driven by disappointment, misfortune or violence, as often as it was triggered by success, serendipity or calculated planning. Born to a politically influential and comfortable family in Seville, Ulloa first crossed the Atlantic aged only fourteen as volunteer seaman, after trying, unsuccessfully, to enter the Bourbon’s newly-founded Midshipmen Academy. He sailed to Cartagena de Indias on one of the vessels of the naval escort of the Spanish merchant fleet, serving under a close friend of his father (Beltrán and Manuel 2019, 415). Upon his return to Spain, aged still only seventeen, he finally gained admission to the Midshipmen Academy. After sailing with the Spanish fleet that fought off the coast of Italy during the War of the Polish Succession, in late 1734 – and probably through his father’s political influence⁴ – he was chosen to accompany the Franco-Spanish geographic expedition to South America (Losada Villasante 2018; Ramos Gómez 1985, 19). Although his entire scientific career and reputation would be built on his participation in this enterprise, at the time of his appointment, Ulloa had no scientific credentials other than the training in mathematics he had received over a few months as midshipman. As Ramos Gómez has argued, rather than as partners of the French savants, Ulloa and his companion joined the expedition as diplomatic escorts (and perhaps as something akin to spies). Their task was to ensure safe passage and cooperation from Spanish American authorities, and to make sure the Spanish crown had direct and unmediated access to the expedition’s findings (Ramos Gómez 1985, 17–18). This appointment also ignited Ulloa’s naval career as before departing from Spain, aged still only eighteen, he was promoted four rungs up the naval officers’ rank.⁵

Ulloa spent the following ten years of his life in Spanish America alternating in his roles as political intermediary between the French and the local authorities, minor scientific contributor, and inexperienced-but-high-ranking naval officer with varying degrees of success. In Quito, rather than smoothing the expedition’s passage, he clashed with the incoming provincial governor and became the subject of a judicial enquiry that charged him with disregarding the authority and standing of local officials (Losada Villasante 2018; Ramos Gómez 1985, 59–66, 70–81, 100). He also quarrelled with the French scientists over the recognition the Spaniards should receive for their technical contributions to the expedition (Ramos Gómez 1985, 185–200). Ulloa interrupted his time in Quito twice, called to Lima by the viceroy of Peru. As some of the highest-ranking naval officers in South America at the time, Ulloa and his companion were called upon to help defend the Pacific against the British squadron led by George Anson, with only limited success (Ramos Gómez 1985, 101–102, 150–156, 218–220, 240–242, 245–257). The turmoil of Ulloa’s second South American sojourn extended to his return journey. Sailing from Callao to Europe through the Cape Horn route, the French frigate carrying Ulloa was captured by the British at Louisburg (Nova Scotia). After visiting British North America and spending some time in Portsmouth as a prisoner of war, Ulloa was eventually allowed to travel to London, where his scientific reputation was cemented by his election as a member of the Royal Academy in 1746. Later that year, he returned to Spain via Lisbon (Losada Villasante 2018; Ramos Gómez 1985, 299–303).

In Madrid, and under the close supervision of the Spanish Council of the Indies, Ulloa and his companion spent the following three years of their lives writing three treatises based on their South American sojourn: a natural-history and account of their travels, a series of geographical and astronomical observations, and a description of the border between the Spanish and Portuguese territories. At the request of the minister Marqués de la Ensenada, they also penned a damning report on the government of Spanish South America (which would eventually turn its authors into household names amongst historians of the region): the (in)famous Noticias Secretas de América.⁶ In 1749 Ulloa was sent to Valencia, to study the province’s silk industry and inspect the shipyards in Cartagena de Levante; he was then sent to survey the port of Barcelona from where he departed for a scientific and economic mission to Europe that has often been characterised as industrial espionage (Losada Villasante 2018).⁷ In his travels through France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Prussia, three younger men, including one of his brothers, who were to be trained in mathematics and engineering, accompanied Ulloa (Merino 1984, 8). Upon returning to Spain in 1752, he was involved in designing or setting up some of the more ambitious scientific and economic projects of the Bourbons including the Botanical Gardens in Madrid, the Cabinet of Natural History, the Canal of Castile, state-operated textile mills in Ezcaray (La Rioja), Pamplona and Segovia, and the revamping of the quicksilver mines in Almadén (Losada Villasante 2018).

After three years spent in Cadiz, engaged primarily in teaching at the Midshipmen Academy, Ulloa was appointed superintendent of the mines of Huancavelica, in Peru. He began his third South American sojourn in 1757, setting sail from Cadiz to Buenos Aires and taking as his criados three young relatives (Losada Villasante 2018).⁸ In 1764, after six years in Peru and while temporarily residing in Havana, Ulloa received an appointment as the first Spanish governor of Louisiana – a post that had no connection with his previous experiences as a sailor, scientists, or administrator of mines. After two years in post, an uprising by the local slave-holding elite forced Ulloa to flee back to Cuba (García and Miguel 2020, 134). From there he travelled back to Spain where he settled once again in Cadiz, combining teaching in the Midshipmen Academy with writing on naval affairs and the natural history of the Spanish America, and a role in upgrading the defences of Seville (Losada Villasante 2018). In 1776, he set out for Spanish America for the fourth (and what would turn out to be the last) time, serving as the commanding officer of the last-ever merchant fleet to sail for New Spain. After two years in Veracruz, he returned to the Iberian Peninsula to receive his final promotion in the navy and publish treatises on the geography of New Spain and the solar eclipse of 1778 (Losada Villasante 2018). Ulloa’s final command saw him lead a squadron off the Azores during the American Revolutionary War for which he was court-martialled before being allowed to retire to Cadiz (Losada Villasante 2018). He spent the last eight years of his life writing on a broad range of topics and occasionally advising the crown on mining and other American matters (Losada Villasante 2018).

Thus, neither his professional nor his geographical trajectories represented coherent, linear progressions. While his movement was technically always undertaken in the service of the Spanish crown, he moved in different capacities, driven by different reasons and for different purposes. He experienced significant setbacks that delayed promotions and even threatened to derail his career more than once. His writings, particularly the Relación histórica del viaje a la América meridional (Juan and de Ulloa 1748) and his peculiar last will and testament,⁹ offer some insight into how he made sense of his travels and sojourns within a complex matrix of culturally and chronologically defined social connections. Yet, Ulloa’s life trajectory was not exceptional. His experiences fit within a “constellation of mobility” – i.e. a set of “particular patterns of movement, representations of movement, and ways of practising movement that make sense together” (Cresswell 2010, 17) – that comprises the experiences of many others whose lives were spent in the service of the Spanish crown in the early modern period. His mobile life was also closely bound to the movement (and immobility) of others: from his long-time associate, Jorge Juan, to members of his family, patrons, clients and subordinates, servants, slaves and a myriad others. For instance, Francisca Remírez de Laredo, a native of Lima – and 34 years younger than her husband – married Ulloa by proxy in 1766; the following year she travelled from Peru to Louisiana, where he was serving as provincial governor and where the couple’s first child was eventually born. When he was forced to flee the province, she followed him to Havana and Cadiz, where the rest of their eight children came into the world (Losada Villasante 2018). By contrast, although little is known of her life, María Antonia del Espíritu Santo Ulloa, believed to have been Ulloa’s illegitimate daughter conceived during his tenure as superintendent of Huancavelica, spent most of her life cloistered in the Carmelite convent of Huamanga, financially supported by her father (Beltrán and Manuel 2019, 417). Like Ulloa’s, the life trajectories of those around him were neither exceptional nor atypical. As the articles in this issue demonstrate, experiences of staggered or step-wise mobility were common to a multitude of individuals – men and women, free and enslaved, of different ethnicities and social backgrounds – whose lives unfolded in and around the early modern Spanish world.

“Ongoing” mobilities and longitudinal perspectives

“Our life-worlds are mobile for us, with us, and sometimes they are against us” (Adey 2010, 4). Mobility is everywhere, as the geographer Peter Adey asserts. From international migrations to the blood flow, passing through dancing, life occurs on the move. From the beginning of the twenty-first century, mobility, together with globalisation, has become a central concern of social scientists.¹⁰ Following the sociologist John Urry, mobility studies have aimed to analyse and theorise society from a perspective that is neither static nor fixed. By transcending the fixed, defined or bounded space as a unit of analysis, they stress how society consists of complex mobilities (Urry 2000; Kaufmann 2002; Jensen and Richardson 2004). The field has paid particular attention to the mobility of objects, corporeal movement, imaginative mobilities, virtual mobility, and communication (Schiller and Salazar 2013; Fortunati and Taipale 2017). More recently, scholars have focused on the study of infrastructure or fixities that, like airports, enable movement (Adey 2010; Cresswell 2006, 219–59). Simultaneously, there has been growing interest in understanding differentiated experiences of mobility and the politics of movement (Uteng and Cresswell 2008; Sheller 2018). This expanding interest in mobility is often englobed under the “new mobilities paradigm” or the “mobility turn” (Sheller and Urry 2006; Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006).

Within this context, contemporary migration studies stress the importance of problematising the categories ascribed to individuals on the move. Building on studies that focused on the intersections between labels such as traveller, migrant, tourist or resident (Williams and Hall 2000; Cohen, Duncan, and Thulemark 2015), recent works question the relevance of dichotomies created by official immigration categories. They highlight how individuals and families often transcend the “temporary” vs “permanent,” or “skilled” vs “unskilled” migrant labels during their lifetimes. Thus, they urge an understanding of transnational mobility as non-linear, reversible, and multidirectional (Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar 2018, 207). Scholars like Ley and Lynn Kobayashi (2005), and Ho (2011) have advocated for a “life-cycle approach” to transnational mobility as a means for capturing processes that include “multiple geographic trajectories, changing forms of status, and ongoing movement across time and space” (Robertson, Harris, and Baldassar 2018, 213). Most recently, Roberts (2019, 3) has used a longitudinal, biographical and narrative analysis of “people’s mobile pathways and practices over their lives” to emphasise that mobility is often best understood as an ongoing “complex matrix of interactions and connections over time and space, rather than a linear and permanent migration.” In line with the insights offered by these studies, the articles gathered here stresses the need to shift historical attention from traditional narratives of “departure, arrival and settlement” towards the analysis of practices and paths of “ongoing” mobility. Thus, they seek to understand experiences similar to Ulloa’s from a perspective that recognises that “mobility was not just about continual movement across space but also the continual acquisition of skills and negotiation of social locations and positionality in different contexts” (Roberts 2019, 15). The essays collected here try to recover some of these experiences, adopting a longitudinal approach to think of mobility and mobile subjects along a continuum of experience that can change or develop over time.

Both the “new mobilities paradigm” and recent migration studies, however, share a perhaps unjustified emphasis on the “modern” nature of complex forms of mobility. They at least implicitly suggest that contemporary experiences are, at some level, fundamentally different from anything that came before. They purport to respond to a perception that levels and forms of mobility have significantly increased in contemporary societies. Even when certain voices have argued for the need to “dampen the enthusiasm for the ‘new’ that characterises some of the work in the new mobilities paradigm, and to illustrate the continuation of the past in the present,” their attempts at historicising mobility often seem to fall short of the mark.¹¹ Yet, mobilities are also profoundly intertwined with historical structures (empires, monarchies, families, cities, etc), infrastructure, and individuals. Indeed, the perception that we are living in a world that experiences mobility to a greater degree than any before is not unique to our time. Historians of the early modern world, particularly those interested in early globalisation, have gone further in their attempts at historicising the movement of people, goods and ideas. However, unlike the recent migration studies outlined above, they often tend to think of mobility as primarily “point to point” displacement within specific categories,¹² or to emphasise “circulation” along closed circuits rather than non-lineal “ongoing” trajectories.¹³

The “new mobilities paradigm” has also been faulted for failing to agree on a definition of mobility. For the purposes of this volume, we follow human geographer Tim Cresswell in recognising, as a starting point, that movement and mobility are not the same thing. The former “is the general fact of displacement,” while the latter is the “socially produced motion” (Cresswell 2006, 3–4). Cresswell argues that mobility is determined by three relational moments: the motion itself, the representational strategies associated with the self-presentation of mobility, and the embodiment of moving (Cresswell 2010, 19–20). Adopting this definition in combination with a longitudinal approach, allows us to further problematise the nature of staggered or step-wise displacement. It enables us to situate the complex, non-linear transformation and development of individual and familial motivations, intensions, skills and strategies for negotiating social insertion and positionality in a variety of chronological and geographical contexts.

As alluded to above, the analysis of historical movement in the Early-Modern world is not a new topic. However, if we adopt Creswell’s distinction between movement and mobility, it soon becomes clear that while the study of movements is a consolidated field, research on the historical representation and embodiment of motion is still in its early stages. Transnational, Atlantic and global historians, like Trivellato (2009), Mangan (2015), and Ghobrial (2019), have focused on analysing diasporas, globetrotters, families and networks spread across the early modern world.¹⁴ In the Hispanic context, the study of the movement of things, people, and ideas is also well-established (Gaudin and Valenzuela Márquez 2015). Historians, like Altman (1989, 2000), Altman (2014) and Aram and Yun Casalilla (2014), have recovered the displacement of moriscos and Amerindians, the circulation of royal officials and mobile settlers, and the movement of global goods.¹⁵ Altman’s (2014) work, for instance, has highlighted the importance of migration and the associated experiences of displacement in the Early-Modern Spanish world. She points out how people on the move contributed to Spanish imperial interdependence, American colonisation, and market-building. The movement of subjects has also been stressed in studies of evangelisation and the religious orders, particularly the Jesuits, and in connection with temporary labour migration and forced labour in the American mines (Maldavsky 2014; Marcocci et al. 2015). Conversely, mobility, as socially produced motion, has received less attention from early modernists. Studies of the relation between mobilities and infrastructure – like gates, lodging houses and bridges – have only recently emerged for the Holy Roman, French, and Venetian empires (Salzberg 2019; Scholz 2020). Historians of the Spanish world have been more cautious in embracing this approach, although scholars such as Sellers-García (2012, 2014), Dym (2012), Brendecke (2016), Wheat (2015), and Gaudin and Ponce Leiva (2019), Gaudin (2020)) have begun to devote attention to transit points, and the social construction of colonial places and distances.

Mobility, however, is always the result of relationships with something or someone (Adey 2010, xvii): from one’s place of birth, to the social networks one operates within, to one’s family or property. It is within this relational matrix that movement acquires specific meaning. Yet, most studies of Early-Modern mobility tend to pay limited attention to the representation and embodiment of movement. Thus, while it is now generally accepted that mobile actors were key to the development and maintenance of the socio-spatial relationships that constituted every-day life in Spanish America, Europe and Asia, we still know comparatively little about how individuals, like Ulloa, gave meaning to their movement and how they embodied practices of continued motion in the early modern world. Mobility was frequently multistaged, marked by changing capacities, aims and drivers, and by the continuous acquisition of skills and knowledge over time and space. We know that royal officials and clergymen who dwelled in diverse places configured the Spanish world through their “ongoing” experiences of imperial mobility. This was the case of Spanish statesmen, as recent studies of the lives of Juan Rena, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, Manuel Godinho de Erédia, and Fernando Valdés demonstrate (Álvarez de Toledo 2012; Muñoz and Ángel Del 2012; Flores 2015; Páez and Miguel 2020). However, these “ongoing” mobilities were not exclusively the preserve of men. Women like Catalina de Erauso, Teresa of Ávila, Sofonisba Anguissola, and María Juana de Knepper y Tripel and her daughters led equally mobile lives that contributed to shape the Spanish world (Mujica 2009; Pérez-Villanueva 2014; Ruiz Gómez 2019; Eire [2019] 2020; A. Eissa-Barroso 2022). Similarly, a multitude of enslaved and native men and women, like Narciso Convento (García and Miguel 2020, 132–149) or the Pipil Catalina (Van Deusen 2015a, 14–16, 71, 134), experienced continuous movement and relocation in and beyond the Americas, constituting diverse “constellations” of mobility.¹⁶ The diversity of experiences of mobility built up the interconnection and interdependence of the Spanish world across continents and oceans.

“Ongoing” mobilities in the Spanish world

Building on all these contributions by historians, cultural geographers and migration scholars, the present special issue seeks to broaden our notions of movement and mobility within the Early-Modern Spanish world. The papers collected here revolve around “ongoing” Early-Modern mobilities. That is, the staggered or sequential experiences of historical agents who dwelt in multiple locations of the Spanish world between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. An approach that focuses on the “ongoing” nature of mobility has rarely been applied systematically to movement patterns in the early modern Spanish world. Focusing on the long nineteenth century and the British empire, Lambert and Lester set out to explore the life-trajectories of “many Britons […] men and women who dwelt for extended periods in one colony before moving on to dwell in others, developing what we might call ‘imperial careers’” (Lambert and Lester 2006, 1–2).¹⁷ To the best of our knowledge, until now, nothing similar existed for the Early-Modern Spanish world.¹⁸ Thus, we have collected a diverse sample of case studies, aiming to read life pathways and mobile experiences by adapting the insights from migration and mobility studies to the research of the Early-Modern Spanish world. The contributors of this special issue adopt longitudinal, biographical, or life-cycle approaches to the complex, non-linear transformation and development of the movement and experiences of mobility of their subjects of analysis. Using this approach, the authors look for the individual and familial motivations to move, the intensions, skills, and strategies for negotiating social insertion and positionality in various contexts, and their transformation over time.

Overall, the six authors are interested in furthering our understanding of the often contingent, accidental nature of mobility within the Early-Modern Spanish world. The authors of the present issue accepted the challenge of thinking about the “mobility turn” and the “ongoing” character of their mobile cases, situating them in their specific geographies and chronological context. From Spain to Japan, passing through the Caribbean and North Africa, the life-trajectories they analyse present theoretical and methodological challenges similar to those with which cultural geographers and migration scholars grapple. The authors of this volume target the micro- and macro-mobilities associated with religious conversions, the slave market, colonisation, miscegenation, kinship, and empire-building, among other processes. By reconstructing the itinerancy of staggered migrants and mobile settlers, the authors reflect critically, less rigidly, and more qualitatively on a multitude of experiences of mobility within the Spanish world in early modern times.

As Cresswell (2006, 5) highlights, “any consideration of movement (and mobility) that does not take time and space into account is missing an important facet.” Yet, given the ubiquity and portability of mobility,¹⁹ we thought it useful to narrow the focus of analysis down to “ongoing” mobilities in the Early-Modern Spanish world. Thus, this volume stresses the contingency of a constantly transforming and interconnected world, in which “ongoing” mobilities were both cause and effect. The six articles that follow revolve around three main topics: how experiences of mobility were conditioned by gender, race and class; the role of mobile trajectories in configuring the global and trans-regional interdependence of the Spanish world; and the relationship between subjectivity and mobility. The articles focus on the specificity of the knowledge and experiences of subjects on the move. Yet, they also reflect on how the experiences of different individuals fit within constellations of mobility, or shared patterns of movement, with specific meaning, and embodied practices (Cresswell 2010).

Bethan Fisk and Èrika Rincones Minda explore a variety of lives that involved prolonged and serial sojourns in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Spanish world. They stress the contrast between forced and free mobility, the production and importance of religious knowledge, and changing social status. Fisk and Rincones Minda reconstruct the trajectories and experiences of enslaved individuals whose lives developed in the Caribbean and Northern South America, and in North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula respectively. The diversity of mobile experiences showed by these papers stresses the need to think critically about shared knowledge, the intersectional character of social axes of differentiation such as gender, class, labour regime, etc., and the specific rhetorical and social strategies used by subjects on the move.

The next two articles focus on the relationship between experiences of staggered migration in the Spanish world and the formal and informal institutions of a globalising empire: from the family to the administrative structures of a composite monarchy. Katherine Godfrey explores mestizo children’s key role in Spanish empire-building and trade. Jesse Cromwell, in turn, introduces us to the trans-Atlantic marital conflict between Domingo Galdona and María Antonia Guerra, a case linking the Canary Islands and Venezuela in the eighteenth century.

The last two articles explore the relationship between subjectivity, life-writing, and “ongoing” mobilities. Nino Vallen considers the global trajectories of a royal official and arbitrista who served under the Spanish Habsburgs. Vallen follows Rodrigo de Vivero’s life trajectory from New Spain, to the Philippines, Japan and beyond, stressing how he fashioned an image of the deserving self that initially praised but later criticised the importance of mobility. In turn, María Victoria Marquez examines the autobiography of Miguel de Learte, an eighteenth-century Navarrese merchant who moved across the Atlantic, ending his days in Cordoba del Tucuman. His autobiography stresses how mobile individuals approached their own mobility experiences as a long-term project or part of their continuous self-construction, even if it was not always seen as a success.

Thus, the articles in this special issue investigates specific experiences of staggered mobility intrinsic to early modern Hispanic societies, and make three key contributions. Firstly, they recover itinerant lives reconstructing their movement and how their specific trajectories created interconnections and interdependence across oceans and continents. From the experiences of muslim imigrants to the Iberian Peninsula, to the networks of mestizo children across the Atlantic, “ongoing” mobilities grounded the social fabric of the Spanish empire. Secondly, the articles demonstrate how those experiences of stepwise mobility were culturally and chronologically defined and did not necessarily map onto our contemporary understandings of mobility. In other words, they acquired meaning through specific, but shared, notions of what movement entailed, why one moved, and what one gained or lost through movement. In turn, these experiences of mobility also helped shape and transform those shared notions. The representation of movement was constantly reformulated along time and space to enshroud mobility within a diversity of meanings. Long-distance and micro-mobilities, as well as immobilities, are manifest in the experiences of the enslaved, represented in the treatises and correspondence of royal officials, and interpreted in the memoirs of merchants and writers, configuring familiar images of movement.²⁰ Finally, our emphasis on the idea of “ongoing” mobility in the Early-Modern Spanish world allows us to establish a dialogue between debates and methods prominent in migration and mobility studies and the chronologically contextualised understanding and practice of early modernist historians of the Spanish world. Thus, going beyond classical approaches to the study of historical movement, these articles stress the insights that are gained by focusing on mobility as an open-ended or staggered process and stressing its non-sequential, contingent, and multidirectional character. By recovering the patterns of movement, the ways in which they were represented and embodied within culturally specific notions, this special issue aims to re-centre. The role of constellations of 'ongoing' mobilities in shaping the early modern (Spanish) world(s). But it also emphasises the need to think of mobility in a proper historical dimension and to abandon simplistic interpretations of all time past as being fundamentally less mobile than today. It aims to challenge other scholars of mobility to address chronological context more seriously and to offer a set of examples of how we can move beyond the unjustified emphasis on the “modern” nature of complex forms of mobility in a methodologically sound and intellectually rewarding fashion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council under Research Grant AH/S012192/1 “Trajectories of Reform in the Spanish World: Careering, Networks and Empire under the Early Bourbons (1700-1759).” The articles collected in this special issue are based on papers presented at the international symposium ‘“Ongoing” Mobilities in the Early Modern World: Sojourners, Mobile Settlers, Itinerants, Staggered Migrants, and Other Lives on the Go”, held at the University of Manchester on 4-6 March 2021 and funded by the same grant. https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FS012192%2F1

Notes

1. Ulloa had been a Teniente General de la Armada since 1778; his naval career, however, had all but ended after a court-martial in 1783. (Losada Villasante 2018).

2. Perhaps the best account of the expedition and its intellectual legacy, from a history of science perspective, in Safier (2008); for an exceedingly detailed description of Juan and Ulloa’s role in it, seeRamos Gómez (1985).

3. Across the texts in this special issue, we have used the term “Spanish world” to refer to the territories attached to the (Spanish) Catholic Monarchy throughout the Early Modern Period. This is in keeping with the bulk of the historiography written in English. However, we recognise that the practice in Spanish-language scholarship is, perhaps more accurately, to refer to these territories as “mundo hispano” or “hispánico”.

4. Ulloa’s father, Bernardo, was a hereditary member of Seville’s city council and a prominent political figure in the city; he also became an influential advisor to the Spanish crown. See, for instance, San Román López (2018); for the suggestion that Ulloa’s father interfered in his appointment, see Ramos Gómez (1985, 19, n.15).

5. Juan and Ulloa received the rank of teniente de navío, roughly equivalent to a commander in the British Royal Navy (Losada Villasante 2018).

6. On the works written by Juan and Ulloa upon their return from South America and their aims, see Ramos Gómez (1985, 351–396).

7. On the mission itself, see José Merino (1984).

8. Expediente de información y licencia de pasajero a indias de Antonio de Ulloa, 24 September 1757, Cadiz, Archivo General de Indias (Seville) [hereinafter AGI], Contratación, 5500, N.3, R.26.

9. On Ulloa’s disposición testamentaria, see Beltrán and Manuel (2019).

10. See, amongst many others, Urry (2000) and Massey (2005), which are foundational to the field. Tourism studies played a prominent role in the development of this scholarship. See, for instance, Hall (2005) and Hannam (2008).

11. See, for example, Cresswell (2010, 26–28), the quote is on page 27.

12. See, for instance, Lucassen and Lucassen (2009).

13. See, for example, Markovits, Pouchepadas, and Subrahmanyan (2006).

14. On diasporas, networks and globetrotters, see Trivellato (2009), Subrahmanyam (2011), Aslanian (2011), Gürkan (2015), Antunes and Polónia (2016), Ghobrial (2019), and Salvadore (2021). On family networks, see Rothschild (2011), Liang (2011), Hardwick, Pearsall, and Wulf (2013), Mangan (2015), Veevers (2015), Romney (2017), Maglaque (2018), and Dalton (2020). Archaeologist of the Early Modern world have also paid attention to mobility, see, for instance, Beaudry and Parno (2013).

15. On specific cases of people, objects and institutions on the move, see Altman (2000), García-Arenal (2003, 2014), Salinero (2005), Aram and Yun Casalilla (2014), Mangan (2015), Valenzuela Márquez (2017), and Gasch-Tomás (2018).

16. On indigenous populations on the move see Roller (2014), Van Deusen (2015b), and Pennock (2020). On displaced enslaved populations, see Thornton (1998) and Wheat (2016).

17. For more recent developments of these notions, see Lambert and Merriman (2020). The approach adopted in this works ows much to developments associated with the “biographical turn”; see, for instance, Renders, de Haan, and Harmsma (2016).

18. For a recent attempt to do this, see A. Eissa-Barroso (2022).

19. On the ubiquity and portability of mobility, see Cresswell (2006, 22).

20. For a definition of micro-mobility as understood here, see Cresswell (2010), Fortunati and Taipale (2017). For a definition and discussion of immobility, see Adey (2006).