Being Spanish in the Early Modern World

This chapter explores the limits and frontiers of Spain and Spanishness in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries from temporal, political and geographical perspectives. The global displacements and mobility of the peoples who came to be described as ‘Spanish’ across this period, their state of estrangement and motion as a structuring condition of identity, formed a crucial driver of the negotiations, political, cultural and linguistic, which came to define ‘Spain’. From the racial politics of Latin America to the states of the Hispanic monarchy whose link to Spain was mediated by foreign Habsburg dynasts, the foreign/other was always a fundamental part of the web of exchanges and interchangeability that made Spain different, an object of envy and admiration from within and without.