The Spanish Empire, Globalization, and Cross-Cultural Consumption in a World Context, c. 1400-c. 1750

Abstract

Do cultures dialogue only through oral and written words or also through the exchange of material goods? Anthropologists and historians completely agree on this matter: cross-cultural exchanges of objects and goods are also a means of intercultural dialogue.¹ Societies interact by transferring pieces of their material cultures, by exchanging values, social habits and practices, or political representations, all of them frequently inherent to those objects. By rejecting these exchanges, societies also reject each other. Very often this cross-cultural relationship involves violence and hate, as well as war and conflict. This is not only a discourse of anthropologists. The idea, in fact, was advanced by the historian Fernand Braudel several decades ago at a global level and then applied also to the Spanish Empire in the Americas by Serge Gruzinski and others.² In the long run the exchange of material goods has been so intense that it is impossible to encapsulate it in a few pages. Yet some examples can be suggestive of the ways in which cultural intertwining has affected and will continue to affect the lives of human beings. To such an end the dramatic change in the history of humanity that took place beginning the fifteenth century and more specifically after 1492 is taken here as a starting point for a general and necessarily incomplete reflection.