Throughout the second half of the 17th century, the Atlantic dimension was determined by the rivalry between European powers to establish prominent positions in the Americas. After the end of the hegemonic Iberian Atlantic, the economic rise of monarchies, principalities, and republics of the Old World and the business opportunities provided by the Indies determined the proliferation, emulation, and materialization of territorial aspirations. Through privileged trading companies, attempts to establish permanent mercantile and population enclaves multiplied. In a period of conflicting models of sovereignty, the Spanish monarchy required a different way of organising the extra-European space. The revaluation of overseas territories, as the arbitrists of the time pointed out, was a means of regeneration and a mechanism for effectively facing the challenge of expansion in the Iberian Atlantic. Dense networks of individuals, collectives, capital, and resources were deployed in such enterprises, which have so far been studied individually, but ―in most cases― not synoptically. Less well known, however, is the contribution of diplomacy and the handling of news in these colonizing dynamics, the management of negotiations for the resolution of territorial or economic disputes and conflicts arising in the Indian sphere or from the projection of armed confrontations which, initiated in Europe, had their correlation in those kingdoms, and the insertion of advantageous clauses in the treaties of trade, alliance, and peace that were signed between 1640 and 1713. The growing threat to the Monarchy posed by a greater foreign presence within its jurisdictional boundaries or by the participation of new agents whose activities contributed to destabilizing the fragile balance of power generated immediate reactions. From the Spanish perspective, their supposed decline in Europe contrasted with the consolidation of strategic poles on the Atlantic coasts, the deployment of defensive means to halt the European advance and preserve key areas for their interests, the extension of their dominions, and the strengthening of the loyalty of local communities in the times of the second globalization.

The aim of this project is, therefore, to examine in depth how the Spanish monarchy, interpreted as a polycentric model of urban republics,  responded to colonial expansion projects during the second half of the 17th century and the War of the Spanish Succession. To this end, we will examine in depth the political and theoretical patterns sponsored by the legitimization of the occupation of lands in the Indies; the practices of power and formulas of political mediation, or the mechanisms of collaboration and economic participation between agents and subjects, foreign corporations and emporiums or Indian urban republics; the respect for local autonomy, the attraction of cosmopolitan models and networks, the active participation of the local sphere in the management of a political structure of global implantation; the dynamics of hybridisation and cultural exchange; the systems of communication and circulation of information; migratory flows for the establishment of permanent population settlements; and, finally, the slave trade, managed through the Asiento, as a phenomenon of political attraction of third powers towards the New World.