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

Abstract

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.