Episode 69 with Scott Eastman
Spain was perhaps the world’s greatest imperial power in the early-modern period, but few know about the new imperial ventures it attempted in the 19th century. In this episode, Scott Eastman, author of A Missionary Nation: Race, Religion, and Spain’s Age of Liberal Imperialism, 1841-1881, crisscrosses the Atlantic world to tell of these ventures in Morocco, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and West Africa. Along the way, he unpacks Spanish liberals’ views on race and religion within the context of the second wave of European imperialism in the 19th century.
The Episode
The Guest
Scott Eastman (Ph.D. University of California, Irvine) is Professor of Transnational History at Creighton University. His most recent monograph is A Missionary Nation: Race, Religion, and Spain’s Age of Liberal Imperialism, 1841-1881 (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). He is the author of Preaching Spanish Nationalism Across the Hispanic Atlantic and is co-author of Independence and Nation-Building in Latin America: Race and Identity in the Crucible of War with Natalia Sobrevilla. They also co-edited The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World: The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812. Eastman has published in European History Quarterly, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, and Historia y Política, among other journals, and has received major funding from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the Hispanex Program, and the Fulbright Commission. A member of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies since 2003, he served as ASPHS president from 2018-2020. His research interests focus on the intersection of identity, colonialism, and culture across the Hispanic Atlantic World.
Suggested Readings
- Berenson, Edward. Heroes of Empire: Five Charismatic Men and the Conquest of Africa, Berkeley, 2011.
- Dalmau, Pol and Jorge Luengo. “Writing Spanish History in the Global Age: Connections and Entanglements in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Global History 13, no. 3 (2018): 425-45.
- Eller, Anne. We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom.Durham, NC, 2016.
- Fradera, Josep. La nación imperial: Derechos, representación y ciudadanía en los imperios de Gran Bretaña, Francia, España y Estados Unidos (1750–1918).Vol. 1. Barcelona, 2015.
- Inarejos Muñoz, Juan Antonio. Intervenciones coloniales y nacionalismo español: La política exterior de la Unión Liberal y sus vínculos con la Francia de Napoleón III (1856–1868).Madrid, 2010.
- Pack, Sasha. The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Modern Hispano-African Borderland.Stanford, 2019.
- Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Anti-Slavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874.Pittsburgh, 1999.
Historias 