New Volume Tells the Story of the Creation of Seville’s Archive of the Indies

Meticulously researched, this book studies the physical apparatus of archival space in detail

Topics

The Invention of the Colonial Americas

Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844

Author

Byron Ellsworth Hamann

The Invention of the Colonial Americas book cover
Jun 14, 2022

Three centuries after Christopher Columbus’s voyages, an archive was built in Seville, Spain, to store the country’s pre-1760 documents about the New World.

To fill this new archive, older archives elsewhere in Spain—spaces in which records about American history were stored together with records about European history—were dismembered. The Archive of the Indies thus constructed a scholarly apparatus that made it easier to imagine the history of the Americas as independent from the history of Europe, and vice versa.

The Invention of the Colonial Americas: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844 (Getty Research Institute, $60) is an architectural history and media-archaeological study of changing theories and practices of government archives in Enlightenment Spain. Within this volume, Byron Ellsworth Hamann explores how building layouts, systems of storage, and the arrangement of documents were designed to foster the creation of new knowledge. He draws on a rich collection of 18th-century architectural plans, descriptions, models, document catalogs, and surviving buildings to present a literal, materially precise account of archives as assemblages of spaces, humans, and data—assemblages that were understood circa 1800 as capable of actively generating scholarly innovation.

Author Information

Byron Ellsworth Hamann’s research is focused on the art and writing of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, as well as on the connections linking the Americas and Europe in the early modern Mediterratlantic world.

Endorsements

“This is a fascinating study of how the decision to establish a colonial archive required distinguishing European from colonial history and reimagining the role and place of the Americas in Spain, present and past. Hamann masterfully and convincingly shows that at the heart of the Archive of the Indies—an archive all historians of Spanish America use—is a hidden story about how our own field came to be and about what we have routinely seen but failed to notice.”

— Tamar Herzog, Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs, Harvard University

“The Invention of the Colonial Americas takes the reader on an illuminating reconstruction of Seville’s Archive of the Indies as a physical place, one whose organization and content allowed eighteenth-century writers to sever the histories of Europe and the Americas. Byron Ellsworth Hamann’s innovative study—intellectual, spatial, data-driven, and always human in its focus—offers a necessary contribution to our understanding of the Spanish Enlightenment.”

— Jesús Escobar, Northwestern University

The Invention of the Colonial Americas

Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies, 1781–1844

$60/£45

Learn more about this publication
The Invention of the Colonial Americas book cover
Back to Top

Resources for Journalists

Press Contacts