Invention of the Colonial Americas

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.

"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. It demonstrates that the breakup of the Hispanic world was not unilateral, as not only creoles but also Spaniards, gradually moved to affirm that Spain and Spanish America were distinct. 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