Reconstructing Colonial Rule: A Historical Web-GIS for Spanish America

The proposed project aims at the construction of a dynamical Historical GIS for colonial Hispanoamerica. In the project, the spatial development of colonial administration shall be systematically reconstructed with the help of GIS-software and integration in a WebGIS application. The thereby resulting GIS serves a similar purpose as existing HGIS-infrastructure efforts, with three main differences: first, most of them have national tailoring, while we have a supra-national vision, in accordance with the historical subject and in opposition to national approaches that dominate not only HGIS but especially Hispanoamerican historical geography. Second, we incorporate pre- 1800 history, which is mainly the starting point for HGIS-infrastructures because of better contemporary maps and more complete and precise documentation of territorial developments. And third, the web-presence of the GIS shall be an expandable Web 2.0 resource rather than being a mere visualization of a concluded results. We will especially focus on the late colonial decades out of three main reasons: First, Hispanoamerican historiography has a good understanding of the intendancy system established through the Bourbon Reforms, which was also better documented than the earlier divisions (although we`ll have to cope with the old system in those areas where no intendancies were installed). Second, even though far from satisfying modern needs, cartographic sources, especially maps drawn by military engineers, give us a better opportunity to reconstruct administrative areas. And third, especially the political map of the late Empire served as fundamental basis for later national territorial claims and the formation of national identities, so a coherent supra-national vision is of special interest. The method for reconstruction is a system of "least common geometry" (LCG), where each area that differs from another at any level of administration at any time is considered an entity. As second backbone, we will identify and store basic information for settlements of colonial Hispanoamerica, since much archival data can rather be associated with a place than an area. For peers with the ability to use GIS-software, we will also provide shapefiles in open access for download. Special benefits of a common spatial GIS-infrastructure are the avoiding of redundant work and a better comparability of data collected for the same units of meaning. That counts especially for a historical period that lacks sufficiently exact cartographic sources and where drawn lines will always be somewhat arbitrary. Through the WebGIS, the scientific community shall be enabled to "spatially empower" and visualize their own data. Furthermore, the community is intended to add such data to the GIS, contribute to the database of colonial settlements and store narrative information on the places and administrative units in the system.

Time and space are important ordering principles for the historian. Modeling spatial changes over periods of time is a great challenge. How does one create an infrastructure capable of connecting research data (across projects) which refers to the same place or space - an infrastructure that at the same time allows to visualize fundamental data and make it accessible. These and other research questions have been tackled in the FWF-project "HGIS de las Indias" for a particular "space-time": Spanish America in the 18th century up to the eve of independence (1701-1808). Most important result of the project for the public is a web-based historical-geographical information system that allows to explore, combine, and visualize a variety of aspects for any year or span of time: territorial divisions, cities, Indian towns, parishes, missions, universities, postal offices, treasuries and other institutions, as well as statistics on demography, economy and other areas. Through the web interface it is possible (for instance) to explore the advances of colonial society into the plains and forests of inland Venezuela; or the changing distribution of Jesuit missions... Beside technical exigencies of a GIS with the dimension time, there have also been historical methodological obstacles. Many of the places mentioned in original sources had to be identified in a laborious process since many places disappeared, were relocated, or renamed. On top of that, there is a lack of orthographic consistency, especially with toponyms of indigenous origin. Also the reconstruction of territorial divisions was far from straight-forward. Although there was a centrally planned administrative reform in the 1780s, many other reforms did not leave traces in metropolitan archives. Even for the early 19th century, it was not always possible to reconstruct the number of districts of certain provinces - and much less of course their area. To fill the huge gaps in information it was necessary to use local historiography or to resort to unlikely and ephemeral archival sources to determine to which jurisdiction a particular place belonged at a certain moment. This work has made possible to track and pin down several administrative changes that had escaped even specialized literature on the subject. Also the project has contributed to better understand the spatial and institutional overlaps, congruencies and delimitations in the administration of the "Spanish Republics" and the "Indian Republics" which were the basis of colonial society. Automatically created base maps as well as services and raw data for specialists complement the system, as does the collaboration with and contribution of data to other fundamental infrastructures such as the Pelagios network, World Historical Gazetteer or the Digging into Early Colonial Mexico project which aims at reconstructing the historical geography of the "geographic reports" sent to Spain around 1580.