A ‘global’ casa : the Bouligny family (1700-1800)

Abstract

A Global casa? The Boulignys (1700-1790) is a global microhistory about an eighteenth-century family characterized by their mobility, the Boulignys. During the first half of the century, they migrated from Marseilles to Alicante, where they settled a profitable commercial-family company within Alicante’s market. From the 1760s, due to the structural transformation of Spanish Mediterranean market(s), and the possibilities offered by the imperial-building, the Boulignys reshaped into a dispersed socio-political entity, serving in the global governance of the Spanish Empire. During the last quarter of the century, they served as political writers, soldiers, diplomats, daughters and mothers of imperial practitioners in Alicante, Istanbul, Madrid, New Orleans, and Oran, among other places. Thus, this dissertation explores the relation between ‘mobile’ family and eighteenth-century globalization, analyzing the agency of the Boulignys in diverse processes of economic, political and social interconnection and interdependence of the globe. In this thesis, I argue the inconvenience of working with the concept of global families for Early Modern times, defending the need of localizing the practices of ‘mobile’ families within their processes of interconnection and interdependence. I claim the need of a critical approach towards historical families as the Bouligny, going beyond the plain use of concepts such as global and family, defending as an alternative the localization of their practices in the global interconnection of spaces and institutions. Consequently, this thesis proposes a methodological alternative approach, global casa, studying the ‘mobile’ family of the Boulignys based on the analysis of their trans-local relationships, their role in commercial agglomeration and regional specialization at Western Mediterranean, and their involvement at Spanish imperial-building in a global scale. In so doing it, it provides a fresh perspective on how to globalize the history of the eighteenth-century Spanish Empire.