Connected Frontiers and Comparative Spaces: The Rodas Family and the Construction of Political Authority in the Northwest of the New Kingdom of Granada and the Southeast of Charcas in the second half of the sixteenth century

Abstract

The present article proposes an analysis of the construction of political power in two distant frontiers of the Spanish Monarchy as the southeast of Charcas and the northwest of the Nuevo Reino de Granada, from a comparative perspective, centred around mobility and transfer and construction of knowledge. It is focused on the lives of brothers Gaspar and Melchor de Rodas, who were soldiers, captains and eventually royal officials; prioritising how they were able to acknowledge and resolve security and integration problems concerning new territories and groups in contact with the global Monarchy. The circulation of these agents provides scope for an analysis of frontiers as spaces that albeit distant, were connected and integrated with each other in manners that we are only beginning to understand. Although slow, mobility and communications were constant and transformed margins into arteries that revitalised and dynamised the Monarchy. The two characters analysed here journeyed across two different moments of the Monarchy, as it transitioned from an expansive policy to one more focused on preserving the territories that it had encompassed, a circumstance that was reflected upon their lives.