UC Berkeley

This Doctoral Dissertation explores the transition that took place in the eighteenth century from the figure of the king as the symbolic representative of the nation to the recently created category of the citizen as the new national metaphor all over the western world. The necessity of creating a positively racialized model of citizen that would serve as a symbolic representative of the nation followed the racial zeitgeist of the time, dictated by imperial expansion together with the creation of new systems of thought such as scientific racism, geographic determinism, or phrenology. Spain, former hegemonic power during Early Modern Europe, was expelled from Modern Europe in the eighteenth century, being displaced for the first time to a racialized southern European periphery at a time when race matched power. Intellectual battles fought through the first stages of the Printed Press and the Encyclopedia, used propaganda to build or destroy national identities. Through an extensive study about foreign views of Spain by France, England, and Latin America, and their reception in Spain, this doctoral dissertation explores Spanish attempts to dislocate Northern European eighteenth and nineteenth centuries epistemologies by creating alternative networks of knowledge and proposing a model of empire where race was not used as a political ideology, with the aim of re-branding itself in the new nation-building landscape of the time.