Dr Silvia Espelt Bombin

I am Senior Lecturer in History of the Americas pre 1860, with research interests in colonisation, indigenous polities, borderlands, law, race and ethnicity. I am currently working on imperial rivalry and indigenous autonomy in the Brazilian Amazon and the Guianas, 1600-1800. I have also researched free people of African descent in early modern Spanish America.

My current project studies peace-making as a door onto indigenous autonomy, cultural practices and European colonial rivalry in the Brazilian Amazon and French Guiana inthe early modern period. I work with archival sources written in French, Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian and Latin, and draw on anthropological, archaeological and linguistic research.This research has been funded by the Leverhulme (2016-2017) and further research facilitated by a Research Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt (October-December 2019). I am now writing a monograph on peace making and indigenous autonomous polities in northeastern South America 1600-1800.

A parallel research interest is race, trade and law in the Spanish Empire through the specific case of free people of colour in Panama City, on which I wrote my PhD thesis. It analysed a lengthy trade lawsuit between Spaniards and African descendants in the context of the Bourbon Reforms. My work challenged historiographic understandings of race in Spanish America by showing that Panama’s free African descendants shaped the empire’s eighteenth century racial policies through their notarial petitions; that blood-based arguments used to exclude people of colour from trade had their origins in economic motives originated by the Bourbon reforms; and that the elite of colour employed a combination of individual and collective mechanisms for upward socio-economic mobility.

Biography:

I have a Licenciatura in History and a D.E.A. in Latin American History from the Universitat de Barcelona, and a PhD in History from Newcastle University (2011). I was Teaching Fellow in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University (2011-2012), and taught part-time History and Spanish at the Universities of Newcastle and Durham (2012-2013). In moved to Scotland as a Research Fellow in a project on the Brazilian Amazon in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews (2013-2015). After a spell working outside academia, I was awarded a Leverhulme SAS which I spent in Lisbon (2016-2017). I joined the University of Exeter in August 2017.

Research supervision:

I am willing to supervise research students working on most aspects of early modern and nineteenth century Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly on early modern empires, colonial societies, colonisation and borderlands; indigenous histories and ethnohistory; exploration and early encounters; resistance to slavery and free people of African origin and descent. Please send me an email with your CV and a research proposal.

Completed PhD students:

Diana Valencia Duarte, "The Food Question. Agrarian reforms and counter-reforms, and peasants’ food insecurity in Colombia, 1961-2013" (second supervisor, completed 2022).