The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico

"The History of the Future in Colonial Mexico"

Historians, like many academics, are increasingly specialized in their topics, research questions, and methods. While some defend this as a healthy development, the natural byproduct of a vigorous community of experts engaged in pure research, many both inside and outside the academy consider it more of a pathology, a symptom of a balkanized discipline whose practitioners find it difficult to exchange ideas across the boundaries of their various subfields. In this context, the history of the future might seem like another tiny piece in the mosaic of historiographical hyper-specialization. This paper considers how time history could in fact play a useful role as a bridge between various communities of historians, since the history of time tends to be situated both historically and historiographically at the nexus of various subfields and draws eclectically on different historical methods. Drawing on diverse historical practices in New Spain, from astrology and prophecy to urban provisioning and credit, it describes some of the methodological and historical payoffs of foregrounding the future as a category of analysis.