Héctor Linares examines King Philip III of Spain’s rule (r. 1598-1621) through the lens of the Military Orders, arguing that this seldom studied monarch exercised personal rule over imperial institutions. He challenges historical narratives about the king´s perceived indolence regarding state matters and shows that the ruler actively oversaw the management of these noble global corporations. Marcelo Luzzi’s and María Bárbara Zepeda Cortés’s contributions focused on the eighteenth century, when the Bourbon dynasty began to rule imperial Spain. Luzzi’s paper explores complex ways to exert influence at the Spanish court during the reign of King Philip V (r. 1700-1746). He braids together both formal (via reservada) and informal forms of governance, including physical proximity to the monarch, to show the decline in the influence of collegial bodies of governance vis-à-vis the emergence of individual office holders. Directly related to this development, Zepeda Cortés provides a century-long analytical overview of the most powerful political agents in the Bourbon Spanish Empire: the king’s ministers or secretaries of state. Controlling specialized offices dedicated to foreign, internal, and colonial affairs, as well as navy, war, and finance, some prominent ministers conducted an ample program of administrative modernization known in literature as the Bourbon Reforms. Zepeda Cortés’s explores the political and sociological profiles of these agents to conceptualize the “era of the secretaries of state” as a crucial historical development in Spanish imperial governance. Olga Gonzalez-Silen’s paper shows that at the moment of the empire’s dissolution, imperial governance continued through innovative forms that emerged as a response to Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. By providing a transatlantic perspective of this major crisis, Gonzalez-Silen demonstrates that, from 1808 to 1810, two so-called Supreme Juntas kept the Spanish Empire running on the eve of Spanish American independence.

Overall, this panel integrates novel understandings of structures of power, political culture, policymaking, and government behavior with broader historical processes, such as imperial expansion, court politics, legal fragmentation, royal patronage, and war. It delivers a global perspective on imperial practices of governance and political authority, and on their shifting nature from the transition of the Habsburg to the Bourbon dynasties across temporal and geographical imperial lines.