Skip to main content
Go to the home page of the European Commission (opens in new window)
English English
CORDIS - EU research results
CORDIS

Global Inheritances: Personal Identification and Inheritance Rights in the Early Modern Spanish Empire

Objective

"The aim of the project is to study the ways in which the institutions of the early modern Spanish Empire identified the legitimate heirs of mobile individuals coming from the Iberian peninsula who died suddenly, often without making a will, while they were in the monarchy’s extra-European territories, thousands of kilometres away from their home towns and the places where their heirs lived. In the context of a global scale empire, and in the absence of reliable official documentation such as civil and property registers, both the property and identity of these mobile individuals was extremely uncertain. Who were the deceased? What property did they own? Who and where were their heirs? When they died thousands of kilometres away from Europe, how did the institutions transmit the inheritance to their legitimate heirs? How could the courts be sure who they were? How could heirs demonstrate their identities in order to safeguard their rights to succession? For those hundreds of thousands of subjects of the Catholic Monarchy now on the move around four different continents – and for their families too – identifying themselves and demonstrating their identities was an urgent and growing need.
Demonstrating their identities in court was a fundamental pre requisite for heirs claiming inherited property and, even more importantly, ensuring legitimate property inheritance was a central priority of the institutions themselves. Over the course of the sixteenth century, in fact, the Catholic Monarchy set up specific courts, the so-called ""Juzgados de Bienes de Difuntos"" (courts charged with handling the estates of the dead), to take temporary possession of goods left without owners and for the purposes of identifying their legitimate heirs. This project will analyse the extraordinary and as yet little used documentation produced by these courts and concentrate its attention on the case of colonial Mexico, a crucible of empire building."

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

You need to log in or register to use this function

Programme(s)

Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.

Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EF

See all projects funded under this funding scheme

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2014

See all projects funded under this call

Coordinator

ECOLE DES HAUTES ETUDES EN SCIENCES SOCIALES
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 185 076,00
Address
54 BD RASPAIL
75270 Paris
France

See on map

Region
Ile-de-France Ile-de-France Paris
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 185 076,00
My booklet 0 0