Geopolitics of Modern Territoriality: the 1864 Spanish-Portuguese Boundary Treaty and the Extinction of the Couto Mixto (1840–1868)

• Main Author: Jacobo García Álvarez
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Asociación Española de Geografía 2019-08-01
• Series: Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles
• Online Access: https://www.age-geografia.es/ojs/index.php/bage/article/view/2798

The making of the 1864 Spanish-Portuguese Boundary Treaty and the extinction of the so-called Couto Mixto offer a privileged micro-laboratory to study some of the geographic basis underlying the transition from the Ancien Regime to the Liberal State in the two Iberian countries. The disappearance of this space, which was the scene of the main international dispute addressed in that Treaty, symbolises the imposition of modern state territoriality on local border populations. This imposition implied the replacement of jurisdictional boundaries by territorial ones, that of diffuse borders by linear ones, or that of hybrid sovereignties by exclusive ones. This work analyses that process by drawing on Spanish and Portuguese archival sources, as well as through a critical geopolitical approach which focuses on the conflicts that it gave rise to, the actors and interests involved at different scales, and the territorial representations and discourses mobilised by those actors.