From Shipwreck to Sovereignty

In 2014, a double exhibition opened in the Spanish capital of Madrid commemorating the most extraordinary shipwreck in recent history. The frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes had spent the last two centuries rotting away on the ocean floor, at a vertiginous depth of 1,100 meters, and had only recently been discovered. The ship has all the elements of a legend: carrying precious cargo, it was part of a colonial-era convoy that sailed from Lima via Montevideo to the Spanish port of Cadiz. As the ships approached the Iberian Peninsula, they were attacked by a British fleet off the Southern Portuguese Coast. The Mercedes sank in what became known as the Battle of Cape Santa María (5 October 1804), and its 249 crew members perished after the ship’s powder store exploded. It carried the most valuable treasure ever recuperated from a shipwreck in recorded history— hundreds of thousands of gold and silver coins and other precious artifacts valued at half a billion U.S. dollars. The treasure was salvaged in 2007 by a profit-driven, private corporation based in the U.S., not by professional archaeologists working under the aegis of museums, or academic or cultural institutions. The company, with the evocative name Odyssey Marine Explorations Inc., travels the seas to hunt treasure and excavates shipwrecks in international waters to sell their artifacts on the global market.

The Spanish government had previously been approached by Odyssey and refused to authorize the salvage operation. It reacted furiously upon learning that the Florida-based corporation had nonetheless recovered the treasure. Even though the wreck lay in international waters, Spain treated Odyssey’s action as illegal plunder and an infringement on its sovereignty. In a lengthy trial in U.S. Courts, which also involved the Republic of Peru and twenty-five individuals, all of whom made competing claims, Spain successfully argued that, as a Spanish naval frigate, the vessel enjoyed sovereign immunity and that Odyssey therefore had no legal recourse to obtain title for the salvaged treasure.Footnote ² In February 2012, two transport planes hauled the recovered shipwreck to Spain. Two years later, twin exhibitions opened in the recently renovated National Archaeological Museum (MAN) and the Naval Museum in Madrid, organized by the Ministries of Defense, Education, and Culture, the Navy, and Acción Cultural Española.

These exhibitions transform colonial extraction into cultural patrimony, converting treasure into heritage to reassert the Spanish state’s political and moral authority at a moment when that authority is increasingly precarious. Investigating the Mercedes exhibitions as a case study in the ideological function of national museums, I show how aestheticization demonetizes bullion and reattaches it to a redemptive national narrative, while masking colonial extraction. This article contributes to the growing scholarship on public memoryFootnote ³ and intervenes in debates on decolonizing museums. It offers a theoretical analysis of museological power that bridges museum studies, postcolonial theory, and political theory. How do silver coins, cherished then as now primarily for their monetary value, become patrimonial objects, withdrawn from exchange? And how does what I call the navigational state produce a sanitized contemporary rearticulation of imperial power through heritage, conservation, and technoscientific display?

Museums, archives, and archaeological sites are central to the production and ritualization of collective memory.Footnote ⁴ Since the nineteenth century, national museums have helped build and educate national publics by producing heritage, that is, by mobilizing the past to register the concerns of the present.Footnote ⁵ Shuttling between past and present, the Mercedes exhibitions activated a large apparatus of archaeologists, curators, archivists, lawyers, historians, and naval officers, all engaged in the production of heritage. Building on museum-studies work on the “politics of display,”Footnote ⁶ I examine how the selection and representation of objects together with the historical documentation that accompanies them advance a national mythmaking project organized around a systematic disavowal of colonial violence.

By dismissing the treasure’s monetary value, the Spanish archival apparatus does more than bolster the official government position in its legal quarrel with the private salvage corporation. It also performs a pointed ideological operation: casting the state as guardian of culture and as protector of Spanish heritage against the onslaught of corporate profiteers, tomb-robbers, and the savage forces of the capitalist market. I argue that this conversion of treasure into patrimony carries out four operations: first, it creates a sanitized and nostalgic representation of Spain’s colonial past at a moment of political crisis; second, it provides scientific and cultural validation for Spain’s position in its case against Odyssey Inc.; third, it shores up the image of Spain as a perennial political community; and fourth, it positions the Spanish state as cultural custodian against the ostensible assault, by the rogue agents of an unbridled neoliberal capitalism, on tradition and history. Although the focus here is on Spain, there are implications for cultural politics that go beyond Spain and are relevant for how colonial history is narrated and staged.

This article is based on extensive archival research. Although I was unable to visit the exhibitions in person while they were on display, the museums and other cultural, scientific, and political institutions involved have produced comprehensive archives that include exhibition floor plans, photographs, videos, and detailed museographical descriptions, catalogues, press kits, audio guides, and thousands of pages of legal, archaeological, historical, and military documentation.Footnote ⁷ I also consulted publicly available accounts, reviews, and descriptions of the exhibitions, including Spanish and international media reports as well as the available academic reviews, and I requested and received extensive files, including visual documentation, from the museums and organizations involved in coordinating the exhibitions.

Methodologically, the article braids curatorial analysis with political theory. It proceeds in four moves: first, it reconstructs the exhibitions’ curatorial logic; second, it theorizes the conversion of treasure into patrimony through display practices and the figure of the “navigational state”; third, it brings back into view the histories of extraction that the displays occlude; and fourth, it shows, through the aborted Latin American sequel, the structural limits of decolonizing gestures within the national museum form.

The Politics of Display: From Treasure to Patrimony

The twin exhibitions—El último viaje de la fragata Mercedes (“The Last Voyage of the Frigate Mercedes”)—opened in June 2014.Footnote ⁸ They were staged concurrently in two museums under a single curatorial team. The National Archaeological Museum’s exhibition carried the subtitle “A Recovered Cultural Treasure” [Un tesoro cultural recuperado] while the Naval Museum’s was captioned “Reason Against Plunder” [La razón frente al expolio]. Together, these blockbuster shows drew hundreds of thousands of visitors and generated significant media attention.Footnote ⁹

Across both venues, the 2014 exhibitions assembled cargo recovered from the Mercedes alongside intricate scale models of the convoy’s ships, naval and military artifacts, and a range of documentary materials—letters, official papers, paintings, and maps—relating to the voyage.Footnote ¹⁰ The display reserved pride of place, near its end, for the most precious objects: a gold snuff box, a gold cufflink, and, most prominently, coins. Visitors encountered tens of thousands of silver coins and several hundred gold coins arranged in multiple configurations.Footnote ¹¹

Before the ship sank to the bottom of the Atlantic, the specie aboard was intended to service Spain’s debts to France. Under a mutual assistance treaty, Spain was obliged either to provide military support or to make substantial payments when the fragile peace between France and Britain collapsed in 1803. The renewed war left the notoriously indebted Spanish monarchy with an acute need for the riches stashed away in its American colonies. The convoy that included the Mercedes therefore had an immediate, concrete purpose: to transport gold and silver to the Iberian Peninsula and replenish the treasury.

Both parts of the exhibition followed the same dramatic arc. The opening gallery established the political circumstances that set the Mercedes convoy in motion: a fiscal emergency and the urgent transport of funds to refill emptied state coffers. Subsequent galleries reconstructed the final voyage, culminating in the surprise attack and the climactic Battle of Cape Santa María. At the center of each installation, built-to-scale models of the Mercedes anchored the narrative, reinforced by a painting by Francis Sartorius Jr. of the ship in its final moments. The concluding rooms then staged a cathartic dénouement in which Spanish power—temporarily undone by British and American adversaries—is symbolically recomposed. Throughout, the exhibits drew on the moral idiom of “plunder” to position Spain as the victim of illegal assaults—“two great injustices,” in the words of the lead archaeologist and lead museographer.Footnote ¹²

The objects were staged within an integrated sensorial environment—design, sound, lighting, wall text, and embedded audiovisual media working in concert. Both museums added contextual sections on Napoleonic-era geopolitics and the Battle of Cape Santa María. At the Naval Museum, the wreck was framed as a solemn maritime graveyard for hundreds of sailors. At the National Archaeological Museum, by contrast, the narrative cast the Spanish state as a reparative agent: it juxtaposed Odyssey’s “predatory” salvage operation with Spain’s archaeological survey, held up as exemplary in expertise, professionalism, and the practices of recovery, conservation, and restoration.

By dividing the project between an archaeological and a naval institution, curators and officials signaled a deliberate dual framing: the Mercedes would be staged both as a naval (and therefore military) instrument and as a recovered cultural artifact. Coins appeared in varied arrangements across the galleries, yet the exhibits repeatedly insisted that their purpose was to tell the ship’s history “beyond the commercial value of the fourteen tons of gold and silver.”Footnote ¹³

The Mercedes carried 212 gold coins and roughly 600,000 silver coins, together worth nearly one million pesos. Across the galleries, these coins, in their varied hues and states of preservation, served as the exhibition’s principal actors. Some were cleaned, polished, and displayed in acrylic cases, appearing almost uncirculated; others were dull, heavily worn, and presented as the authentic residue of deep time. Visitors encountered coins clustered into irregular masses, greened by oxidation after two centuries on the ocean floor, as well as fragments of wood and replicas of textile bags with coins attached to them. Most strikingly, thousands of silver coins were arranged in carefully composed piles, stacks, and rows, in different degrees of corrosion and restoration. Polished and reflective surfaces were juxtaposed to coarse, untreated pieces in dark and green tonalities.

Despite more than half a century of “new museology” and its sustained critique of the power relations sedimented in Western museum history, museums still present themselves as neutral spaces for edification, places where visitors contemplate accumulated cultural objects, arranged in an objective, rational order. That posture obscures the museum’s ideological role of reproducing and naturalizing the social relations that structure collective life. Rather than objective mirrors, museums are better understood as ideological apparatuses that address spectators and, through carefully choreographed environments, disseminate knowledge while cultivating dispositions, beliefs, and forms of attachment.Footnote ¹⁴ As the art historian Carol Duncan suggests, the museum’s sequenced spaces “provide both the stage set and the script”: design, lighting, and arrangement organize the visit as a guided passage rather than an unmediated encounter.Footnote ¹⁵ Curatorial decisions—selection, staging, documentation—operate as arguments, conveyed not only through text but also through spatial and sensorial form.Footnote ¹⁶

These insights are especially salient for institutions that function as sites of colonial memory. Unlike museums that can plausibly broaden their remit by expanding representational inclusion, anthropology and archaeology museums (often branded as natural history museums) have historically been integral to colonial governance and the production of knowledge about dominated peoples and territories.Footnote ¹⁷

Contemporary museums commonly justify themselves as havens of calm—refuges from the frenzy of a rapidly changing world.Footnote ¹⁸ Although this rhetoric attaches most readily to art museums, the underlying premise travels: museums promise a protected environment for civic learning, moral improvement, and a pious immersion in an idealized past. They help manufacture national myths and civic ideologies by inviting visitors to inhabit a carefully “authenticated past,”Footnote ¹⁹ emplotted in a historical narrative that leads up to the present.Footnote ²⁰

Spain, moreover, was not the only party to the Mercedes dispute to mobilize the museum as a site of political claim-making. In the period leading up to—and following—its defeat in U.S. courts, the private salvage corporation Odyssey Inc. developed its own museological narration through a virtual museum and a traveling exhibition, “SHIPWRECK! Pirates & Treasures,” reportedly seen by more than two million people.Footnote ²¹ The exhibitions of both Spain and Odyssey Inc. sought to bolster the legitimacy of their respective patrons, but they did so by advancing rival rationales: competing accounts of global order, state authority, corporate prerogative, and the nature of sovereignty.

For Spain, the display of the treasure affirms the imperial legacy transformed into the cultural project of hispanidad and establishes the continuity of the Spanish state by narrating an uninterrupted political and cultural line from the past to the present while furnishing heroic scenes for spectators’ phantasmatic identification. At the National Archaeological Museum, the visitor’s route dramatized this continuity: the itinerary began with portraits of statesmen and terminated in vitrines of coins, punctuated by official records, flags, ensigns, and stamps that inscribed the shipwreck into a national-historical frame.

Odyssey, by contrast, presented shipwreck artifacts as specimens of a common heritage of humanity. Shipwrecks appeared as unintended residues of the logistical infrastructure of travel, trade, and exploration on a planetary scale, an archive indexed, in Odyssey’s framing, by the estimated three million ships that never completed their journeys. From this perspective, shipwrecks constitute a cosmopolitan patrimony belonging to all, including, implicitly, the corporate actors positioned to recover and circulate valuable objects.

Like several European and North American anthropology and archaeology museums that have recently rebranded as sites of world culture, Odyssey framed its shipwreck show as a universal museum.Footnote ²² Against the state-bound logic of heritage defended by Spain, Odyssey advanced a cosmopolitan vision organized through a global market in cultural objects. Here the principle of coherence is not the state form but the commodity: coins and artifacts rendered valuable, tradeable, and ultimately destined, through auctions and the art market, for those willing to pay most. In sum, each of these exhibits sought to legitimize a particular understanding of shipwrecks, treasure, culture, and capital, embedded in the political claims by corporate and state actors. Analyzed together, they stage competing visions of the global order for a public audience.

In the 2014 exhibitions in Madrid, the political project is legible not only in the explicit narrative of “two injustices”—the British attack and Odyssey’s salvage—but also in the museographic handling of the coins. As the Spanish Ministry of Culture itself put it, the coins were the “principal protagonists of the Mercedes case.”Footnote ²³ Yet amid media fascination with “treasure,” the museums worked to sever the cargo from monetary value and to recode it instead as cultural patrimony. Formal strategies did much of the work. By arranging the coins in neat geometric shapes, and mounding them in stacks, pillars, piles, and pyramids, the curators aestheticized them, arraying them in lines and shapes, highlighting their physicality, and using them as materials to build three-dimensional forms, landscapes, and structures. While some of the display cases sat at eye level where visitors could identify numismatic detail, for the most part the coins were displayed wholesale, emphasizing the abundance of wealth while skirting the coins’ exchange value.

This curatorial conversion resonates with a classic anthropological account of material value. In The Gift, Marcel Mauss distinguishes forms of wealth whose value lies not in circulation but in attachment—objects that remain bound to persons, lineages, or collectivities.Footnote ²⁴ The anthropologist Annette Weiner extends this analysis by describing objects that may circulate for long periods yet retain their original attachments and are expected, ultimately, to return.Footnote ²⁵ She thus supplements Mauss’s category of immovables with a second class of inalienable objects: things that may be given to others under certain conditions yet remain on loan and are never fully alienated. Across both categories, inalienability is sustained by an immaterial surplus, an aura of sacredness or symbolic force that binds people across generations and confers a sense of transcendence and group immortality. The Mercedes exhibitions sought to produce precisely this effect: the coins were not presented simply as precious metal minted for pecuniary ends, but as cultural treasures whose proper destiny is withdrawal from circulation and restoration to an “original” collective owner.

Walter Benjamin’s caustic warning, that the objects we celebrate as “cultural treasures” so often bear the imprint of violence, casts a long shadow over the curatorial conversion performed in Madrid. Benjamin’s further claim that cultural treasures “owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries” is especially apt here.Footnote ²⁶ The Mercedes coins are neither simply precious metal, nor are they adequately described as cultural patrimony. They are crystallizations of forced labor and imperial violence. They could have served as the hinge for a different kind of narrative: one that tracked the material history of imperial wealth, the extraction of precious metals from colonial territories, the coercive labor regimes and administrative infrastructures that made such extraction possible, and the geopolitical entanglements through which colonial proceeds were transformed into metropolitan wealth. Such a rendition would make visible, along the lines of the critical historiography Benjamin calls for, the imperial prehistory of what later appears, in the museum, as a neutral “cargo” or a tragic loss at sea. Instead, the exhibitions relocate the drama away from empire and toward a storyline of national injury and moral redress. Spain is positioned as the wronged party twice over, first in the British attack, later in Odyssey’s salvage, while the proceeds of colonial extraction are aestheticized and mobilized to produce a fantasy of national continuity and immortality. In this dramaturgy, the coins become symbols of Spanish wealth that must be withdrawn from circulation, so that they can be returned to their rightful owners. As objects of cultural patrimony, these coins participate in producing a cultural continuity that stretches from the colonial era to the present. Their staging effects a conversion from specie to patrimony.

Imperial Nostalgia and the Echoes of Crisis

There is a paradox at the heart of the saccharine celebration of Spanish heritage and heroism: the story of this ship is a chronicle of defeat and yet it is also a narrative about Spanish glory. Spanish glory in defeat and in a moment of world-historical decline. In 1804, at the time of the Mercedes’s last voyage, the Spanish Empire, formerly the largest, most powerful, and longest lasting of the early-modern European empires, was in crisis. Already in the late eighteenth century, the Spanish crown was caught between its continuing domestic struggles against the Inquisition and the powerful clergy and the need for administrative and economic reforms. Spain was broke.Footnote ²⁷

But the crisis was not only fiscal in nature. Spain’s languishing economy and paralyzed political structure was seen as emblematic for a “crisis of identity.”Footnote ²⁸ In the last years of the eighteenth century, pamphlets began to appear across Spanish America exhorting creoles to rebel.Footnote ²⁹ The American, French, and Haitian Revolutions functioned as catalysts. Antislavery uprisings in the cities of Coro (1795), Salvador (1798), and Maracaibo (1799) all invoked the libertad de los franceses. Footnote ³⁰ The Latin American independence era had begun.Footnote ³¹

In October 1805, the combined fleets of the French and Spanish navies were decisively routed by the British at the Battle of Trafalgar. In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain, forcing Carlos IV and his heir, Ferdinand VII, to abdicate. And although the French were defeated in the Peninsular War by the combined efforts of the Spanish guerilla and the British army, the war left the Spanish Empire in tatters. In 1810, creole juntas took control of Buenos Aires, Caracas, Bogotá, and Santiago de Chile. By 1821, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Paraguay, Mexico, and Peru had declared independence, and, in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine proclaimed the end of Spanish imperial power in the Americas. As the historian Josep Fradera puts it—no doubt hyperbolically—in the early nineteenth century, the Spanish Empire “collapsed like a house of cards.”Footnote ³²

If Spain was in the midst of profound political cataclysms when the Mercedes sank, it faced another tumultuous cycle of crisis between the wreck’s discovery in 2007 and the exhibitions’ opening in 2014. The latter crisis was a fallout of the 2008 global financial collapse, which in Spain burst a housing bubble, produced a sovereign debt crisis, and triggered a great recession with unemployment above twenty percent and youth unemployment over forty percent. Spain’s status as a weakened middling power and a second-tier EU member was underscored during negotiations for a rescue package with the Troika (European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund) in 2012. The Troika’s bailout conditions imposed austerity, which, although less draconian than that foisted on Ireland, Portugal, and Greece, fueled massive protest waves between 2011 and 2014.

Crises tend to foster myths, and the arc of the Mercedes tale supplies a quintessential model: from the climax of Spanish imperial power to the fall and dénouement of the Battle of Santa Maria through the seizure of the wreck by American corporate profiteers to the peripeteia and redemption by the U.S. courts, this narrative has all the elements of a classic drama. It comes with a cast of heroes, the sailors and soldiers on the ship who perished in battle; a happy ending, with the Spanish state obtaining the wreck and treasure rather than the corporate marauders; and a morale, namely the triumph of law over the profit motive and an affirmation of the role of states to secure and defend cultural heritage.Footnote ³³

Imperial nostalgia selectively romanticizes empire and imperialism while disavowing the violence and domination of the colonial encounter.Footnote ³⁴ Scholars of empire and postcolonialism have long emphasized how knowledge production, strategic ignorance, and disavowals operate in imperial and colonial formations. For founding figures of postcolonial studies—from Edward Said through Gayatri Spivak to Homi Bhabha and Anne McClintock—the systematic nurturing of ignorance and distorted narratives is not incidental but constitutive of empire.Footnote ³⁵ More recent work offers finer-grained accounts of how willed ignorance, hypocrisy, bad faith, and distortion structure the lived colonial order. Imperial narratives, several scholars argue, involve not only historical amnesia but what Jodi Byrd calls “colonial agnosia,” what Charles Mills terms “epistemologies of ignorance” and what Ann Stoler names “colonial aphasia.”Footnote ³⁶ Collective memory, in short, is not inert. It is strategically and selectively mobilized, constructed, and at times even invented out of whole cloth.Footnote ³⁷ Imperial nostalgia is also bound up with stories of geopolitical decline and marks an attempt to re-narrate the waning of imperial power.Footnote ³⁸ As such, these Spanish exhibitions are not merely conventional sites of nation-building, amplified by revalorizations of identity and heritage. They also register a broader cultural logic of the present, as demands for colonial reparation and restitution become increasingly salient.

In recent years, many European and North American museums have begun a reflection process concerning the role of colonial pillage in their collections, their own complicity in colonial crimes, and their moral and political responsibility for restitution and reparations.Footnote ³⁹ Traditionally, museums have represented themselves as custodians of the cultural heritage for humanity, a position that is encapsulated in the Universal Museums Declaration of 2002.Footnote ⁴⁰ Over the past two decades, this view has come under pressure, as demands for restitution have grown in volume and scholars and curators have argued that museums are not just stewards of cultural artifacts with dubious provenance but are effectively perpetrators of ongoing domination and (post-)colonial violence.Footnote ⁴¹

Yet the Mercedes exhibitions enact the opposite of a critical reckoning: they celebrate Spanish colonial power while refusing to confront the violence and harm inflicted by the empire or the responsibilities that may follow from that history. With salvage, repatriation, and historicization, the Mercedes has been resurrected and thrust into the public eye as a potent, polyvalent symbol of bygone Spanish imperial power. Even though the archaeological museum (MAN) had just undergone a complete renovation, modernizing its architecture and adding a unit on the origins of its collection, the Mercedes galleries offered little critical attention to the histories of the objects on board.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, the exhibition catalogue’s unabashed ethnocentrism and its derogatory references to the “low cultural levels” of pre-contact indigenous populations might be understood as backlash against questions of responsibility, restitution, and reparations.Footnote ⁴³

In Spain, imperial nostalgia unfolds within a broader debate over the meaning of empire itself, specifically, whether the term “colonialism” accurately captures the constitutional status of the Spanish Indies, or whether those territories should instead be seen as integral parts of the kingdom.Footnote ⁴⁴ Attachment to Spain’s imperial past has long served as a rallying point for conservative and reactionary forces, from the defeat of 1898 through the Civil War and beyond. Reactionaries often invoked an image of Spain as “the civilizer of the Americas, the Christianizer of a continent, […] and the defender of the Western hemisphere against the […] selfish individualism and base materialism of Anglo-Saxon and ‘yanqui’ culture.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Although the re-conquest of Spain’s lost empire was never a realistic prospect after the 1820s, a fact even authoritarian leaders came to accept after 1898, Spanish fascism, from the Falangists to Franco, remained deeply invested in reviving Spain’s cultural and political power in Europe and the Hispanic world. This ambition was framed as the continuation of Spain’s world-historical civilizing mission, and the aspiration to cultural leadership became associated with the idea of hispanidad. Ramiro de Maeztu, one of the principal early twentieth-century theorists of hispanidad, epitomized this outlook in his fervent militarism and his prominent far-right propaganda against the Spanish Republic.Footnote ⁴⁶ While some historians suggest that Spain was ultimately “cured of any residual imperial hangover,” the Mercedes exhibitions make clear that not everyone has received the memo that the party is over.Footnote ⁴⁷

As museums have become more responsive to voices of activists, scholars, and curators calling for the “decolonization” of the museum, it stands to reason that these demands also trigger adverse responses, and the Spanish exhibitions may well be examples of such a backlash.Footnote ⁴⁸ The exhibits avoided dealing with the political economy of Spain’s extractive colonial policies, its forced labor regimes, and the role of racial and religious ideologies in maintaining and reproducing colonial relations of power, domination, and exploitation. Instead, the Spanish cultural establishments staged these shows as displays of cultural, political, and military glory, as sites for phantasmatic identification with imperial grandeur, naval exploits, global power, and prestige.

These exhibitions mobilize nostalgia as affective repair, staging cultural cohesion in a time of precarity. They offer a view of how “imperial debris” can be recycled to salvage the vestiges of an imperial imagination.Footnote ⁴⁹ As Stoler and others note, imperial debris has political afterlives, echoes, and resonances, even as the global social order and its material bases have been fundamentally transformed over the past two centuries. Cultural institutions can activate these echoes and resonances for political ends, producing nostalgic scenes with which spectators are invited to connect and identify. Here, a spectacle is organized for a presumptively white Spanish audience that reassures their place in an imaginary topography of global power. By tracking the history of a concrete material object—the shipwreck—and by asking what material forces and social relations are rendered visible and invisible in these exhibitions, we can elucidate how museums stage political history as an object of desire. The Mercedes exhibitions thus serve as case studies in an ideological apparatus committed to narrating a certain kind of history and furnishing the cultural objects and heroic figures that invite political identification.

Against the background of the increasingly sophisticated scholarship on the narratives and representations of colonialism, the imperial whitewash in these Spanish exhibits is remarkably crude. Reflecting a broader tendency among some historians of nineteenth century Spain to “marginalize […] Spain’s modern imperial history from their historical narratives,” the shows make strikingly little effort to contextualize or explain the colonial order.Footnote ⁵⁰ Rather than dwell on the ambiguities and ambivalences of that order, they stage a celebration of Spanish heritage that is shameless in its innocence. This unabashed mystification relies on a key move: the Mercedes’ treasure had to be de-monetized. The ship’s role in extracting silver from the veins of Latin America to be pumped into the Spanish royal coffers had to be narrated in a different register. Treasure had to be converted into culture, silver into patrimony.

The Navigational State: From Empire to Heritage

If both the coercive colonial state and the political crises of the early nineteenth century are entirely eclipsed in the exhibit, viewers instead glimpse the navigational state apparatus—the institutional and technological machinery of Spain’s maritime capacities. By “navigational state” I mean the technopolitical apparatus that secures sovereign iconography through heritage protection, translating maritime power from conquest to conservation while preserving imperial dispositions. Operating as part of the broader ideological state apparatus, it interpellates individuals as subjects into an immortal national community through the ritual management of wreckage, archives, and representations of political, economic, and military power.Footnote ⁵¹

Navigation is central to Spanish imperial history; Spain was, after all, the first modern “seaborne empire.”Footnote ⁵² Yet instead of linking naval technology to its principal political and economic function in the early modern period—maintaining colonial relations of domination in the Americas—the museum portrays navigation narrowly as technical ingenuity. Displays foreground instruments such as compasses, telescopes, theodolites, mariner’s quadrants and quintants, reflecting circles, and marine chronometers. These devices convey Spain’s historic naval expertise while obscuring the central role of navigation in European conquest and colonization. When the navigational state is sanitized and staged in technological terms alone, the military violence that sustained the seaborne empire is scrubbed from view.

The narrative of the navigational state is a lore born in the 2010s, after the Mercedes dispute. One reason Spain was unable to prevent Odyssey from salvaging the treasure in 2007 was that it lacked the technological resources to conduct deep-sea recovery on its own. Salvage infrastructures are complex, specialized, and expensive, relying on sonar, submersibles, and remotely operated robotic crafts.Footnote ⁵³ Commercial salvors like Odyssey thus expose most states’ incapacity to perform similar operations. That asymmetry of resources marks the limits of contemporary state power, that is, the inability of states to protect and control their archives, including the props that conventionally signify sovereignty: warships, naval artillery, the human remains of naval officers, minted gold and silver coins. This problem is particularly acute in eras of austerity. In response to what it regarded as an affront to heritage and infringement on sovereignty, the Spanish Ministry of Culture has, over the past twenty years, developed a national plan to protect subaquatic cultural patrimony.Footnote ⁵⁴ Having acquired equipment and expertise, including specialized crafts and robotic equipment, Spain now presents itself as a world leader in underwater archaeology. Initially incapable of rescuing the Mercedes from the seabed, but having ultimately recovered it from private plunderers, Spain glamorizes its navigational powers as heritage protection and conservation.

Spain has indeed built world-class expertise in underwater archaeology, a feat recognized by UNESCO, which in 2019 awarded the archaeological project of the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes its “Best Practice” label.Footnote ⁵⁵ But how are these capabilities represented? The exhibitions foreground the Spanish Navy, forging a direct link between defending sovereignty and recovering and conserving aquatic heritage. In one video, viewers watch a modern Spanish warship cruising the seas. Over a cinematic score, an unsteady handheld camera registers the movement and vagaries of the sea. As the warship approaches, the sequence cuts to a low-angle shot of a Spanish naval flag fluttering behind antennae and rigging, then to a close-up of a mechanical compass: navigational power appears as the fusion of national purpose and planned oceanic traverse. On-screen text warns the viewers of the need to protect Spain. But the danger is not a military enemy; it is a threat to underwater heritage. The captions refer to vigilance, security, and sovereignty, as the navy is cast as guardian of Spain’s submarine patrimony. We next see a modern archive where researchers pore over old stacks of papers tied with red ribbons. As the protection of sovereignty is once more aligned with knowledge accumulation, viewers are told that the naval archives are a key resource for documenting and defending shipwrecks worldwide. Shots of vessels at sea and officers in command centers convey technical competence and responsibility. The camera then moves underwater to navy divers identifying, measuring, and analyzing archaeological remains. After dramatic wave shots, a blue screen appears, and after a beat of suspense, text is typed: “Spain is the leading world power in underwater archaeological heritage. The state ensures its protection.”

These audiovisual materials suggest that the navy’s function has been reconfigured rather than transformed: its strategic aim remains the reproduction of Spanish power. Where it once fought imperial rivals, it now secures submerged artifacts as national heritage, suturing the imperial past to an ostensibly post-imperial present. Cannons give way to salvage technologies, and coercive force is displaced by curatorial authority. In this form, the navigational state operates as an apparatus that fuses knowledge, technology, and sovereignty to govern the afterlives of empire.

Colonial Amnesia: The Missing Histories of Extraction

The visitor who digs a little deeper into the museum catalogue will find out that most of the coins aboard the Mercedes were minted in Lima with a small proportion coming from other mints such as Potosí. They were dated to 1770–1804, with about forty percent minted in 1803.Footnote ⁵⁶ The most significant silver veins in Spanish America were in the highlands of the Andes, in the Viceroyalty of Peru and in Charcas in the Viceroyalty of La Plata, in what is today Bolivia, a region that also produced tin, copper, and lead. But this is as far as the background on the coins goes.

While museum visitors are apprised of the crown’s need for specie, they do not learn that silver was the principal Peruvian export to Spain from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth century and that as a result of the eighteenth-century silver boom, crown revenue grew from 3.5 million pesos a year in 1700 to over 20 million pesos by 1800.Footnote ⁵⁷ The economy of the colonial viceroyalty of Peru was dominated by the production and export of silver, and Peruvian silver constituted the principal source of Spanish wealth in South America. As the historian J. H. Elliott notes, a mid-eighteenth-century visitor to the viceroyalty of Peru would have marveled at the “splendor and obvious wealth” and at the dynamic commercial life of Lima, animated by a flourishing mining industry.Footnote ⁵⁸

Spain depended on New World silver not only for its imperial budget but also to offset a chronic balance of trade deficit, producing continual flows of precious metal from Spain to creditors and merchants across Europe, especially in the Netherlands and Britain, where industrial and merchant capital was most advanced.Footnote ⁵⁹ Visitors learn none of this. Nor do they encounter the crucial role of American precious metals in the emergence of a European money economy, the inflationary pressures it generated, or the contribution it made to Spain’s longer-term decline. Andean silver fueled not only Spanish consumption but the global pre-history of capital.Footnote ⁶⁰ Marx, with characteristic sarcasm, called the “extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population” in the Americas one of the “idyllic proceedings” that mark primitive accumulation.Footnote ⁶¹

Work in the mines was backbreaking and dangerous, especially for carriers, who hauled enormous loads through narrow tunnels.Footnote ⁶² Peruvian silver was mined and amalgamated largely by coerced laborers. Unlike gold, often found as a native metal or alloy, silver typically appears in compounds that must be refined. The silver ore was broken up at the mine and transported to refineries, where it was milled to a fine grind and amalgamated with mercury. To consolidate, the ore-mercury mixture either had to be soaked and stirred for weeks, a process that involved workers stomping through the toxic sludge with bare feet, or it had to be heated in copper or stone tanks. The amalgam was then washed, compressed, and heated to remove the mercury. Once refined, the unminted silver was purchased by merchants and transported from the highlands to the mint of Lima, where it was coined.

Many of these roles were performed by forced migrant workers, mitayos, who made up about half of the laborers in the mines of Potosí.Footnote ⁶³ Instituted in 1573, the mining mita required hundreds of Indian communities to provide one seventh of their male labor force to work in the mines and refineries at any one time. Between the sixteenth and early nineteenth century, millions of Andeans were forced to work in the mines.Footnote ⁶⁴ Indians who refused to report for duty or abandoned their villages lost their land. Each rotating shift was between four and six months long, yet it took many Indians up to two months of travel time to reach the plateau of Potosí. During their period of forced labor, mitayos were subject to stringent labor quotas, measured by weight of ore per week.

By the time of the Mercedes’s last voyage, the mita system had been in decline, yet the draft was not abolished until Peruvian independence in 1812. It is, in fact, conceivable that a significant part of the silver aboard the Mercedes was mined by free laborers rather than mitayos. Yet as economic historians have shown, the mita rent is what made silver mining profitable.Footnote ⁶⁵

In 1805, the American naval captain Amasa Delano visited Lima and took a tour of the mint. As he writes in his travel log, published some years later, the precious metals were prepared for coinage by enslaved Africans.Footnote ⁶⁶ The slaves hammered the gold ore with mauls and ground it into a paste before mixing it with quicksilver and stomping it with their feet to separate the gold from the other metals. Once separated, the gold was cast into ingots or bars. The silver arrived already separated and was ready for melting in crucibles filled with lit charcoal. The precious metals were then poured into bars and, using rollers and plates, pressed to the right thickness before being cut into coins, milled, weighed, scoured, and stamped using a screw press.

Enslaved Africans were imported into Spanish South America beginning in the early sixteenth century. Initially brought by conquistadors as servants, enslaved people were imported on a large scale as Indigenous populations collapsed and colonial labor crises intensified.Footnote ⁶⁷ While forced indigenous labor remained dominant in the silver mines, enslaved Africans were deployed in several other sectors, even if they were not the predominant labor force in most fields. The crown permitted the slave trade but regulated the numbers for most of the colonial period through a monopoly system known as asiento. Many enslaved people bound for Peru first passed through Cartagena, South America’s most important slaving port, in present-day Colombia, and until 1717 part of the Viceroyalty of Peru. From there, many were transported to Lima prior to being distributed throughout the hemisphere. Lima, in other words, was the hub of the mainland Spanish slave trade.Footnote ⁶⁸ As the historian Peter Blanchard notes, slave occupations ranged from “common laborers to skilled artisan to domestic servant,” such that by the end of the colonial era, enslaved people “were ubiquitous in all aspects of urban labor and vital to the whole process of colonial urbanization.”Footnote ⁶⁹

When the museum catalogue mentions Indigenous peoples, it does so while studiously avoiding the assignment of responsibility to the Spanish crown. Luis Navarro García, the historian who authored the relevant section of the catalogue, portrays colonial societies in Spanish America as mirrors of metropolitan Spain.Footnote ⁷⁰ Three centuries of colonization are presented as having produced a structural replica of European society. For Navarro García, the only real distinctiveness of American societies is race: the presence of “two other races, Indians and blacks, in addition to multiracial people [mezclas]” complicates the social hierarchy.Footnote ⁷¹ Race thus appears as a naturalized variable that disrupts the consolidation of metropolitan aristocratic forms. Yet the exhibition never asks how these metropolitan forms were themselves predicated on forced labor and racialized slavery. By naturalizing racial difference, the displays depoliticize it, sidestepping the question of how and through what political, economic, cultural, and epistemic powers such difference has been produced.

Thus the text refers vaguely to the “demographic catastrophe” that hit the Indigenous population in the sixteenth century and to enslaved Africans—indeterminate statements that deploy the passive voice to mystify the question of historical and political responsibility. Readers of the catalogue (as opposed to exhibit visitors) do learn that silver ore may have been mined by Indian and Black laborers. Yet readers will search in vain for an explanation of the forced labor regimes applied to Indians, for information about the conditions of enslaved people, or indeed for a reflection on the mechanisms whereby subjects and populations have been slotted into these categories. Instead, they will encounter gushing statements about the “rich diversity of Indian society.”Footnote ⁷²

Countercurrents and Lost Opportunities: The Latin American Exhibitions

Following the 2014 Madrid exhibitions, several versions of the show were produced. The most significant emerged from a 2022 Spanish government proposal for a sequel that would travel to Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Uruguay, the countries from which the Mercedes treasure originated.Footnote ⁷³ If the Madrid exhibitions turned wreckage into patrimony, the Latin American sequel attempted to turn patrimony into reconciliation. From Spain’s proposal emerged a show titled Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes: Una historia común, a traveling exhibition meant to emphasize shared historical ties between Spain and its former colonies. Framed as a transatlantic dialogue, Una historia común promised a gesture of historical repair. What it delivered instead was another iteration of imperial nostalgia, cloaked in the language of shared heritage. I first reconstruct the exhibit’s design and then show how its limitations instantiate the contradictions of patrimonial sovereignty.

The Mercedes wreck is a material repository of the global order of the early modern Atlantic World. The ship’s two-hundred-year voyage is coextensive with political modernity and with profound reorganizations of the globe and of the categories through which that order is represented and understood. The voyage could be narrated as a critical genealogy of the modern global order, tracing juridical and political shifts and continuities. But telling the story in such a way would require a different framework of historical time, a critical conception of political modernity, and a commitment to what Benjamin calls brushing “history against the grain.”Footnote ⁷⁴ For Benjamin, this means telling history from the standpoint of the oppressed and defeated, adopting the angel of history’s backward gaze, for whom what we call “progress” is a single catastrophe that piles “wreckage upon wreckage.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Taking the Benjaminian “wreckage” as a guide, the ship’s route becomes a path across the South Pacific and Atlantic, moving between colonial and racialized itineraries—from the sailors, workers, and slaves of the revolutionary Atlantic to the European port cities that amassed fabulous wealth through colonialism and the slave trade.

Beyond precious metals, the Mercedes’ cargo included commodities that tied the convoy to the wider political economy of Spanish colonialism at the turn of the nineteenth century. The manifest lists 1,000 pounds of quinine, the period’s most effective treatment for malarial fevers, nearly 3,000 seal and sea lion hides from whaling and sealing fleets along both South American coasts, hundreds of other animal skins, cacao beans, dozens of bags of vicuña wool, and 700 pounds of tallow. Tallow, rendered animal fat used for candles and soap, likely came from the expanding meat industry around Buenos Aires, which produced vast quantities of the stuff. The booming Río de la Plata slave trade helped ranchers develop an efficient factory-style system that used every bit of the animal: hides were tanned and sold as leather in Europe; meat was cured and shipped to the Caribbean to feed plantation slaves; hoofs became gelatin and glue; and bones, scrap meat, and fat were boiled into tallow.Footnote ⁷⁶ The hides and tallow aboard the Mercedes’s convoy thus connect the ship to this early history of Argentine meatpacking, just as its construction in Havana’s shipyards ties it to the slave trade, the coins fasten it to Peruvian mining, and the seal skins connect it to sealing and whaling.

These colonial webs, their overlapping legal regimes, and their histories of violence linger in the contemporary dispute about who owns the wreck and its treasure. At issue, then, is the status of the colonial remainder and, more broadly, the relation between the colonial past and the “postcolonial” present. Conventional linear models of historical time fail to account for the legacies, afterlives, and continuities of slavery and colonialism. As several cultural theorists have argued, to theorize the relation between these histories and the present requires a more complex account of historical time; one in which the past, in some sense, remains contemporary with the present.Footnote ⁷⁷ The Mercedes offers a concrete, material framework to link the sedimentations of colonial time and the continuities and contemporaneities of imperial histories with our present.

A critical re-appraisal of the webs of power and violence in which the Mercedes was embedded could have been central to the more recent traveling exhibit that reached Latin America in 2024 (Una historia en común).Footnote ⁷⁸ Designed to retrace the Mercedes’s itinerary and highlight shared cultural heritage, the project transpired in response to Bolivian and Peruvian demands that Spain cede at least part of the treasure as ill-gotten gains of colonialism.Footnote ⁷⁹ The itinerary originally included six countries tied to the Mercedes (Peru, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Mexico), but the project was pared down when Colombia and Peru refused to participate. Unveiled in Spain in 2023, the exhibition traveled to Uruguay and Chile in 2024, with stops in Bolivia and Mexico planned for 2025. In the summer of 2025, however, the remaining legs were cancelled. The show ultimately reached only Uruguay and Chile, where it was staged in second-tier museums with limited success.Footnote ⁸⁰

The traveling exhibition was organized in two parts: a common segment and a site-specific segment that changes in each location. The common segment spotlighted the ship, the political context of Spain and its viceroyalties, and the struggle between archaeology and plunder (Spain versus Odyssey), while presenting a shared history, collaboration, and dialogue. Designed for easy disassembly and reinstallation in different spatial configurations, the common segment relied on twenty-seven semi-cylindrical display modules whose form evokes the hull of a ship. Built on metal frames, the modules featured flat fronts and semi-circular rears clad in pine boards, and they housed display cases for objects or audiovisual equipment. The common block also included three-barrel-type display cases of varying diameter used to display the show’s core objects: three sets of coins recovered from the wreck. The graphic design for the exhibition posters featured a split globe, the emblematic of the aspirational dialogue linking America and Spain through historical ties and shared heritage.Footnote ⁸¹

The traveling exhibition was structured to include a country-specific segment, allowing each participating state to contextualize the wreck through its own ministry of culture and to exercise some control over materials and presentation. In principle, this format could have opened space for a more critical narrative. In practice, press releases suggest a different priority: not to revisit the history and afterlives of Spanish colonialism, but to promote underwater cultural patrimony.

The local blocks prepared by Uruguay and Chile were innocuous and lackluster. If the respective ministries of culture had an opportunity to write a history of extractive colonialism from their angle, they declined to avail themselves of it and instead chose to display items selected from the holdings of the Museo de Arqueología Subacuática (ARQVA), Spain’s national underwater archaeology museum in Cartagena, with inoffensive and dull commentary. The Uruguayan exhibit, for example, included detailed descriptions of the port of Montevideo, where the Mercedes stopped from June to August 1804, on its journey from Lima to Cadiz. It also included a historical map of Montevideo, paintings, letters, and biographies of several naval officers. The local segment produced by Chile delves into the protection and conservation of underwater heritage.Footnote ⁸² The traveling exhibit thus exposed the contradictions of patrimonial sovereignty: cooperation without critique, circulation without restitution, and the transformation of demands for reparation into a new scene of imperial management.

The traveling exhibit was abruptly cancelled in mid-2025, just before it was supposed to move to Bolivia where it was scheduled to be displayed at the museum of the mint of Potosí. When contacted by my research assistant, both the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Acción Cultural Española, the government agency responsible for the exhibit, refused to share any information, insisting that these were “internal matters.”Footnote ⁸³ In a follow-up exchange, Acción Cultural Española explained that the exhibit was scrapped due to coordination problems and cost increases, neither of which seems a credible explanation for calling off a long-planned international cooperation.Footnote ⁸⁴

It is plausible that substantive disagreements arose between the Spanish ministry and its Bolivian counterpart about the content of the local segment. Indigeneity is central to Bolivian politics, and decolonization is explicitly within the remit of the Bolivian Ministry of Culture, which is formally titled the Ministerio de Culturas, Descolonización, y Despatriarcalización. In April 2025, the Spanish ambassador to Bolivia visited the Casa Nacional de Moneda (the national mint in Potosí) to discuss the exhibition. A press release accompanying the visit described the show as “a symbolic return of part of Potosí’s numismatic heritage” but noted that the project, scheduled to be unveiled only weeks later, remained “in the bilateral negotiation phase between the Plurinational State of Bolivia and the Kingdom of Spain.”Footnote ⁸⁵ We asked both ministries whether disagreements over the local segment contributed to its cancellation, but neither would comment.

The traveling exhibition ultimately reached neither of the planned sites where the coins were minted, Lima or Potosí. Meant to function as a symbolic return of the extracted silver and as an invitation to dialogue, it failed on its own terms, exposing the asymmetries of cultural power and the structural limits of dialogue as a framework. The logic of patrimonial sovereignty that has organized all the Mercedes exhibits since 2014 forecloses not only substantive restitution but even symbolic return. Once again, the emphasis on the navigational state and the protection of underwater archaeological heritage displaces the harder work of reassessing Spanish colonialism.

Recent calls for museums to become more inclusive have produced a new wave of institutional self-critique. The Mercedes exhibitions point to a deeper constraint: the national museum form is structurally bound to the state and to the reproduction of legitimating narratives, limiting the reckonings it can sustain. “Rethinking" or “decolonizing” collections has already been absorbed into museum business models. Institutions, including, notably the Spanish National Archaeological Museum, now devote resources and exhibition space to critical reviews of their holdings. Yet the ease with which such appraisals can coexist, in the same building with an exhibition that serenely glorifies the colonial past, signals an investment in imperial nostalgia not dissolved by critique. National museums are technologies of temporal governance: they shape how historical time is experienced and represented. A genuinely anticolonial museology would require not only restitution but the unmaking of patrimonial sovereignty itself. The Mercedes reminds us that beneath heritage’s polished surfaces lie the sediments of empire—wreckage upon wreckage, still lit by the false glow of redemption.

Shuttling between the Napoleonic Wars and the present, the Mercedes offers a sharp lens on sovereignty, empire, the status of the seas, and the contested rights of states and corporations. But by casting the Atlantic primarily as a battlefield, the exhibitions obscure the broader imperial circuits through which the Mercedes made its last voyage. At the same time, they reveal how the national museum form translates colonial violence into heritage, reaffirming sovereignty under neoliberal conditions. The Spanish nation appears as heroic navigator, defined by naval expertise, military prowess, and maritime technology. The navigational state becomes the mechanism whereby colonial violence is displaced and disavowed.