ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the efforts of the Spanish Empire during the eighteenth century for understanding the flows that allegedly shaped its economic, legal, and strategic needs and the possibilities of managing them. It explores how this led to questions about the discontinuities, stagnations, thresholds, and interstitial spaces of liminality and transition in medical, geological, political or commercial contexts. By analyzing three cases where environments (anatomical, architectonic, and industrial, respectively) were articulated around liminal spaces, it unveils how the Empire’s epistemic framework came to conceive environments as complex sets of interrelated milieux and necessary discontinuities.
