Alejandro García Montón

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at University of Granada

This article studies how merchants used the judge-conservator institution in defending their rights and liberties in the Spanish Empire. The 1663-1674 “asiento” on slave trade with the Americas constitutes our case study. Three issues will be addressed: (i) the judge-conservator as an intersecting point between the Crown and the “asiento” holders,...

The resilience of the Spanish empire during the Early Modern period is currently largely ascribed to its capacity to foster and reproduce collaborative relationships between the political superstructure and a plethora of local and transnational actors across the globe. As a consequence, while the contribution of private actors -chiefly the social e...

This article analyzes the rise of Portobelo as the most important center of the Spanish American slave trade from the 1660s to the 1730s. Portobelo's emergence was one of the most striking results of the structural transformation that the slave trade to Spanish America underwent between the 1640s and the 1650s. In these years, intra-American transi...

The Isthmus of Panama was a crossroads between North and South America during the continent’s first peopling (and subsequent movements) also playing a pivotal role during European colonization and the African slave trade. Previous analyses of uniparental systems revealed significant sex biases in the genetic history of Panamanians, as testified by...

The Isthmus of Panama was a nodal point articulating some of the most important trade routes established during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, like the African slave trade to Peru or the silver trade connecting Potosí with China through Europe. However, historians know little about how local trade took place on a daily basis in this r...

The economic, political, financial and social crisis that broke out in 2008 has brought fateful consequences for the so-called welfare states. At the light of the social and ideological impact of this “crisis”, social scientists have inquired themselves about how rulers financed their states in past times, what kind of solutions they created, or ho...

Entre las décadas de 1680 y 1720 el ramo Mondragone de la casata Grillo abandonó su discreta condición de nobili vecchi, confinada al microcosmos de la República de Génova, para caracterizarse como un ilustre apellido de eco cosmopolita. Durante estos años el entramado familiar acumuló seis nuevas distinciones nobiliarias, compró al menos diez feud...