Publications
Journal Articles:
“Nacionalismo criollo desacreditado: la problemática recepción de Benedict Anderson entre especialistas de las independencias.” Prismas. Revista de historia intelectual 27, no. 2 (2023): 183-192.
Resumen. Con la publicación de la segunda edición de Imagined Communities en 1991, Benedict Anderson escribió un prefacio en el cual dejaba muy claro cuál había sido una de sus principales metas en el trabajo original de 1983, a saber, localizar los orígenes del nacionalismo moderno en Hispanoamérica durante las revoluciones de independencia, cuando unos “pioneros criollos” intentaron crear nuevas naciones en las postrimerías del colosal imperio hispano. Dado el papel protagónico que Anderson asignaba a la Hispanoamérica revolucionaria, era de esperar que su trabajo se convirtiera en lectura obligatoria para quienes se dedicaban a estudiar las independencias de esa región. Sin embargo, el libro tuvo una acogida reticente entre historiadores de las revoluciones, incluso en el mundo anglosajón, donde era muy conocido. ¿A qué se debió esta recepción tan fría? Este texto propone que la razón principal radica en que Anderson desarrolló sus argumentos en base al trabajo de John Lynch, cuyos supuestos eran cuestionados de manera fundamental por un conjunto de historiadores revisionistas. Al final de cuentas, aunque innovador, el trabajo adolecía de obsolescencia historiográfica.
“Free Ports within Empire: The Intellectual Origins of Spain’s Intra-Imperial System of Free Trade, 1765-1789.” Global Intellectual History 8, no. 6 (2023) 747-770.
Abstract: Between 1765 and 1789, the Spanish crown issued a series of comercio libre decrees that liberalised trade between Spanish America and peninsular Spain. What was the crown attempting to do by relaxing trade restrictions within the empire? Because the comercio libre decrees only authorised free trade within the confines of the empire, it may be easy to conclude, as the extant scholarship has, that these decrees were a delayed attempt to revitalise an increasingly obsolete mercantilist system. Indeed, Spain’s new imperial system of free trade appears to be little more than an outmoded form of protectionism centred on hoarding bullion. This article pushes against this perspective and shows that Spain’s decrees of comercio libre were part of an attempt to erect a peculiar interconnected system of free ports within the empire. Even though Spain’s free trade system excluded international trade, its intellectual architects deployed Enlightenment political economy to dynamize and integrate the imperial economy while avoiding the increasingly bellicose competition for international markets that was ascendant among European empires.
“Colonial Economic Improvement: How Spain Created New Consulados to Preserve and Develop Its American Empire, 1778-1795.” Hispanic American Historical Review 98, n. 4 (2018): 605-634.
Abstract: After implementing comercio libre (free internal trade) in 1778, the Spanish crown endeavored to create multiple new consulados (chambers of commerce) to facilitate commercial exchange within Spain's Atlantic territories. However, while the crown established new metropolitan consulados in the mid-1780s, it approved colonial consulados only in the 1790s, after the death of the minister of the Indies, José de Gálvez, in 1787. Why did the crown initially hesitate to establish colonial consulados? I argue that unlike Gálvez, who was committed to an extractive system of imperialism, the post-1787 ministers were inspired by a distinct kind of soft imperialism, which held that the empire's survival depended on stimulating colonial economic growth while promoting reciprocal bonds among all Spanish subjects. In reconstructing this history, I show how the post-1787 ministers established a new regime of colonial economic improvement to bind the empire during a moment of impending crisis.
“Viscardo’s Global Political Economy and the First Cry for Spanish American Independence, 1767-1798.” Journal of Latin American Studies 48, n. 3 (2016): 537-664.
Abstract: Revisionist historians have convincingly argued that Spanish American independence was not the result of simmering grievances that galvanised a national or Creole identity against Spain. Instead, this scholarship insists that Spanish American national identities did not exist at the time and that independence was an unforeseen process that must be understood in the context of the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia. But, if independence was undesirable before 1808 and if national identities arose at a latter period, how do we explain the early independence projects of ‘precursors’ like Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzmán? By contextually reconstructing the logic behind Viscardo's projects, this article offers a new perspective on the intellectual conditions of possibility for Spanish American independence. It argues that though he certainly identified as a Creole from Peru, Viscardo actually deployed an Enlightenment global science of commerce, not Creole patriotism or nationalism, to legitimate Spanish American independence.
“La invención de un imperio comercial hispano, 1740-1765.” Magallánica, revista de historia moderna 2, n. 3 (2015): 56-76.
Resumen. Hacia mediados del siglo XVIII se fragua un nuevo discurso imperial en el corazón de la monarquía hispana. Entre sus arquitectos intelectuales habría que incluir ministros de las nuevas secretarías borbónicas, la Junta de Comercio, y el Consejo de Castilla. Fieles estudiosos de la ciencia de comercio ilustrada, ya para 1740 dichos ministros habían delineado un nuevo sistema imperial en el que la única y exclusiva función de las colonias era consumir la mercancía de la metrópoli. Es decir, estos ministros ilustrados buscaban transformar la monarquía compuesta heredada de los Austrias en un imperio comercial, un tipo de estado cuyo poder derivaba de su capacidad para encauzar el mercado colonial a su propio beneficio. En este artículo intentamos reconstruir la manera en que se llega a proyectar ese anhelado imperio de naturaleza comercial.
Book Chapters:
“Building Nation-Empires in the Eighteenth-Century Iberian Atlantic,” The Cambridge History of Nationhood and Nationalism. Eds., Cathie Carmichael, Matthew D’Auria, and Aviel Roshwald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, [book here].
“A New System of Imperial Government: Political Economy and the Spanish Theory of Commercial Empire, c. 1740-1750.” Empire and the Social Sciences: Global Histories of Knowledge. Ed., Jeremy Adelman. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, [book here].
“The Contested State: Political Discourse during the Independence of the Dominican Republic, 1844.” Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies. Eds., Kiran Jayaram and April Mayes. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2018, [book here, abstract here].
“Ciencia de estado comercial. Un lenguaje político dieciochesco.” Historia en fragmentos. Estudios en homenaje a Pablo Fernández Albaladejo. Eds., Julio Pardos, Julen Viejo, José María Iñurritegui, José M. Portillo, and Fernando Andrés. Madrid, Spain: UAM, 2017, [book here].
Book Reviews:
Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean: The Greater Antilles, 1493–1550, by Ida Altman (Baton Rouge: The Louisiana State University Press, 2021), Journal of Interdisciplinary History 53, n. 4 (2023): 673–675, [review here].
The Global Spanish Empire: Five Hundred Years of Place Making and Pluralism, Edited by Christine D. Beaule and John G. Douglass (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2020), Comparativ. Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 32, n. 1 (2022): 123-125, [review here].
Los virreinatos de Nueva España y del Perú (1680-1740): Un balance historiográfico, Edited by Bernard Lavallé (Madrid: Casa de Valázquez, 2019), Hispanic American Historical Review 101, n.1 (2021): 163-164, [review here].
Writing the Americas in Enlightenment Spain: Literature, Modernity, and the New World 1773-1812, By Thomas C. Neal (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017), Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 21, n. 4 (2020): 569-571, [review here].
Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization, Edited by Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, Rachel Sarah O'Toole (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), Journal of Jesuit Studies 7, n. 4 (2020): 676–678, [review here].
The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires, By Josep M. Fradera (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), Journal of Social History 54, n. 1 (2020): 369-371, [review here].
Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830, Edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Hispanic American Historical Review 99, n. 3 (2019): 539-540, [review here].
The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth Century: Balance of Power, Balance of Trade, Edited by Antonella Alimento and Koen Stapelbroek (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie IV, Historia Moderna, n. 32 (2019): 385-392, [review here].
Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia, By Lina del Castillo (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), Journal of Interdisciplinary History 50, n. 1 (2019): 147-148, [review here].
An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World, By Ernesto Bassi (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017) and New Countries: Capitalism, Revolution, and Nations in the Americas, 1750-1870, Edited by John Tutino (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), Journal of Interdisciplinary History 48, n. 4 (2018): 581-584, [review here].
Other Publications:
"Mispricing Tuition." Inside Higher Ed. November 17, 2022, [article here].
Interview with Fidel J. Tavárez, author of “Colonial Economic Improvement: How Spain Created New Consulados to Preserve and Develop Its American Empire, 1778–1795.” Hispanic American Historical Review, [interview here].
“A New System of Imperial Government for Spanish America.” CONTEXTOS: The Blog of the Center for Latin American Studies at UChicago, February, 2018, [blog post here].