Globalizaciones versus imperios.Una perspectiva mundial sobre el nexo panameño en el siglo XVII

Résumé

The Carrera de Indias that linked Seville to Panama and carried Iberian peoples across the Atlantic has been considered the backbone of Europe’s so-called early modern globalization and a motor of the “Rise of the West”. The growth and decadence of this artery of Empire normally has been approached by considering American economies independently from other, broader processes underway. Based on a critical discussion of the recent literature, this article puts the Panamanian crossing in a wider context. Situating Atlantic expansion as part of a more general process with multiple origins, it points to competing paths for early modern globalization. Tensions among these rival projects, which reached a height by 1640, elucidate both the Carrera de Indias’ seventeenth-century crisis and the changes that subsequently took place in the Iberian empires. The history of globalization and the history of empires, usually studied as parallel and interrelated phenomena, are considered here from a perspective in which globalization could provoke an imperial crisis and reconfigure the Spanish empire.