The Asiento System and the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans (Circa 1580-1750)

Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-90-04-54928-9
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, Band 41, 372 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm

Reihe: The Atlantic World

This is the first edited volume to focus explicitly on the asiento, the contractual framework that regulated the transatlantic slave trade to Spanish America between the late sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. As the mechanism that structured a vast system of human trafficking – one of the foundational tragedies of the modern world – the asiento functioned as a legal, political, and commercial instrument of empire. Drawing on new archival research in multiple languages and from repositories across the Atlantic, the chapters trace the negotiated nature of these contracts, the transimperial flows they enabled, and the roles played by formal and informal agents of diverse social, ethnic, and institutional backgrounds.

Contributors are: Pedro Cardim, Christopher Ebert, Manuel F. Fernández Chaves, Alejandro García Montón, Miguel Geraldes Rodrigues, Manuel Herrero Sánchez, Wim Klooster, Thiago Krause, Maximiliano Mac Menz, Joseph Mainberger, Ramona Negrón, Linda Newson, Jonatán Orozco Cruz, Edgar Pereira, William Pettigrew, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Klaus Weber, and David Wheat.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Herrero Sánchez, Manuel

Orozco Cruz, Jonatán

Cardim, Pedro

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Geschichte der Sklaverei

Über Autor(innen)

Manuel Herrero Sánchez is Professor of Early Modern History at the Pablo de Olavide University in Seville. His research focuses on the comparative approach to the history of the Dutch Republic and Genoa, and on the Spanish Monarchy considered as a polycentric imperial structure composed of urban republics.

Jonatán Orozco Cruz is Predoctoral Researcher at the Pablo de Olavide University, where he is developing his PhD dissertation Transnational social networks connecting imperial spaces: the Hispanic Monarchy and the Slave Settlement (1675–1694) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Manuel Herrero Sánchez.

Pedro Cardim is Associate Professor in History at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. He has published widely on Iberian history, early modern legal history, and Portuguese colonization of Brazil.