A Hydra of Business and Men: The Habsburg Asiento de Negros in Structuring the European Transatlantic Slave Trade - Hardcover

by Cátia a. P. Antunes (Author), Alejandro García-Monton (Author), Elisabeth Heijmans (Author)

This book offers a historical and historiographical analysis of the Spanish asiento de negros, a contract between the Spanish Monarchy and private parties to introduce specific number of enslaved Africans to Spanish America. As the Spanish American market was the largest single market for enslaved people prior to 1720, studying this colonial contract is essential for understanding the development of the most significant colonial contract of the long 17th century. The asiento framed the European transatlantic slave trade for nearly two centuries and shaped much of the political economy of the Spanish Atlantic empire.
This book is unique in providing the first comprehensive study of the asiento since George Scelle's 1906 work (La traite négrière aux Indes de Castille. Contracts et traités d'assiento, 2 vols.). Unlike Scelle, who focused on legal frameworks and presented the monarchy's perspective, this book examines the asientistas themselves, offering insights into their business decisions and organizations. It concentrates on the period that gave rise to the idea of an asiento and the Habsburg-era asientos (1595-1713), preceding the so-called Bourbon reforms.

Author Biography

Cátia Antunes is Professor of Global Economic Networks: Merchants, Entrepreneurs and Empires at the Institute for History at Leiden University. She is currently the principal investigator of the project Exploiting the Empire of Others supported by the Dutch Research Council.

Alejandro García-Montón is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economic Theory and Economic History of the Universidad de Granada. He specialises in the histories of pre-industrial capitalism with a focus on Mediterranean entrepreneurship, the political economy of Atlantic empires, and the articulation of trans-imperial slave trade in the Caribbean. He is the author of Genoese Entrepreneurship and the Asiento Slave Trade, 1650-1700 (2022).

Elisabeth Heijmans, Ph.D. (2018), Leiden University, is an economic and social historian specialised in French and Dutch early modern overseas expansions. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. She is the author of The Agency of Empire: Connections and Strategies in French Overseas Expansion (1686-1746) (2020).

Gerhard de Kok works as a digital historian at the Huygens Institute of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he applies techniques from the field of AI to the study of history. In addition, he works on several Linked Open Data projects.

Susana Münch Miranda is Assistant Professor at the NOVA University of Lisbon, School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH), and a researcher at CSG/GHES, Lisbon School of Economics and Management (ISEG). Her research focuses on early modern public finance, fiscal institutions, and transnational business networks.

Edgar Pereira is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for the History of Society and Culture - Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra (Portugal). His area of expertise is the interest aggregation between the early modern Iberian Crowns and business groups, with a particular focus on army and naval logistics, as well as overseas trade and taxation.

João Paulo Salvado is a research fellow at CIDEHUS, University of Évora. His research interests lie at the intersection between economic history, social history, and the history of institutions in the early modern period. He has published on various topics, including the formation of business groups in the context of expanding foreign and colonial trade in 18th-century Lisbon and their embeddedness in transnational networks connecting Lisbon with European and colonial port cities.

Julie Svalastog, Ph.D. (2017), Leiden University, is an independent scholar and author of Mastering the Worst of Trades: England's Early Africa Companies and Their Traders, 1618-1672 (2021).