The Irish in Spanish America and the reconfiguration of commerce: cases of trans-imperial mediation in the Age of Revolutions, 1797-1824
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62120/mch.v1i3.27Keywords:
Age of Revolutions, Commercial reconfiguration of Empires, Hispanic-Irish Community, Thomas O’Gorman, Patricio Lynch, Eustace BarronAbstract
This article proposes to deepen our understanding of the reconfiguration of actors and trade channels in the Age of Revolutions through the analysis, not only of the great political changes and economic reforms, but also of the transformations and adaptations of trans-imperial mediators to the fall of the Atlantic empires. The work is centered on the Irish trans-imperial communities and merchants, who after connecting the two main enemy camps in the final struggle between Atlantic empires in the eighteenth century –Spain and France on one side and Britain on the other–, were able to provide bases and tools for the insertion in the Hispanic world of new hegemons in long-distance trade. The article presents the subtly crossed trajectories between Buenos Aires, Chile, Peru and Mexico– of an Irish family group that acted in one of the so-called “Bullion Contracts” and later in the opening of relations between Great Britain and Mexico; and of some Hispanic-Irish merchants who collaborated with British and US actors in the reconfiguration of empires and commerce unleashed by independence. It evidences how Irish trans-imperial networks thus functioned, not only as connectors between the old Atlantic empires in the mercantilist era, but also as connectors between the Early Modern and the Modern globalization.
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