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This article examines the profound consequences of the global upheavals of the first decades of the 19th century on the Kongo kingdom, notably the abolitionist phenomenon of the slave trade, and the Independence of Brazil. Our aim is to analyze how Kongo kings, princes and officers tried to maneuver in these troubled times and adapt to a context that challenged the old diplomatic and economic modus operandi between Kongo and Portugal. These new power relations and the attempts of the Kongo elites to keep their power and sovereignty led to misunderstandings and violent situations. We will analyze a specific case study: that of Kongo prince Aleixo Água Rosada – emblematic and revealing of the strength of the process underway and its impact on Kongo at the dawn of colonialism.

This special issue investigates how in the times of war, political turmoil, and disruption of commercial practices during the Age of Revolutions two centuries ago, merchants appear as demiurges of a new order. This is part of a polycentric reading of epochal transformations that does not deny the primacy of politics and military power in establishing relations of force, but which underline the complex negotiations at their base. The collection of essays looks at the profound global consequences of the fall of the Spanish American empire, particularly as they related to the decline of mercantilism and the reconfiguration of both Atlantic and inter-Pacific commerce. A crucial element in this transformation was the war economy, which had implications not only in Spanish America, but in the whole of the Hispanic world and beyond. Global merchants or businessmen —foreigners and Hispanic— strategically located in the Hispanic World, whose networks and affairs linked Europe, Asia and the Americas, worked within the vacuum created by the crisis of the Spanish monarchy in what was a fluid and foundational moment. The essays investigate how the Napoleonic Wars and the Wars of Independence against Spain accelerated the emergence of new actors, practices, rules and commercial circuits, by analyzing the personal and business networks that built, redefined and renegotiated the role of Hispanic America in the global economy. This prosopography of merchants thus shows trajectories through which, despite infinite difficulties, global and transregional merchants appear as one of the maieutic forces in the birth of the modern world.