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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.

This article investigates the role that the arms trade connected to Hispanic American Independence Wars played in the transformations at the origins of 19th century globalization. It looks specifically at how arms supplies to governments encouraged the early post-mercantilist development of South American commerce, and some of the domino effects of such development. This turning point in economic history is analyzed through the biographical trajectories of merchants who were well positioned between geopolitics and trade, and who had “imperial” functions without being formally involved in imperialist projects. Business and political correspondence, notarial documents, and customs registers from archives in Europe and the Americas reveal the workings of networks and business affairs of global merchants whose companies were major arms importers in Buenos Aires during the years leading to Chile’s liberation. The threads of John McNeile’s (an important but neglected figure) and David DeForest’s networks hook onto the principal economic and political laboratories of the countries from whence most arms were imported: Great Britain and the United States. They reached Chile and Peru from Buenos Aires and remained crucial to the liberation campaigns, encouraging further commercial expansion along the American Pacific coast and toward Asia, and pioneering financial adventures. Relations between commercial houses active in Hispanic America and Asia reveal British and US transpacific networks and ties between Hispanic American and Asian commerce and economies. The article thus shows how, by bringing together fragmented and scattered sources from both sides of the Atlantic, the significance of the arms trade in South America as a driving force of globalization emerges.

This paper retraces the changing alliances and practices of Antony Gibbs & Sons’ Lima agent during the transition from Spanish to independentist rule. The company’s correspondence with London guides us in exploring this moment in Hispano-American history halfway between the 18th century Spanish global trading system and 19th century international trade hegemonised by Britain. It will shed light on that ‘grey area’ between royalists and independentists, kept open by a handful of international merchants from neutral countries and embracing a wide gamut of possible compromises. Gibbs quickly adjusted the hierarchy among their alliances, in order to adapt to shifting power balances between royalists and independentists and between British and Spanish interests on the Hispano-American Pacific coast. The firm’s synergy with British merchants well-connected to the independentists provided it with greater guarantees of success and better political support than those provided by its partners in Spain and royalist America. Such alliances were key in expanding the firm’s trade, as was Gibbs’ access to pre-existing commercial networks in Spanish America. The company’s initiatives became therefore a vector of change between the old system and the new, an informal means of ‘restructuring’ influence during this era of reconfiguration.

This article traces the story of one of the most significant unofficial mediators in the context of the imperial reconfiguration of the Atlantic World between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The protagonist was a woman of many identities, loyalties, experiences, and allegiances, who stood at the center of business and family networks of global dimension. Of French descent, married to an Irishman, and naturalized a Spanish subject in Buenos Aires, “Anita” Périchon was able to strike a balance between British and Hispanic-American imperial and personal interests. Wellknown in Argentina as the mistress of Viceroy Liniers, this article focuses on the role she played in the system of corruption that allowed British merchants to conduct business in Río de la Plata between the June 1808 alliance of Britain and anti-French Spain and the legal opening of direct trade with the British in Buenos Aires in November 1809.