Anchoring an Empire Gender and Ethnicity in Colonial Panama

Abstract

This book brings recent perspectives on gender and ethnicity in the early modern period together with the results of the interdisciplinary research project, “ArtEmpire” (ERC CoG 648535), to advance the state of the art. Over the last ten years, specialists in African and Latin American History working predominantly in North America have written influential books and articles on related subjects (Bennett, Gauderman, Mangan, McKinley, O’Toole, Van Deusen, Vinson, Wheat, among others). No scholar, however, has examined the uses of gender and ethnicity across the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century isthmus of Panamá, in the port cities of Old Panama, Nombre de Dios and Portobello, or at the Cruces outpost on the Chagres River. At these sites of exchange, life, and death on a precocious artery of world-wide transport and communications, women and men of diverse and often mixed Indigenous American, African and European origins forged and anchored an empire. Rather than imposing present-day categories on the past, this monograph offers a deeply contextualized, bottom-up and fluid reconstruction of gender and ethnicity in and between port cities. It examines matters relevant to present-day concerns, including adaptations to early globalisation that facilitated cultural and biological survival. Poor conservation of local archival materials due to humidity, fire and other factors, has long impeded bottom-up historical research on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Panamanian crossing (Wade, Castillero, Mena). This circumstance justified renewed scrutiny of the diverse holdings of the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, including the less-studied Contratación and Justicia, sections, as well as uncharted forays in the archives of Bogotá, Lima and Madrid. It has also led to two archaeological excavation campaigns undertaken in collaboration with Patronato Panamá Viejo, which have cast new light on Panama Viejo’s under-documented female and African majorities. Rather than a dearth of material, an abundance of fragmentary evidence recalls the lives that anchored an empire.