RT Book, Whole
T1 Anchoring an Empire Gender and Ethnicity in Colonial Panama
A1 Aram, Bethany
K1 Globalización temprana
K1 Historia global
K1 Panamá Viejo
K1 Género
AB 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.
PB Cambridge University Press
SN 9781009595353
YR 2025
FD 2025-11-21
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10433/25054
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10433/25054
LA en
NO Aram, Bethany. Anchoring an Empire: Gender and Ethnicity in Colonial Panama. of Cambridge Latin American Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. www.cambridge.org/9781009595353
NO Publicación completa: www.cambridge.org/9781009595353
NO Proyectos de investigaciónERC CoG 648535, "An ARTery of EMPIRE. Conquest, Commerce, Crisis, Culture and the Panamanian Junction,  1513-1671 (ArtEmpire)."FEDER-UPO-1380997 financiado por la Consejería de Transformación Económica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades de la Junta de Andalucía y el Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional de la Unión Europea, “Género y etnia en el istmo de Panamá, 1500-1700, y en otros ámbitos.”Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, PID2024-161493OB-I00, “Recovering evidence of the past with present-day communities (RecCom).”
NO Departamento de Geografía, Historia y Filosofía, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Sevilla
DS RIO
RD Apr 23, 2026