Movilidades escalonadas y construcción de un espacio imperial: Caracas, 1715

This piece reconstructs the staggered mobility of two radically different people –a Navarrese soldier, provincial governor, and a Turkish enslaved woman in domestic service– whose life trajectories intersected in Caracas in 1715. It demonstrates that complex forms of mobility are not a recent development and that staggered mobility was a heterogeneous phenomenon that affected a diverse range of people in the early modern Spanish world. Engaging with the “new mobilities paradigm” and recent work on “ongoing” migrations, it demonstrates that experiences, knowledge and expectations accumulated through successive relocations contributed to the construction of diverse “imperial spaces” and to the specific characteristics that, in the case of early 18th-century Caracas, contributed to the failure of one of the first joint stock trading companies in the Spanish world.