The Evolution of Panama's Camino Real: A Geographic Necessity

My paper explores Panama’s character as an early modern Atlantic crucible in which complex relationships and identities were forged.  The development of an over-land route across Panama solved considerable imperial problems, providing an avenue to the Atlantic accessible from the southern zone of Spanish activity.  (A necessity at a time when the route around Cape Horn was not reliably navigable.)  The royal road was the major pathway through which goods, bullion, and personnel traveled into and out of the region.  The use of slave laborers to man and maintain the route, however, was followed by the appearance of escaped slaves who disrupted transportation through the passageway.  These cimarrones posed a threat to the system from the 1550s up through to the 1580s.  In addition, rebellious indigenous peoples to the east provided an opening for pirates, adventurers, and settlers acting against Spanish interests in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Initially an arterial conduit for goods, the road eventually represented a choke-point in the Spanish system, emerging as the site from which enemies of the empire siphoned off the crown’s wealth and vitality and coordinated their activities with the region’s indigenous and African peoples.