House of Trade: Mestizo Children, Merchant Networks, and 16th-Century Empire Building in Early Modern Colombia

Over the course of the sixteenth- and early-seventeenth centuries, dozens—if not hundreds—of mestizo, or mixed-race, children and adolescents journeyed to and from the Iberian Peninsula from Spain’s American territories. A significant number of them hailed from northern South America—a region which, during the first half of the colonial period, experienced a surge in population movement as disease and Indigenous enslavement swept through the corridor that connected the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. Born from the often-violent encounters between Indigenous and European peoples, mestizo children facilitated the forging of merchant networks both in the service of their Spanish fathers as well as other non-related, legal guardians. These children—and in particular male youths—assisted their stewards during terrestrial and transatlantic travel, and in the process, became familiar with trading practices, kinship networks that spanned vast distances, and the crucial recognition that having access to the monarch’s ear held immeasurable worth. Yet despite their ongoing mobility and presence, few scholars have paid serious attention to their immense cultural, political, and economic worth as empire-building participants.

This paper seeks to correct this historiographic omission, especially as it concerns networks created between the New Kingdom of Granada, the Gobernación de Popayán (jurisdictions that comprise present-day Colombia), and Spain. Documents culled from Colombian and Spanish archives, and in particular travel licenses from the Casa de la Contratación in Seville, Spain, provide rich and often harrowing accounts of the multidirectional movements of mestizo children. Pressed into a peripatetic life at the behest of Spanish guardians and the pulse of the Carrera de Indias fleet system, I contend that mestizo children, while perhaps small in physical and legal stature, were crucial, human components in the building of empire.