John Rich Faculty Fellow
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“The Great Circulation Machine: Imperial Logistics and Fugitive Practice in the Iberian Empire”
In the late sixteenth century, Spanish officials in colonial Mexico oversaw the building of a new leg of the camino real or royal highway linking the administrative and commercial center of Mexico City to the port of Veracruz on the Atlantic coast. Backers of the new road hoped it would make the circulation of people and especially commodities faster, cheaper, and more secure. Using literary and historical methods and working with archival and printed texts and images, The Great Circulation Machine explores the new road as an expression of an early modern revolution in logistics, tracing the emergence and consolidation of two opposing discourses of circulation during this period. On the one hand, colonial authorities and merchants began to understand circulation as an object of governance, something that could be improved and made governable through technique and infrastructure. On the other hand, they also began to identify new threats to the smooth flow of people and commodities everywhere they looked. This official discourse of ungovernable mobility congealed around the racialized figure of the African maroon, and colonial elites regularly denounced maroons for attacking and disrupting commercial traffic along the new road. By tracking the debates and struggles to which the new road gave rise, this project presents a new account of the early modern rise of logistics within the long history of capitalism.
Daniel Nemser is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures.
