When the Mediterranean Moved West: Catalan Social Networks and the Construction of Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Uruguayan Society and Culture
Keyword(s):
This essay explores how Catalan traders repurposed the commercial techniques and patterns of human deployment used to create their country’s Mediterranean merchant empire in the late medieval period, to generate important trade networks in the Atlantic basin starting in the 18th century. After explaining the dynamics of this new, but simultaneously old, transatlantic system, it zeroes in on one of the key nodes of the network, Uruguay, and explores how successive generations of Catalans shaped the development of that country’s culture in fundamental ways.