With this issue, The Americas inaugurates a new section, In Dialogue, dedicated to fostering scholarly exchange through the publication of clusters of articles that speak directly to one another. This format is designed as a space between a traditional special issue and the standard publication of individual research articles. By presenting paired or grouped pieces that clearly intersect, we hope to highlight conversations already emerging across historical fields, disciplines, geographies, and methodological approaches.

The War of Jenkins’ Ear (from 1739 to 1748), more accurately known in Spanish as the “Guerra del Asiento,” marked the end of the Spanish Crown’s authorization of the British monopoly of the South Sea Company to deliver captive Africans to the Spanish Americas. The end of the British Asiento led to four decades of experimentation by various actors within the Spanish Empire trying to reestablish and expand the slave trade, which many Spanish political economy leaders increasingly saw as vital to the future of both the metropolis and the colonies. This article examines certain currents, undercurrents, and countercurrents of the deregulation of the slave trade, linking these debates to the evolving policies on colonial commerce within the Spanish Empire, as authorities in Iberia and the Americas recognized the interconnectedness of these issues and their relationship to the actual slave trading in the colonies. Besides focusing on colonial elites and reforms in colonial governance, this article demonstrates that the timelines of reforms in overall trade policy and measures regarding the slave trade were closely connected.

Cuba’s ascent as the dominant sugar colony of the Atlantic world from the 1790s onward is well known. However, historians have failed to note that the political blueprint for Cuba’s sugar revolution was first sketched in Santo Domingo. By the time the Cuban plantation elite endeavored to position the island as the leading sugar colony in the Atlantic—particularly after the Haitian Revolution disrupted the world’s most profitable yet brutal sugar colony—the Santo Domingo elite had long attempted to erect a plantation complex along similar lines. In fact, the first decree for the liberalization of the slave trade was granted to Santo Domingo in 1786, years before it was extended to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela in 1789. It is, therefore, not surprising that the main architect of Cuba’s sugar revolution, Francisco de Arango y Parreño, made his debt to Santo Domingo explicit in his correspondence with the court. This article interrogates Santo Domingo’s efforts to erect a plantation complex in the eighteenth century and demonstrates that the political origins of Cuba’s sugar revolution are to be found in Santo Domingo’s plantation dreams, unrealized though they remained.

Scholarship on Black Atlantic geographies and non-European knowledge-making has underscored the crucial role of Africans and Afro-descendants in shaping New World landscapes, where their interaction with American environments was vital for survival. Building on these insights, this article explores the environmental knowledge of the bogas, Afro-Indigenous boatmen who navigated the Magdalena River. As the only route connecting New Granada’s capital, Santa Fe, with the Atlantic world, the Magdalena was central to the viceroyalty’s political and economic integration. The bogas were key to this process–not only because of their physical labor, but because of their deep expertise in fluvial geography. By centering the journeys, labor, and interactions of bogas with passengers and riverine communities, the article reframes the history of the Magdalena River. It shows how these encounters became sites of knowledge production, positioning boatmen as political actors who forged social and spatial networks linking Caribbean and Andean worlds. It also rethinks environmental knowledge in the Caribbean, tracing its roots to enduring Afro-Indigenous relationships. In doing so, it calls for a more inclusive framework for understanding African diasporic experience in the Americas and for reimagining the geography of the Caribbean itself.

This paper examines the gradual imposition of private property on agricultural land, mostly occupied by Indigenous communities, in the early nineteenth century by Andean republics’ ruling classes. The state’s weak authority and the Indigenous resistance to economic and political border advance impeded the immediate destruction of previous power structures, resulting in genuine statal formations in the region and clashes for the imposition of the newly adopted liberal ideas. This paper focuses on two early agricultural property privatization attempts in Bolivia, which have not been properly analyzed yet. First, José Ballivián’s governmental project, which resolved to dismantle the Indigenous communities through capitalist education, by placing “good examples” of white and mestizo colons between Indigenous lands using the legal formulation of emphyteusis, thus expanding the liberal conception of property and taxation and then making the existence of communal lands futile, achieving social homogeneity, enforcing capitalist production, and widening executive authority. Second, Jorge Mallo’s posterior pamphlet, which gave continuity to Ballivián’s policies through public opinion and linked them to the ones finally imposed in the second half of the century. Both initiatives were not successful but were remarkable steps in the process of Indigenous land usurpation by the state and white-mestizo colons.