Anchoring an Empire is a bottom-up exploration of how gender and ethnicity shaped the lived experience of Spanish subjects across the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century isthmus of Panama. Focusing on understudied historical actors, Bethany Aram sheds light on how indigenous Americans, Afro-descendants, and Europeans contributed to critical debates on race and gender. From the Caribbean port cities of Nombre de Díos and Portobello, to Panama Viejo on the Pacific coast, free, enslaved, and in-between women and men managed to become arbiters of Spanish and competing interests. Those who lived and died in these cities sustained them as hubs of interaction, communication, and commerce. Whether victims, beneficiaries – or both – of the slave trade, these individuals found ways to meet and to exploit the region's episodic demand for housing, provisions, and other services. Their expertise grounded global transport and trade, with a lasting impact on processes of mobility and globalization.

‘Centuries before the Panama Canal, traders relied on women to cross the isthmus. Travelers rested in their homes in the Atlantic and Pacific facing ports. Aram’s insightful reconstruction of women’s lives and choices offers a novel explanation of the opportunities and challenges found at the empire’s crossroads.’

Tatiana Seijas - Rutgers University

‘Aram masterfully documents the experiences, agency and power of the women who sustained colonial Panama, with particular attention to actors of Indigenous and African origin. A vital contribution to Panama's history, Anchoring an Empire also provides a new benchmark for scholarship on multiethnic, geostrategically critical spaces throughout the early modern Iberian world.’

David Wheat - Michigan State University