Project
This project develops a large database on the origins and destinations of voluntary and involuntary (slaves) migrants during colonial times within the Spanish empire. The database will contain information about migrants’ origins, measures of their human capital such as education and occupation, and map migration networks from Spain and Africa to the Americas.
During the colonial period, hundreds of thousands of slaves were brought to Spanish America to work in plantation agriculture, mining, and household service. Building on the work by The Trans-Atlantic Slave Database, this project will increase coverage of the Spanish slave trade to the Americas.
Principal Investigators
Leticia Arroyo Abad is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at City University of New York and a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Her primary research expertise is the political economy of economic growth and development, with a focus on the Americas. Her recent work has analyzed the development of forced labor in Spanish Latin America, examined the impact of mining on long-term economic growth, studied immigration networks in Argentina, and quantified the effect of pandemics on American election results.
José Antonio Espín Sánchez is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Yale University. He received a PhD in Economics at Northwestern University in 2014. He is an Economic Historian with a strong background in economic theory and industrial organization. His thesis was centered on traditional irrigation communities in Murcia, Spain. He is interested in water allocation and agricultural communities. His recent work studies historical inequality and social mobility, in both sides of the Atlantic.
Collaborators
Werner Stangl is a spatial historian and historian of colonial Spanish America with a PhD and venia legendi at the University of Graz, Austria. From 2015-2019 he led the project “HGIS de las Indias”, reconstructing the historical geography of Bourbon Spanish America (1701-1808). From 2019 to 2021, he was part of the interdisciplinary Digital Tokugawa Lab at Yale University, mapping feudal territories of early modern Japan. Currently he works as a lecturer of economic history at the University of Graz.
Miguel Angel Lafuente Navarro is a historian graduated from the University of Murcia, currently completing pre-doctoral studies. He is an expert in paleography and in Spanish colonial archives.
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