Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we aim to comprehend how informal collaboration between Iberian commercial agents was sustained, trading in a global cross imperial scope.

Paper long abstract:

The Iberian union under Habsburgs' Crown was fostered on formal independent administration of the Portuguese and Spanish empires. Nevertheless, for more than 30 years, historiography has proved the interference and protagonism of Portuguese business men in trade dynamics of the Castilian Indies. However, it has been silent about the presence or/and absence of Castilian merchants in the Portuguese dominions and on their actions within global trading. Spanish literature has underlined the decline of their role as private commercial agents in the seventeenth century.

We hypothesize, based on previous work, the collaboration of Portuguese and Spanish merchants in cross-imperial trading ventures, as an opportunity and a necessity. In this paper, we aim to comprehend how this informal collaboration was sustained, trading in a global cross imperial scope. Did the Crown and its monopolies display a role in facilitating or restricting these alliances? What reasons did lead to this collaborative entanglement? Was cooperation a linear behavior or was it disturbed by both-sided complaints? What mechanisms did merchants to handle mutual suspicion? The analysis will be based on the internal dynamics of Iberian self-organized trading networks, built upon notarial, official and private correspondence and bibliography's evidence.