Tatiana Seijas, assistant professor of history, Miami University, will give a talk titled "The Road of Empire: Covering the Distance between Mexico City and Santa Fe, 1540 – 1850".
The royal road or camino real connected the colonial capital of Mexico City with the far reaches of the Spanish empire in North America. Along its path, Apaches, Spaniards, Africans and Tarahumaras, among countless others, clashed, traded and toiled, engaging with structures of imperial power and participating in the money economy to derive some benefit from colonialism. This book deploys the camino real as the organizing principle to argue that the people who lived in the territories it crossed saw the road as a political challenge and a commercial opportunity. They seized it for their own purposes and to achieve their own objectives within the empire.
Seijas received her PhD from Yale University in 2008. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico will be published this spring by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Seijas’s current book project is tentatively titled The Road of Empire: Covering the Distance between Mexico City and Santa Fe. It's an economic and social history of the camino real (royal road) that linked the capital of New Spain to the Spanish empire's northern frontier.
Sponsored by the Americas Before 1900 Working Group.
