In recent decades, historical studies on capitalism have regained the prominent role they had in configuring social sciences in the mid-twentieth century. Consolidation of a new history of capitalism,Footnote ¹ cultural, postcolonial, and global studies,Footnote ² i.e. “history from below”,Footnote ³ has broadened and made its analysis even more complex. In addition to highlighting the pre-eminence of institutions, asymmetric social relations, circulation of commodities and capital, and the interconnected processes of globalization, colonization, and enslavement, they reveal the growing importance not only of those who resisted the emergence of the capitalist order (slaves, sailors, coolies, wage labourers, etc.), but also that of those who were driving forces behind the capitalist order and operated and gave meaning to the gears of accumulation and expansion of the world economy throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Those makers and agents of the new liberal political and economic order in Latin America, Africa, and the Pacific are detailed in Misioneros del capitalismo. This collective historiography examines personalities with transnational biographies, where the state of revolutionary exiles, bankers, collectors, scientists, businessmen, or slave traders at times overlapped, facilitating their social mobility and the construction of a self-image aligned with the cultural values of the new bourgeois world. The analysis in each of the twelve chapters in this volume conveys the scope of the transformations that took place throughout the nineteenth century in commodities production in Latin America and the taming of colonial territories in Africa and Southeast Asia. It reveals how the networks of the African slave trade, dissemination of scientific knowledge, policies of white colonization in frontier territories, and interest payments and the public debt of the liberal states operated at different scales.

On this last subject, Juan Luis Simal examines the liberal theorist and statesman José Canga Argüelles (1771–1842), one of the main Spanish-American representatives of conducta franca, which ultimately adopted the political postulates of the credible British commitment to structuring the post-ancien-régime states. According to Simal, to maintain the financial credibility of the emerging Spanish liberal state, Canga Argüelles became an advocate for reorganizing the Treasury and public debt. This step proved essential to consolidate credit capacity and economic growth. The tension between liberal positions (1810–1814, 1820–1823) and absolutist ones (1814–1820, 1823–1833), which characterized peninsular political dynamics, was key to how the ideas and actions of Canga Argüelles evolved during his time as Minister of Finance. On the other side of the Atlantic, Edward Jones Corredera explores the position of Mexican intellectual and diplomat Lorenzo de Zavala (1788–1836) in the parliamentary debates on colonial debt in the new Latin American states. Like Canga Argüelles, Lorenzo de Zavala was an advocate for public credit on the basis of institutions jointly responsible for the “finances of the nation”.

Marial Iglesias and Martin Rodrigo reconstruct the entrepreneurial career of Peter Harmony (1777–1851) – one of the ten wealthiest people in New York in 1845 – and his multiple connections with the slave trade in the first half of the nineteenth century. Harmony, born on Spain's Galician coast, worked as a cabin boy on the active Philadelphia–Havana trade route, until he became a US citizen (1805) and settled in New York, importing tropical commodities from Cuba. The US merchant marine dominated island maritime traffic during the sugar boom. Port cities such as Matanzas and Cárdenas maintained direct links with the American enclaves of the Atlantic coast. Several ships associated with Harmony were involved in these transfers, with continuous incursions into Africa to supply slaves to the sugar plantations, incorporating Cadiz as part of a commercial triangle. Iglesias and Rodrigo note that, based on his networks, Peter Harmony mingled with North American, Spanish, and French traders in commercializing commodities, in financial institutions, and in the slave trade, establishing himself as a “self-made” entrepreneur, as is so customary in the United States. His social advancement, however, was attributable to intensive exploitation of slaves in the commodity-producing regions.

Ander Permanyer focuses on the “Eurasian” merchant Lorenzo Calvo y Mateo (1789–1850), who joined the Royal Philippine Company early on and was appointed primary agent in China (1816). Calvo y Mateo played a pioneering role in the opioid trade in Canton and Macao. From 1827 to 1831, he moved to Paris and founded various trading companies. In politics, he provided financial support to liberal restoration efforts in Spain and operated within progressivism between the 1830s and 1840s. Mario Etchechury explores how the nomadic and speculative itinerary of José Buschental (1825–1870) allows us to reconstruct the asymmetric dynamics of global capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Pilar López considers the Italian military man, geographer, and statistician Agustín Codazzi (1793–1859), whose experience in the Latin American wars of independence furthered his political career in the future republics of Venezuela and Colombia, to have been a representative of the new transnational science made possible by the globalization of the first half of the nineteenth century. His exchanges with naturalists such as Alexander von Humboldt and geographers such as Adriano Balbi strengthened his academic prestige in Europe and America, as his geographical and statistical contributions made him a pivotal scientific force in the rise of capitalism in Latin America. The transatlantic business of the trader and collector George Ure Skinner (1804–1867) in Central America was conducive to his involvement in collecting natural and archaeological tropical products (animals, plants, “ruins”, etc.) and their dissemination in Great Britain. The analysis by Juan Carlos Sarazúa of the correspondence that Skinner had with James Bateman and William Hooker reveals the imperial intricacies of the material appropriation of the indigenous past.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Maria do Mar Gago discusses how the exponential growth of Angolan coffee in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries aligned with coerced labour and climate conditions. The process also related to the work of the Austrian scientist Frederick Welwitsch (1806–1872), who led the first botanical expedition to the colony of Angola (1853–1860). His environmental studies benefited the new Portuguese imperial agenda, which was forced to reconfigure its new colonial world in Africa after Brazil ceased to be part of it (1822). In Mar Gago's opinion, the rationale of Welwitsch on robusta coffee – a species native to Angola – proved vital in the expansion of commercial agriculture, and forest conservation was contingent on its cultivation being profitable. Juan Luis Martirén studies the entrepreneur Guillermo Lehmann (1840–1886), a pioneer of agricultural colonization in the Argentine pampas. Lehmann became one of the main agents facilitating the conversion of Santa Fe into an agro-exporting commodity complex for an expanding capitalist world economy in the last third of the nineteenth century.

The experience in the Philippines of the US-educated Lebanese physician Najeeb Saleeby (1870–1935), a nurse during the Spanish–American War (1898), helped him become a member of the American Oriental Society in the 1920s. Isa Blumi explains how these intermediaries of the new American imperialism became pivotal in its “civilizing” mission, arguing that understanding individuals such as Saleeby demands an interpretative framework devoid of moral judgements and resists simplifying the historical processes linked to capitalist globalization.

Ignacio García de Paso García explores the biography of the liberal revolutionary Nicolás del Balzo Llorfa (1815–1873), a Spanish political exile who became an agent of French colonial expansion in the Maghreb, as did the Italian physician and revolutionary Rinaldo Andreini (1818–1890). Daniel F. Banks presents the study of Andreini as an opportunity to examine the interaction between transnational republicanism and ongoing colonization in North Africa. Banks argues that Andreini’s connections with the French colonial authority and the medical field based in Algiers enabled him to use colonized bodies as vehicles to implement European surgical instruments and clinical knowledge.

Reconstructing the itineraries of these makers and supporters of capitalism offers a glimpse of the need to apply different scales of analysis that explain the complexity of the local and global functioning of the system. The Harmonys, the Buschentals, and the Codazzis drove the expansion of large capital in the Atlantic world and, together with this process, the cultural values of that liberal order, which was consolidated at the same time as hundreds of thousands of African slaves laboured on commodity plantations in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States.