Between Imperial Projects and National Dreams: Communication Networks, Geopolitical Imagination, and the Role of New Granada in the Configuration of a Greater Caribbean Space, 1780s--1810s

This dissertation explores the roles of trade and migration networks in the configuration of a trans-imperial space---the Greater Caribbean---and in the development of its inhabitants' geopolitical imagination. It challenges existing scholarship that has taken geography for granted, neglecting the ever-changing nature of spatial configurations. The research also recasts previous interpretations of the Age of Revolutions to argue against the impression that changes during this period were preordained. My approach takes the transition from colony to republic---the emergence of a national imagined community---as one of many possibilities that configured the rich geopolitical imagination of the age.;I contend that the Greater Caribbean was a space under permanent construction. I argue that the size and continually flexible boundaries of the region changed depending on who was defining or experiencing this subjective geography. The implicit definitions of Greater Caribbean espoused by specific groups of people residing within this space informed their interpretations of the present and framed their ability to imagine potential futures.;In the first two chapters, I reconstruct the commercial and migration networks that gave shape to the Greater Caribbean. Chapter 1 emphasizes the combined impact of British and Spanish commercial policies in the configuration of the trans-imperial Greater Caribbean. Chapter 2 positions sea captains as the key players in the configuration of the Greater Caribbean space. Through frequent circulation captains, sailors, and other travelers effectively created a trans-imperial space that provided its inhabitants a geographic framework for evaluating and defining their options in the revolutionary Atlantic. In the other three chapters, I present case studies that deploy the variety of geopolitical projects competing actors develop in the trans-imperial Caribbean of the Age of Revolutions. Generally looking north from the coast of Caribbean Colombia, these three chapters depict different and often contrasting ways of imagining and experiencing the potentialities the Greater Caribbean had to offer.;Using an innovative geographic framework to interpret the transformations of the Age of Revolutions, this dissertation uncovers unlikely alliances and enduring connections that traditional geographic frameworks have kept in the dark.