David Pretel

I am a historian of Latin America and the Atlantic World, working at the intersection of the history of science and technology and economic history. My other areas of research include environmental history and the history of colonialism.

I work at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where I am Senior Distinguished Researcher at the Institute of History and Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant WILDHIST. I have held teaching and research positions at several universities, including Pompeu Fabra University, El Colegio de México, the European University Institute (EUI), and the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). I studied at the Autonomous University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge, and was a visiting graduate student at the Universities of Bristol, California-Los Angeles (UCLA), and Nottingham. I have also been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, King’s College London, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, as well as an invited professor at the EHESS in Paris.

I am the author of Institutionalising Patents in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Palgrave-Macmillan), which examines the development of the Spanish patent system in the years 1826–1902 and provides a fundamental reassessment of its evolution in an international and imperial context.

I have also published the volumes The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy: Circuits of Trade, Money and Knowledge, 1650-1914 (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, 2015), Technology and Globalisation: Networks of Experts in World History (Palgrave, 2018) and Colours, Commodities and the Birth of Globalization: A History of the Natural Dyes of the Americas, 1500–2000 (Bloomsbury, 2024).

My recent publications include articles in the journals History of Science, Technology & Culture, Global Environment, Business History, History of Technology, Latin America in Economic History, Historia Mexicana and Ayer. My writings have also appeared or are forthcoming in several edited volumes such as the Oxford Handbook of Commodity History and the Cambridge History of Technology.