Josep Maria Fradera, Catedràtic d’universitat, Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) was a visiting scholar at the Department of History. His work centers on the transition from the Greater Spanish Empire to the nineteenth-century Spanish colonial system in the Caribbean and the China Sea (the Philippines). He is the author of Colonias para después de un imperio (Barcelona, 2005) and editor of Endless Empires. Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, and America’s Decline (Madison, 2012; with Alfred W. McCoy and Stephen Jacobson),  Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire (New York, 2013) and La nación imperial. Derechos, representación y ciudadanía en los imperios liberales de Gran Bretaña, Francia, España y los Estados Unidos, 1750-1918 (2014). He is presently working on two projects: a research induced by his last book;  a questioning of the very foundations of the Spanish American world, such as the social arrangements that allowed the mining expansion and the formation of so called ‘castas’ in sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.