David Pretel is a historian of Latin America and the Atlantic World, working at the intersection of the history of science and technology and economic history. His other areas of research include environmental history and the history of colonialism.
He works at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where he is a Senior Distinguished Researcher at the Institute of History and Principal Investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant WILDHIST. He has 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). He 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. He has 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.
His first book, Institutionalising Patents in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Palgrave-Macmillan), examined the development of the Spanish patent system in the years 1826–1902, providing a fundamental reassessment of its evolution in an international and imperial context.
He has 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).
His 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. His 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.
His works, ongoing research, and other details can be found on his website
