In pursuit of common interests: struggles and crisis of merchant conglomerate of Santafé de Bogotá at late colonial period

This article aims to show the existence in the city of Bogotá in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century of an important group of traders with great social, political and economic power that, acting as a body, ensured defending their interests before the viceregal authorities and the Consulado de Cartagena, and how that group broke up as a result of the political situation created by the crisis of the Spanish monarchy in 1808 and the independence of the Nuevo Reino de Granada.