Review of The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth- Century Venezuela (original) (raw)
Related papers
Trans-imperial History in the Making of the Slave Trade to Venezuela, 1526-1811
2012
The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of knowledge about the transatlantic slave trade, both through research on specific sections of this traffic and through the consolidation of datasets into a single online resource: Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (hereafter Voyages Database). This collective project has elucidated in great detail the slave trading routes across the Atlantic and the broad African origins of captives, at least from their ports of embarkation. However, this multi-source database tells us little about the slave trading routes within the Americas, as slaves were shipped through various ports of disembarkation, sometimes by crossing imperial borders in the New World. This gap complicates our understanding of the slave trade to Spanish America, which depended on foreign slavers to acquire captives through a rigid system of contracts (asientos and licencias) overseen by the Crown up to 1789. 1 These foreign merchants often shipped captives from their own American territories such as Jamaica, Curaçao, and Brazil. Thus, the slave trade connected the Spanish colonies with interlopers from England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal (within the Spanish domain from 1580 to 1640), and eventually the United States. The importance of the intra-American slave trade is particularly evident in Venezuela: while the Voyages Database shows only 11,500 enslaved Africans arriving in Venezuela directly from Africa, I estimate that 101,000 captives were disembarked there, mostly from other colonies. This article illuminates the volume of this traffic, the slave trading routes, and the origins of slaves arriving in Venezuela by exploring the connections of this Spanish colony with the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French Atlantics. Imperial conflicts and commercial networks shaped the number and sources of slaves arriving in Venezuela. As supplies of captives passed from Portuguese to Dutch, and then to English hands, the colony absorbed captives from different African regions of embarkation.
Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690
Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690, 2020
Islanders and Empire examines the role smuggling played in the cultural, economic, and socio-political transformation of Hispaniola from the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. With a rare focus on local peoples and communities, the book analyzes how residents of Hispaniola actively negotiated and transformed the meaning and reach of imperial bureaucracies and institutions for their own benefit. By co-opting the governing and judicial powers of local and imperial institutions on the island, residents could take advantage of, and even dominate, the contraband trade that reached the island's shores. In doing so, they altered the course of the European inter-imperial struggles in the Caribbean by limiting, redirecting, or suppressing the Spanish crown's policies, thus taking control of their destinies and that of their neighbors in Hispaniola, other Spanish Caribbean territories, and the Spanish empire in the region. - Provides a rare, on-the-ground study of a Spanish Caribbean society in the seventeenth century, a previously understudied period and region. - Discusses significant examples of colonial peripheries and borderlands in shaping overall imperial governance. - Features a strong narrative style as a key feature of historical inquiry.
2020
His book is evidence that he knows the history of Cartagena like the back of his hand, but he also challenges and redefines current understandings of Colombia national history by bringing voice to black privateers in the independence of Cartagena and highlighting their help to Lieutenant Colonel Simón Bolívar. Experienced professors and graduate students will find in this book useful information about privateering with a special focus on African descendants, which makes this book a valuable asset. His book starts with a chapter called Slavery, Seamanship, Freedom. Pérez Morales clearly connects these three concepts by telling the story of Olaudah Equiano 1 to exemplify how seamen had the opportunity to pay for their freedom, and although difficult, was possible. Subsequently, by using the runaway advertisements published in Les Affiches Americaines in Saint-Domingue, one might grasp how freedom was experienced by some crew members of famous vessels such as Bellona, Augustus, and the Blanche. Additionally, this chapter offers an understanding of an offshore maroon which is not a common topic in the field. By using several vessels' names, the author provides greater content to the future reader. The second chapter, called Heralds of Liberty and Disobedience, makes clear how privateers, especially French Negroes from the Antilles, were demonized because of their association with Haiti's revolution. These sailors generated, transmitted, and transformed information not only by word of mouth but also by transporting and reading out loud newspapers and handwritten documents. Pérez Morales discloses how smuggling was a key factor to affect bureaucrats and merchants' businesses in Cuba with the example of Antoine Labarièrre, a Parisian presumably involved in smuggling. However, bureaucrats were afraid of black privateers for other reasons. By using letters of and other historical references to people, such as Governor Anastasio Cejudo and José Ignacio de Pombo 2 , the author clarifies his
Colonial Latin American Review, 2023
Using the wreck of the galleon Nuestra Señora de Las Maravillas (1656) as a point of departure, this article analyzes the role of Cartagena de Indias as a logistical center for fraudulent silver salvaging and transportation in the Spanish Caribbean during the middle of the seventeenth century. After 1640, Cartagena’s insertion into Atlantic maritime networks suffered from the collapse of Portuguese-led slave trading, the decline in legal silver circulation in Spanish ports, and expansion of other European colonial powers across the Caribbean. The article uses the cases made against officials and contractors involved in unauthorized silver salvaging in Cartagena to show how Caribbean-based Spanish merchants and administrators created trans-Atlantic bullion transportation networks independent of royal control. Like their legal counterparts, these unauthorized networks relied on specialized maritime labor from free and unfree divers of African and Amerindian origin, and sailors of all races. Simultaneously, maritime laborers’ knowledge, often extracted under torture, formed the basis of prosecutors’ cases against suspect colonial officials. By following these maritime linkages, this article highlights the centrality of maritime labor and communication logistics in the structural rearrangement of the Caribbean during the seventeenth century.
that thrives and is dependent on the physical, intellectual, commercial, and artistic labor of Europeans, Africans, indigenous tribes, and every mixture thereof. What makes this collection so insightful is its focus on the richness of the sixteenth century in and of itself. If you consider the fact that we never have and never will be able to predict the future, it is unfair to simply judge a culture or historical period as a precursor to that of another era, especially when such an evaluation is made through a dichotomous cause-and-effect perspective. These essays are strengthened by their concerted focus on the complexity of Caribbean life during the sixteenth century .
en Culture and History, Instituto de Historia, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CISC-Madrid, Vol 12(2), 2023. , 2023
Slave transshipment and resale routes within the Spanish Caribbean were a fundamental part of the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans brought to the region during the late XVI and first half of the XVII century were forcibly made to traverse multiple circum-Caribbean points throughout their lives in a continuous process of de-racination, re-commodification, and forced mobility. Maritime regional slave routes linked seemingly marginal locations in the Caribbean like Cumaná, Margarita, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, or Trujillo with wider regional flows of peoples, capital, and commodities, as well as with the circulation in the larger Atlantic. Veracruz and Cartagena each served as an axis for these regional slave transshipment and resale routes, while Havana and Cartagena both functioned as re-shipment springboards for Veracruz. Las rutas de trasbordo y reventa de esclavos en el Caribe español fueron parte fundamental del tráfico esclavista trasatlántico. Los africanos esclavizados que fueron traídos a la región durante las últimas décadas del siglo XVI y la primera mitad del siglo XVII fueron obligados a recorrer múltiples localidades del circum-Caribe a través de sus vidas, en un proceso continuo de desarraigo, re-comodificación y movilidad forzada. Las rutas marí-timas regionales del tráfico esclavista vincularon localidades consideradas marginales en el Caribe como Cumaná, Margarita, Puerto Rico, Jamaica o Trujillo con los flujos regionales más amplios de gentes, capitales y productos, así como con la circulación atlántica. Veracruz y Cartagena funcionaron como ejes en estas rutas regionales de trasbordo y reventa, mientras que Habana y Cartagena servían como plataformas de trasbordo hacia Veracruz.
Jamaica's illicit trade with Spanish America in the early eighteenth-century
2023
The illicit trade of Jamaica with the territories of other imperial powers in the early eighteenth-century was vital to the development of not only the mercantile and maritime communities of the island, but also the plantation economy. In this paper, which will form part of a chapter from my thesis on the merchant community of eighteenth-century Kingston, I will discuss the sources of Jamaica's illicit trade/s, focusing on interaction with Spanish America, and provide some preliminary results and problems from my research.
The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century
2019
Edited by Ida Altman and David Wheat. Contributions by Lauren MacDonald, Cacey Farnsworth, Erin Stone, Ida Altman, Shannon Lalor, Brian Hamm, Marc Eagle, David Wheat, JMH Clark, Pablo Gómez, Spencer Tyce, Gabriel de Avilez Rocha. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9780803299573/