Linda M. Rupert

The inter-imperial contraband trade that thrived in the eighteenth-century Caribbean involved the crossing of numerous boundaries, not only geographic and political frontiers, but also social and racial barriers. Successful smuggling ventures entailed collusion among a variety of people, including colonial officials, vessel owners, merchants, captains, and sailors (black and white, enslaved and free). This paper examines the intermingling of people that occurred at the nodal points of illicit trade—in ports, on board vessels, and at coastal rendezvous sites—and the connections that participants developed across the perceived divides of empire, race/ethnicity, and social class. I focus on commerce between the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao and the northern littoral of mainland Spanish America in the mid-eighteenth century. This provides a window into the complexities of human interactions that occurred in the interstices of emerging empires in the early modern colonial Atlantic world.

[WP# 04CR004]