Enemies Bound by Trade: Jamaica, Cuba, and the Shared World of Contraband in Atlantic Empires, 1710-1760

Abstract

This dissertation reveals how, in the half-century following 1710, inhabitants of British and Spanish America became ever more deeply intertwined in an interconnected regional economy based on illicit trade and violent conflict, regardless of peace or war. Drawing together English- and Spanish-language sources from European, American, and Caribbean archives, this dissertation shows how these evolving transnational relationships shaped not only Jamaica and Cuba, but also the rise of the Atlantic sugar plantation complex, the Atlantic slave trade, and the very nature of Europe’s Atlantic empires.

To unpack this complex web of relationships, the dissertation first examines in detail three major aspects of the early eighteenth-century inter-imperial economy connecting British Jamaica and Spanish Cuba: smuggling; the South Sea Company’s monopoly contract to supply slaves to Spanish America (the asiento); and privateering. The social and cultural net woven by contraband trade and privateering reached broad and deep, drawing in not only merchants and planters, but also poor whites and free blacks who manned the vessels traversing imperial boundaries. Jamaican slave traders carried tens of thousands of captive Africans to Spanish America, while simultaneously others enslaved in Jamaica used knowledge gained from illicit traders to escape their bondage. In seeking profits, status, or survival, colonists in both islands constructed an illegal and informal but nevertheless coherent system that operated alongside the formal structure imposed by each island’s European metropole.

After narrating the emergence and workings of this inter-imperial economy, the dissertation then shows how the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739) revolutionized it, as newly empowered Cuban elites took advantage of the conflict’s disruption to forge contracts with their ostensible Jamaican enemies to peacefully supply the Spanish colony with foodstuffs and slaves. Following the Peace of 1748, these contacts continued and expanded to incorporate the rest of the Spanish Caribbean. Simultaneously, the dramatic expansion of the Jamaican sugar complex in that period opened new ports around the island, spurring Cuban merchants to travel clandestinely to Jamaica and meet directly with their Anglo-American counterparts, rather than waiting for British and British colonial vessels to come to them. As officials became increasingly conscious of how this integrated world was vital not only to the two islands, but also to societies across their Atlantic empires, Jamaican and Cuban elites were accommodated in ways not afforded to other colonists. The inter-imperial relationships they had forged were first quietly accepted and later formally incorporated into the structures of the “reformed” empires of the late eighteenth century. The result of these transformations was the quasi-legalization of the international slave trade and the dramatic decline in inter-imperial violence for the first time in centuries.