Creolization and Contraband

Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curacao in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. xviii + 347 pp.REVIEWED BY JAMES ROBERTSONIN A WIDE-RANGING STUDY, LINDA RUPERT SURVEYS THE ISLAND of Curacao, the port that became Willemstad, and the broader regions its merchants traded with. Her book covers a long time frame, reaching from the capture of the backwater Spanish settlement by the Dutch West India Company in 1634, through to the French revolutionary wars which first transformed the island's trading partners and then saw the island seized by the British in 1800. A small island provides a foundation for an ambitious book which offers suggestive insights onto the roles slave trading and smuggling both played in shaping a distinctive creole culture. Broad arguments are rafted on extensive research. The book builds on Dutch, Spanish, Papiamentu and English-language publications as well as extensive trawls through Dutch and Spanish archives where the author brings a sharp eye to her sources.Curacao thrived as a major entrepot because trading in enslaved Africans opened doors in most colonies. The commerce which supported this desolate but thriving island offers Rupert a foundation to develop fresh insights onto the dynamics shaping its distinctive societies via practices that extended across the Caribbean. Successive holders of the Spanish Empire's asiento slave-dealing monopoly used the island as a terminus for disembarking cargoes of enslaved Africans before using local vessels to re-ship them to further destinations around the southern Caribbean and terra firma (the South American mainland). Even when the asiento was held by hostile nations, the island's slave-holding facilities still provided a basis for Curacao's international trade, with labour-hungry planters willing to exchange their sugar, cacao, tobacco and hides for enslaved workers and European manufactures. The island thrived not just because the Spanish empire's supply lines were inefficient, but because, while other empires sought to enforce mercantilist orthodoxies, Curacao's traders filled gaps in inefficient markets, taking their goods north to Hispaniola, south to Venezuela, and sometimes sailing west to offload slaves in Jamaica too. The trade with Venezuela meant that the island became the leading source of cacao and tobacco for the Netherlands. Efforts by the government-backed Caracas Company to recover this trade in the late eighteenth century failed to supplant local farmers' readiness to deal with Curacao's merchants, though reports made by company officials offer fascinating information on how smuggling worked. Considering overlaps between risings attempted in Venezuela by communities which included smugglers and the descendants of slaves who had escaped from Curacao, risings where surviving leaders then tried to flee to the island, and a further rising on an estate on Curacao, then indicates how far contacts extended. Until the French and Haitian Revolutions disrupted Curacao's trading, the island remained a major node in inter-regional commerce across much of the southern Caribbean. The book ends here, leaving someone else the opportunity to explore the records generated by the British occupations during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars

Ancient history · Atlantic World · Creolization · Ethnology · Geography · Sociology · Anthropology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History