The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795-1815

Historians of the Atlantic world have richly documented how colonial subjects in the Caribbean navigated shifting boundaries and imperial allegiances during the Age of Revolution. The upheaval generated by the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions pushed waves of royalist and republican refugees into exile, reshaped the political landscape for free people of color, and fueled slave rebellions from the US South to Venezuela. Building on recent studies of interimperial migration in the Greater Antilles, Kit Candlin offers a compelling portrait of Britain's “frontier colonies” of Grenada, Trinidad, and Demerara during the Age of Revolution. Through a series of illustrative case studies, Candlin considers how the rapid flow of people, ideas, and goods forged a distinctive milieu in the southern Caribbean.In the decades between the Seven Years' War and the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814, Britain garnered eight new colonies in the Caribbean. These recently acquired territories, Candlin maintains, constituted an unstable “Caribbean frontier at the edge of empire” (p. xxii). In contrast to Britain's older sugar colonies of Barbados and Jamaica, the southern Caribbean colonies were a “transcultural, transcolonial world” characterized by highly mobile residents, limited government control, and vast swaths of undeveloped forest and swampland (p. xxi).The Last Caribbean Frontier traces how the region's polyglot population navigated the imposition of British rule beginning in the late eighteenth century. Five of the book's eight chapters examine Thomas Picton's notorious tenure as military governor of Trinidad from 1797 to 1801. Picton's violent exploits in Trinidad during his five years as governor—particularly his role in the torture of 14-year-old free mulatto Louisa Calderon—have been well documented. Therefore, while Candlin does revisit the Calderon scandal, he devotes most of his attention to Picton's beleaguered efforts to govern Trinidad's transient population of “free coloureds, capricious planters and revolutionaries” (p. 69). Unfamiliar with the procedures of colonial governance and the “inter-coloniality” of the southern Caribbean, Picton sought advice from opportunistic émigré planters and brutally repressed anyone deemed subversive, whether enslaved or free (p. 69). In addition to ordering the torture of Calderon in 1801, he authored a repressive new slave code, censored the local press, authorized antirepublican raids in Venezuela, and presided over a series of tribunals that executed enslaved Africans accused of a poisoning conspiracy.If the region's porous borders vexed Picton and other British officials, they provided economic opportunities for free people of color. In the late eighteenth century, free people of color comprised two-thirds of the free population in Trinidad and a significant percentage of the free community in Grenada and Demerara. While British authorities gradually instituted discriminatory laws that targeted free people of color, ambitious free people of color circumvented these restrictions by marrying European émigrés, purchasing property in neighboring colonies, or relocating to outlying districts where government presence was weak. Free landowners of color also seized upon the language of the French Revolution and took up arms to secure their rights. Fédon's Rebellion in Grenada, Candlin argues, offers a dramatic example of how free landowners of color used their transcolonial family networks and business ties to pursue social mobility in the southern Caribbean during the Age of Revolution.Candlin's most important contribution is his detailed account of free women of color's roles in the southern Caribbean frontier. European travelers and colonial officials often noted the ubiquitous presence of free women of color in the region's bustling port cities. Yet, scholarly accounts of these enterprising women tend to situate their activities in the context of a single territory rather than tracing their networks across the Atlantic world. Weaving together evidence gleaned from probate records, arrival registers, trial transcripts, and colonial correspondence, Candlin highlights how free women of color exploited “the gaps that a poorly organized and inconsistent empire allowed” (p. 155). Women like Dolly Thomas of Demerara and Rosetta Smith of Trinidad took advantage of the region's underdeveloped commercial networks and amassed their fortunes by huckstering, renting out the services of enslaved Africans, and speculating in real estate. Others like Jeanette Philip and Judith Philip of Grenada owned profitable estates. These free women of color, Candlin argues, “were not simply concubines and bit players in a European colonial drama but were creditors, partners, mothers and fellow planters participating on much the same level as their white counterparts” (p. 28).The Last Caribbean Frontier successfully excavates the dense familial, business, and political networks that linked colonial subjects across the southern Caribbean. Yet Candlin's work also raises important questions about the uniqueness of the southern Caribbean “frontier.” The reader is left to wonder how the strategies utilized by Dolly Thomas and Rosetta Smith compared to those employed by “Atlantic creoles” further north in Jamaica, Spanish Florida, and Cuba. In a similar vein, how did the mobility strategies of the Fédon and Philip families in Grenada compare to those of free people of color in Saint-Domingue? Finally, Candlin's fascinating examination of the waves of refugees who fled the Venezuelan War of Independence and relocated to Trinidad highlights the need for more scholarship on the history of migration between the two neighboring territories. As The Last Caribbean Frontier powerfully demonstrates, the southern Caribbean was a hub for enslaved and free migrants from across the Atlantic world, including South America

Ancient history · Annexation · Archaeology · Caribbean art · Caribbean island · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · Ethnology · Frontier · Geography · Independence (probability theory) · Political science · Politics · Population · Portrait · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Demography · History · Law

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