No Limits to Their Sway

No Limits to Their Sway tells the story of the ephemeral, independent state of Cartagena, emphasizing “its development into a privateering republic, a polity that welcomed foreign outfitters, officers, and sailors by the hundreds, authorizing them to attack Spanish shipping on its behalf for a share of the prize money” (p. 6). Rethinking the Age of Revolutions from the perspective of a state that was eventually reconquered and obliterated illuminates the multiple contingencies and potential outcomes of a period that many still simplistically interpret as a transition from colony to nations. No Limits to Their Sway thus joins a host of recent studies that compellingly argue for historicizing the Age of Revolutions as a period of open-ended political futures.Edgardo Pérez Morales takes independent Cartagena seriously as a nascent republic whose authorities were working hard to make it viable in the international sphere. Securing the new state's viability required, among other measures, establishing commercial and diplomatic relations that could help Cartagena's authorities sustain the war effort against Spain. As in any early nineteenth-century war, the navy was central to achieving this goal. Unlike well-established political entities with strong institutional foundations, independent Cartagena was served by a “private irregular navy” (p. 97). Had Cartagena had a regular navy, No Limits to Their Sway would have been a conventional naval history full of admirals, battles, and emblematic warships, largely based on admiralty records held in national archives. Such archives do not exist for Cartagena's navy. Therein lies the book's biggest challenge and greatest contribution.Writing the history of independent Cartagena's navy required building a naval archive out of a multiplicity of archives. Archival research in more than a dozen archives in six countries (Colombia, Spain, Cuba, France, the United States, and Jamaica) allowed Pérez Morales to recover the hidden history of an ephemeral navy that, during the first half of the 1810s, “became a force to be reckoned with” in Caribbean waters (p. 97). With about 40 ships manned by more than 1,500 sailors, the majority of whom were of African descent, Cartagena's navy was strong enough to be perceived by Cuban authorities as a significant threat. For Spanish authorities in Cuba, despite the letters of marque through which Cartagena privateers sought to legitimize their actions, Cartagena's naval agents were pirates who needed to be hunted and hanged.While Cuba quickly emerged as the main enemy of independent Cartagena, Haiti became the small republic's most important diplomatic ally and the United States one of its most vital commercial partners. Diplomatic relations with Haiti, officialized in 1813 with the deployment of Pierre Antoine Leleux as Cartagena's representative before Haiti, made it possible for Les Cayes, on Haiti's southern coast, to become one of the most important ports of call for Cartagena's privateers (pp. 109–10). Commercial relations between US and Cartagena merchants, often materialized by Cartagena privateers, constituted what Pérez Morales calls “Cartagena's tangible American connection,” a connection that effectively represented a lifeline for independent Cartagena (p. 56).Besides imaginatively using numerous archives to reconstruct independent Cartagena's international relations, No Limits to Their Sway offers an innovative approach to the study of port cities in the Caribbean and beyond. The book analyzes Cartagena from multiple geographic scales of analysis. Local politics, particularly the rivalry between the city's patricians and plebeians, were key to Cartagena's emergence as a “locus of early anti-Spanish sentiment and revolution” (p. 1). Economic and political competition with neighboring Santa Marta and the more distant viceregal capital, Santa Fe, proved critical to both Cartagena's early disposition toward absolute independence from Spain and the short-lived nature of that independence. Regional Caribbean geopolitics influenced political events and daily life in Cartagena. And larger hemispheric and Atlantic connections supplied Cartagena with goods and information that proved central to the decisions made by the city's leaders and its privateers throughout the first half of the 1810s. In this way No Limits to Their Sway convincingly demonstrates that during the Age of Revolutions the local, intraviceregal, Caribbean, hemispheric, and Atlantic spheres were deeply interconnected.No Limits to Their Sway also aligns neatly with recent scholarship on sailors and maritime life, offering a highly informative prosopography of Caribbean sailors, many of whom were “born, spen[t] considerable time, and die[d] at sea” (p. 75). By focusing on Cartagena privateers, Pérez Morales widens our understanding of Jack Tars and Black Jacks beyond the North Atlantic waters to which a vast historiography tends to confine them. For Cartagena privateers, as well as for sailors sailing from North Atlantic ports, the sea was far and wide, and their geographic spheres of actions were not constrained by artificial lines drawn by twentieth-century geographic areas of specialization. While sailing under the flag of Cartagena, privateers, as Pérez Morales demonstrates, felt ultimately more truly connected to the sea

Economic history · Navy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Law