The Smugglers' World

In this book Jesse Cromwell dedicates great effort to understanding and diagnosing the society that gave rise to the contraband so characteristic of eighteenth-century colonial Venezuela. He presents a complex picture of a society supported by illegal, corrupt behaviors and a peculiar morality that connected Venezuelans and Europeans in the Caribbean in unsuspected, sustained, and creative ways.Cromwell examines the long history of imperial disdain for Venezuela, marginalized by the great colonial projects that formed what today are Peru and Mexico, and those social spaces that affected Venezuela's consolidation. Cromwell is interested in understanding contraband as the response of a neglected, impoverished colony seeking to survive and how this culture of contraband was disrupted by the forceful presence of the Real Compañía Guipuzcoana de Caracas from 1728 to 1784. The most successful of its kind throughout the eighteenth century, this entity, known as the Caracas Company, was part of Spanish authorities' efforts to manage and control American trade. The problem, as Cromwell well emphasizes, is that the Caracas Company—with its monopolistic and often-abusive and arbitrary operations—ended the controversial social, commercial, and moral practices integral to colonial Venezuela's economic and social fabric and generated a continuous, disturbing conflict between two sectors of Venezuelan society.Contraband, as Cromwell describes, connected Dutch, British, and French merchants and sailors with Spaniards and Venezuelans. The significant presence of African-descended people—free and enslaved—both on smugglers' boats (as sailors) and among harvesters and merchants (as field workers and cargo carriers) created a dense multilingual, multiracial, and multireligious fabric that clashed with the social and political mores of the time. This dense fabric could not exist without the approval or connivance of important characters in Venezuela's colonial bureaucracy, from port officials to governors.To complement this analysis, Cromwell devotes a final, special chapter to Juan Francisco de León's famous 1749–51 rebellion that challenged the colony's status quo and most powerful institutions, including the Caracas Company and the governor himself. The León movement ended in defeat but led to a reform of the company's operation and greater acceptance of Venezuelans' complaints in court. As Cromwell correctly points out, the importance of the practices and social values around contraband for colonial Venezuela is clear and evident—though he is not the first to link contraband to the León rebellion, as he presumes (p. 273n3).The information and analysis that Cromwell provides are extensive, diverse, and often novel. I especially appreciated the information that he collected from the Comisos section of Venezuela's national archive, which includes scattered, practically unknown files on descaminos (capture on land of contraband goods) and seizures, and from the Audiencia de Santo Domingo section of Seville's Archivo General de Indias, which contains records for Venezuela from 1700 to 1750. This allows Cromwell to introduce little-known cases of contraband both on land and at sea.One of the book's central interests is understanding the social foundation of contraband in colonial Venezuela. Cromwell constantly reiterates that his work is a social history of an economic practice that seemed extremely relevant to Venezuelans. However, what constituted contraband practices is not clearly explained. The reader cannot distinguish the different social groups participating in these practices and what roles they played; Cromwell does not clearly explain what differentiated the activities of those Curaçaoans who furtively arrived in sloops on the Venezuelan coast from those that the Spanish conducted, legal or otherwise, in ports open to foreign traffic. The slave who furtively transports a bag of cacao does not have the same power or play the same role in the contraband economy as the La Guaira port official who turns a blind eye to undeclared merchandise. Likewise, although sailors, merchants, and boat captains all lived from contraband, they should not all be grouped together under the category of smuggler; that a good majority of sailors and crews were enslaved complicates even further smuggler as a social typology and challenges their relationship with the thorny issues of corruption and morality.On the other hand, Cromwell should have been more cautious about generalizing high-ranking officials' role and behavior in the contraband trade and about presenting situations and circumstances from the early eighteenth century as typical of the entire century. It is also important to avoid depicting all colonial officials and bureaucrats as corrupt; there are also countless officials who acted morally. The very first intendant, José de Abalos, was one such functionary who apparently acted according to the law and tried to control illegal practices and crime.In spite of such lapses, the bulk of the work makes a good contribution to the scholarship and fleshes out the picture of contraband and its complex dynamics in colonial Venezuela and the Caribbean. Likewise, this book is a good addition to the marginalized field of Venezuelan colonial history and pairs well with the few but substantial US-published works on the topic. This is a rich history of contraband in colonial Venezuela that could have benefited from a closer look into the social composition of the smuggling networks and their intricate operations

Colonialism · Consolidation (business) · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Monopolistic competition · Monopoly · Morality · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Law