The seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean as global crossroads: transimperial and transregional approaches

Historical scholarship on the seventeenth-century Caribbean generally has focused on the rise of Dutch, English, and French settlements in the region and commercial export agriculture, especially the cultivation of sugar using enslaved African labor. From the vantage point of the Spanish Caribbean, however, the seventeenth century looks quite different. In the Greater Antilles, on the Isthmus of Panama, and along the Caribbean’s southern littoral Spanish towns, the majority of them ports, had been established a century or more earlier (Altman 2021; Díaz Ceballos 2020). Initially mostly oriented to serving extractive enterprises such as mining and sugar cultivation (Gelpí Baíz 2000; Sued Badillo 2001; Rodríguez Morel 2012) and shipping livestock and provisions, Caribbean port towns became part of an active, sprawling maritime network serving local, regional, and transatlantic economies. Spanish expansion in the Caribbean during the 1490s and early 1500s depended heavily on the subjugation and incorporation of Indigenous societies, with diverse responses from Amerindian communities, including sustained resistance (Mena García 2011; Farnsworth 2019; Stone 2021). Along with violence and the demands of Spanish colonialism, epidemic disease took a notoriously steep toll on Indigenous populations (Henige 1998; Livi-Bacci 2003), while ostensibly ‘Spanish’ society, particularly outside of urban areas, became increasingly ethnically mixed with a strong Indigenous component (Schwartz 1997; Altman 2013). During the 1560s or 1570s—at least half a century before northern Europeans began to establish permanent footholds in the region—Spanish activities in the Caribbean entered a second phase with the consolidation of the Indies fleets, and Havana and Cartagena de Indias overtook Santo Domingo as leading centers of trade (Vidal Ortega 2002; Fuente et al. 2008). By the late sixteenth century, sugar production in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico had declined significantly while ranching, farming, regional commerce, and in some cases mining came to predominate in colonial Spanish Caribbean economies (Abello Vives and Bassi Arévalo 2006; Giusti-Cordero 2009; Cromwell 2014; Stark 2015). Perhaps the most dramatic event separating the sixteenth century from the seventeenth was the forced depopulation of western Hispaniola in 1604–1606, along with other draconian measures designed to stem unregulated trade and enforce Crown control (Ponce Vázquez 2020). In short, while scholarship on areas settled or seized by northern European powers tends to treat the seventeenth century as a natural chronological starting point, historical analysis of the Spanish Caribbean during the 1600s provides an opportunity to examine the region’s development in relation to processes that were already under way in the previous century.

Despite a host of new developments, including but certainly not limited to territorial encroachment by northern Europeans, many of the most characteristic aspects of the sixteenth-century Spanish Caribbean—its demographic diversity, mixed economies, maritime connections, and powerful local elites—prevailed during the seventeenth century as well. Between 1580 and 1640, when Spain’s Habsburg monarchs ruled both Spanish and Portuguese empires, a wide variety of new routes came into existence alongside Spain’s Indies fleets (Pérez-Mallaína Bueno 1998; Rodríguez Lorenzo 2015) and active maritime traffic with the Canaries (Torres Santana 2003). Iberian Union-era trajectories intensified the Lusophone Atlantic world’s connections to the Spanish Caribbean (Eagle 2014; Wheat 2015; Rocha 2019; Wolff 2021). Cartagena de Indias, for example, played a central role in the chain of commercial and logistical hubs that linked Lisbon and West Africa to the Viceroyalty of Peru (Newson and Minchin 2007). The transatlantic traffic of enslaved Africans fundamentally reshaped much of the region during this sixty-year period; Africans and people of African descent played increasingly vital roles in Spanish Caribbean societies, comprising demographic majorities in several major ports and their hinterlands (Acosta Corniel 2015; Wheat 2016; Gómez 2017; Silva Campo 2021). Important maroon communities, which first formed in the Spanish Caribbean in the early sixteenth century, continued to exist in both conflict and symbiosis with Spanish settlements, with some surviving into the late 1600s (Landers 2013; Schwaller 2018; Obando Andrade 2020; Aram and García-Falcón 2022) and in some territories (like Jamaica) after they changed hands.

Yet despite the resilience and dynamism of Spanish Caribbean economies and Spain’s continuing territorial dominance, most narratives of English, French, Dutch, and Danish inroads into and successes in the region during this period portray Spain as, at best, a potentially troublesome but weakening rival, inexorably forced to yield its overseas possessions in face of the superior financial, military, and naval resources and capabilities of northern Europe.¹ Just the same, in many respects the most frequently cited examples of Spain’s weakness, such as the loss of its silver fleet to the Dutch in 1628 (or of Jamaica to the English in 1655), were exceptional.² As large as such events may loom in English-language scholarship, the attenuation of direct maritime and commercial ties to the Lusophone Atlantic following Portugal’s renewed independence in 1640—accompanied by new anti-Portuguese sentiments that culminated in Inquisitorial repression—probably was far more consequential for most residents of the Spanish Caribbean at that time.³

Even after the dissolution of the Iberian Union in 1640, Spain maintained its hold over most of the Caribbean with thriving ports, productive estates, and robust institutions that would find few parallels in the neighboring possessions of the British, French, or Dutch until much later. By the mid-1600s, however, regional and international geopolitical contexts were quite different from those of a century earlier. The transatlantic slave trade to the Spanish Caribbean diminished starkly after 1640, recovering only a portion of its volume and frequency over the remainder of the century.⁴ The traffic continued, but in a different form; beginning in the 1660s, Spanish Caribbean slave markets relied heavily on Dutch and English colonies—Curaçao, Jamaica, and Barbados—for access to enslaved Africans (O’Malley 2014; Navarrete 2015; Borucki et al. 2015). During precisely this period, Portobelo eclipsed Cartagena de Indias as Spanish America’s foremost slaving port (García-Montón 2019). Changes in the structure and operation of the Indies fleets after the mid-1650s were no less drastic. In addition to a realignment of the administrative hierarchy and tax policies previously used to organize the Carrera de Indias, the fleets sailed much less frequently during the second half of the seventeenth century, their Iberian center of gravity shifting from Seville to Cádiz, where northern European merchants were better established and where virtually all participants had better opportunities to evade royal fiscal restrictions (Crespo Solana 2009; Lamikiz 2011; Díaz Blanco 2018). Other northern European traders avoided peninsular Spain or the Indies fleets altogether, hiring front men in the Canary Islands who were still legally permitted to transport a certain amount of trade goods to Spanish America (Pérez-Mallaína Bueno 1993).

To view the seventeenth-century Caribbean as essentially an arena of imperial rivalry in which local actors carried out the policies of their respective European metropoles would be to misinterpret the nature of Spanish imperial rule during the era and to underestimate drastically the Spanish Caribbean’s diversity, complexity, and chronological depth. As scholars begin to unravel the nature of trade networks to, through, and within the Spanish Caribbean, both before and after 1640, they increasingly find a wealth of intricate and surprising connections among the merchants, entrepreneurs, and even officials of the rival empires that operated in the region. Given the scope and degree of organization of commercial networks and the involvement of so many diverse players, the standard terms for extra-legal trade—contraband, smuggling—fail to convey the full dimensions and nature of interconnected systems of transatlantic, regional and local exchange in which the Caribbean figured prominently (Rupert 2012; Cromwell 2018).⁵ That valuable merchandise could be trafficked clandestinely without paying taxes required by Iberian laws, while the purchasers or the traffickers’ heirs subsequently employed Iberian laws in an effort to lay claim to the same merchandise if their rights of ownership were challenged, suggests ‘the inadequacy not only of customs controls but of categories of legal and illegal trade’ (Warsh 2018, 174). Spanish free-trade policies enacted during the second half of the eighteenth century, including both the gradual elimination of the Indies fleet system and the liberalization of the slave trade, ultimately aimed to appropriate and regulate de facto trade patterns that had existed since the 1600s or even earlier (Bassi 2016; Belmonte Postigo 2019). The same vessels that carried merchandise or enslaved Africans from one imperial jurisdiction to another, or from one settlement to another within the same jurisdiction, also carried information that could foster slave uprisings or contribute to independence movements (Ferrer 2014; Scott 2018; Soriano 2018); perhaps unsurprisingly, when the latter occurred they often relied on the aid of international privateers and mariners (Pérez Morales 2018). Meanwhile, the same routes that enabled trade among the Caribbean colonies of different empires also facilitated transimperial marronage, by both land and sea; this commonplace practice was partly fueled by a Spanish policy implemented from 1680 to 1790 that granted refuge and freedom to fugitives from slavery in neighboring colonies, as long as they converted to Catholicism (Landers 1999; Rupert 2013; Belmonte Postigo 2017).

Imperially bounded Caribbean historiographies that privilege the formal establishment of northern European colonies during the seventeenth century have largely failed to reckon with the earlier and concomitant presence of not only Portuguese, Italians, and Flemings but also English, Irish, Scots, Dutch, French, Germans, and Scandinavians, among others, in the Spanish colonies (Herrero Sánchez and Pérez Tostado 2010). To give but one example, the Genoese merchant Domenico Grillo, in his role as administrator of the asiento to deliver enslaved Africans to Spanish Caribbean ports from 1663 to the early 1670s, worked from his headquarters in Madrid to create and employ a network of transnational operatives who penetrated not only Spanish American markets but the English and Dutch empires as well (García-Montón 2022). Other recent studies address officials based in neighboring English colonies who analyzed and interacted with Spanish Caribbean settlements (Hatfield 2018), or British traders and factors who resided in some of them (Finucane 2016). Even our understanding of episodes of outright conflict in the seventeenth-century Caribbean—such as the well-known French, English, and Dutch raids on Spanish American territories—is becoming increasingly nuanced. The British occupation of Havana in 1762–1763 was in many ways an extension or intensification of western Cuba’s ambiguous relationship, one that frequently involved the traffic of enslaved Africans, with Jamaica and other nearby English settlements beginning in the seventeenth century (Schneider 2018). Other recent works that focus on the seventeenth century have examined the experiences of non-Hispanic Protestants brought before Cartagena’s Inquisition (Block 2012, 65–105), of Mayas from Tabasco and Yucatán enslaved by multinational freebooters (Bialuschewski 2017), and of women of Afro-Mexican origin in French Saint-Domingue and elsewhere during the years after their capture by buccaneers (Sierra Silva 2020).

This special issue draws attention to the seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean as a setting for transimperial and transregional movements and exchanges and to the diverse inhabitants as agents and actors who participated extensively in both. It demonstrates the largely untapped potential of Spanish Caribbean sources and historiographies for identifying and exploring historical patterns of global connection.⁶ In contrast to the usually accepted picture of impoverishment and decline—which to some degree is a function of the older, tenacious notion of general decline in seventeenth-century Spain and Spanish America—the articles included in this issue reflect the complicated and messy interactions of merchants, mariners, officials, captives, fugitives, and settlers who crossed imperial lines and regional borders to collaborate in ways that only recently have begun to come into sharper focus. Countering Eurocentric portrayals of the Spanish Caribbean as marginal or peripheral, this suite of essays seeks to advance our understanding of the region as a constellation of ports and dynamic population centers whose evolution during the 1600s depended on their positions vis-à-vis multiple empires and within multiple overlapping maritime circuits.

In ‘Informal entrepôts: witness testimony about slave ship arribadas to Santo Domingo and San Juan in the 1620s’ Marc Eagle draws on testimonies generated during a wide-ranging investigation of unauthorized slaving voyages arriving in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. These arribadas enabled inhabitants of both islands to maintain connections to slaving hubs in Atlantic Africa and to many other Spanish Caribbean ports that were secondary destinations for the African captives who had been transported to Santo Domingo or San Juan. Regardless of their places of origin, the slave merchants, crew members, and passengers who carried out these voyages often developed extensive and durable social ties with local residents in both port cities. In addition to facilitating the trafficking of enslaved Africans within the Caribbean, some vecinos of Santo Domingo and San Juan themselves had participated in transatlantic slaving circuits, becoming well-versed in the trade as a result. The regularity of unregistered voyages’ arrivals in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico not only sheds new light on the informal commerce conducted within and parallel to Atlantic slaving itineraries approved by the Spanish Crown, but also reveals the existence of subsidiary intra-Caribbean networks fueled by the Atlantic traffic. Eagle refutes the notion that Spanish Caribbean settlements east of Havana were isolated during the first decades of the seventeenth century, but shows that these connectivities were maintained at the expense of thousands of enslaved Africans.

Portugal’s renewed independence after 1640 led to a reconfiguration of Iberian Atlantic maritime connections in which Cartagena de Indias’ economic importance was starkly diminished. Leonardo Moreno Álvarez’s essay, ‘Of shipwrecks, fraudsters, and divers: Cartagena de Indias and the transformation of Spanish Caribbean labor and bullion flows, c. 1650–1660,’ sheds light on Cartagena elites’ efforts to reposition themselves in the new world of Atlantic commerce that took shape during the middle decades of the seventeenth century and the active participation of diverse maritime laborers in making this transition possible. Officials and contractors based in Cartagena organized several unauthorized expeditions to salvage silver from a galleon that had wrecked in the Bahamas in 1656; one of their objectives was likely to use the silver to reestablish direct trade with African slaving ports. The expeditions relied on maritime workers of widely varying origins, including Amerindians, Africans, and people of African descent, who not only recovered and transported the silver but also provided testimony about the expeditions during subsequent investigations. Their lives reflect the impact at the local level of the economic, demographic, and geopolitical realities that characterized the Spanish Caribbean as it responded to increasing competition and external pressures.

Shifting our focus back to Hispaniola, Juan José Ponce Vázquez’s article ‘Smugglers, pirates, diplomacy, and the Spanish Caribbean in the late seventeenth century’ analyzes the protection that Santo Domingo elites and officials provided to Nicholas Van Hoorn, a Dutch pirate who helped lead the notorious sack of Veracruz soon afterwards. After committing a series of assaults and robberies in Iberian ports from Cádiz to São Tomé, Van Hoorn arrived in Hispaniola in 1682 with more than two hundred enslaved Africans kidnapped from the Gold Coast. During his two months in Santo Domingo, Dutch and English envoys from Curaçao and Jamaica sought to have him arrested for piracy, an outcome that would have benefited Spanish imperial interests as well. But Ponce Vázquez notes that the governor of Hispaniola, who was also the President of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo—and a close associate of Van Hoorn’s host, the influential merchant Rodrigo Pimentel—rebuffed their requests and, for a price, enabled Van Hoorn to depart. Thus two of the most powerful men in Santo Domingo protected a known pirate in order to procure West African captives and gold, prioritizing their own economic interests over the security of other territories (including Spanish ones) and over the Spanish monarchy’s diplomatic and commercial relations with England and the Dutch Republic. Rather than viewing this consequential episode as a simple case of corruption or contraband, Ponce Vázquez argues that Van Hoorn’s escape from Hispaniola provides a clear-cut example of how Spanish Caribbean elites influenced the highest echelons of local government with little regard for imperial agendas in the region.

For Iberian Jews in Curaçao and other Dutch territories, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia offered new opportunities to travel internationally in the service of the Dutch Republic. Oren Okhovat’s essay ‘Portuguese Jews and Dutch Spaniards: cultural fluidity and economic pragmatism in the early modern Caribbean’ traces the itineraries, social ties, and political connections of several such men in Curaçao and in Spanish Caribbean ports at the close of the seventeenth century. As Dutch subjects and important figures in Jewish communities who still maintained aspects of their Iberian heritage, they possessed plural identities that enabled them to act as intermediaries in multiple forms of transimperial commerce, including the trafficking of enslaved Africans. Okhovat focuses on the emblematic figure of Phelippe Henriques, a Jewish resident of Curaçao and factor for the Portuguese Cacheu company, who was arrested by the Inquisition after delivering African captives to Cartagena de Indias in 1699. The inquisitors’ goal in detaining Henriques (who they could not legally persecute because he was born a Jew) was to question him as part of an investigation targeting the city’s governor, with whom Henriques regularly corresponded. In fact Henriques had long been welcomed in Cartagena, where he also maintained a friendship with the city’s factor for the slave trade asiento, and would continue to visit Spanish Caribbean ports afterwards despite his temporary arrest. Drawing on Henriques’s experiences, Okhovat evokes a late seventeenth-century Caribbean culture of tolerance and practicality in which Spanish American officials knowingly and openly relied on Jewish go-betweens to gain access to Dutch Atlantic commerce.

Although they address different Caribbean places and periods during the 1600s, these articles examine closely related themes of transimperial and transregional exchange—unauthorized voyages, piracy and contraband, the traffic in enslaved Africans—using approaches that foreground the vantage points and objectives of administrators, elites, mariners, divers, migrants, travelers, enslaved people, and religious minorities, among others. Each essay advances a locally centered perspective that provides insight into the porosity of imperial borders in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, revealing the ease and frequency with which inhabitants of seaports such as Santo Domingo and Cartagena de Indias participated in intraregional maritime circuits that could alternately extend, reinforce, or completely circumvent authorized channels of movement and commerce. These interpretations challenge narratives of seventeenth-century Caribbean history that prioritize the establishment of northern European settlements or imperial policies promulgated by the Spanish Crown, the Consejo de Indias, and the House of Trade (narratives that have been particularly characteristic of English-language scholarship); the focus here instead is on historical actors and developments within Spanish Caribbean societies. Scholarship on the seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean is blessed (or cursed) with an abundance of extant primary sources, many of which are located in peninsular Spanish archives. These articles also suggest that new perspectives on the Spanish Caribbean may be gained by broadening the focus of research to include collections beyond peninsular Spain, and that deeper engagement with Spanish Caribbean sources and historiographies may yield new insights into the seventeenth-century histories of the Portuguese empire, northern Europe, Atlantic Africa, and the non-Hispanic Caribbean.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Marc Eagle for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Additionally, the editors of this special issue wish to thank CLAR editors Dana Liebsohn and Lisa Voigt as well as the anonymous reviewers of the articles for their efforts and insights. Our thanks also to Elena Schneider and to the contributors to this issue for their excellent work.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Wheat

David Wheat (PhD Vanderbilt 2009) is an associate professor in the Department of History at Michigan State University. His research uses Iberian sources to address migration, slavery, cross-cultural exchange, transimperial trade, and maritime societies in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic world. He has published Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (2016), and has co-edited, with Alex Borucki and David Eltis, From the galleons to the highlands: slave trade routes in the Spanish Americas (2020), and with Ida Altman, The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic world in the long sixteenth century (2019). His work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Conference on Latin American History, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Ida Altman

Ida Altman is Professor Emerita at the University of Florida. She received her PhD in history from The Johns Hopkins University and was University Research Professor at the University of New Orleans, where she taught from 1982 to 2006. Her more recent publications include The war for Mexico’s west: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524–1550 (2010), Contesting conquest: Indigenous perspectives on the Spanish occupation of Nueva Galicia, 1524–1545 (2017) and Life and society in the early Spanish Caribbean (2021). She is the co-editor with David Wheat of The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic world in the long sixteenth century (2019).

Notes

1 Characterizing seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean ports as ‘honeypots of American wealth,’ Roper also employs ancient tropes such as the ‘Spanish disinclination to perfect territorial claims,’ the ‘inattention of the Spanish government,’ and ‘Spanish negligence’ (2018, 1–2, 7–8).

2 Schmitt (2019) argues that the loss of Jamaica had more to do with competition and differing priorities among Spanish officials and merchants than with lack of resources or military or naval weakness.

3 The association of Portuguese with Jewishness was a seventeenth-century phenomenon that differed markedly from Spanish attitudes during the sixteenth century; see Hamm 2016.

4 Although their actual numbers were likely higher, the SlaveVoyages database currently lists only eighteen transatlantic voyages known to have disembarked Africans in any Spanish Caribbean port in the years 1641–1696. https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/r72ga6Ci. By contrast, at least 59 intra-American voyages reached Spanish Caribbean ports during the same years, with over half docking in Portobelo. https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyages/GBvHnZXu.

5 Rupert, for example, notes that ‘Although the intercolonial trade conducted from Curaçao was perfectly legal under the Dutch system, much of it contravened the laws of the other European powers that had established colonies in the region’ (2012, 3).

6 Bassi argues that ‘Spanish subjects, far from living in a box hermetically sealed from the outside world, actively participated in the transimperial networks that shaped the Atlantic’ (2014, 709).