Make New Friends but Keep the Old: Working through Layers of Networks in the Public Markets of Circum-Caribbean New Orleans, 1720–1815

This paper argues that Black marketing women were linchpins for networks of connection among free and enslaved Blacks in New Orleans. These connections were both long distance in nature across the circum-Caribbean, and local, among Africans and Afro-Creoles in the city and its hinterlands.  Colonial New Orleans had ties to the French and Spanish Caribbean as well as the Anglo, French, Spanish, and Amerindian populations in North America.  This makes the city’s interactions among the most complex in circum-Caribbean. Black sailors and militiamen mixed freely with local slaves and free people of color in markets that were largely beyond the supervision of white authorities and slave owners. People in these “Black markets” conducted business, exchanged ideas, made plans, and built relationships. The mangos, rum, rice, and chickens that women traded in the markets came from local production and from regional and international sources. Along with these goods came news from the outside. This made public markets into informal clearinghouses for information from the Caribbean and the Atlantic World that was then carried out of the market and into the region. Women were central players in the public markets, which in turn became important sites for Black female autonomy. By laying out these connections, my work suggests that eighteenth-century slavery was more of a trans-colonial phenomenon for slaves themselves than has previously been thought; they were international agents and not merely another transnational commodity of European empires. Such interactions in the public markets extend the idea of slave mobility and networks of communication well beyond the bounds of the neighborhood of nearby plantations.  They also serve to further complicate the idea of Black populations fixed in place by plantation slavery.