“We Don’t Want Your Lights”: Dominican Modernity in a Hostile Caribbean, 1844–65

Literature on emancipation in the Caribbean often overlooks the struggles of the Dominican Republic, whose nineteenth century presented a complicated trajectory of sovereignty and dwindling economic fortunes. Despite these limited accounts, the republic embodied a much more complex portrait of rural free labor, urban oases, and – in the face of hostile imperial threats – considerable ferment. When Spain, a slave power, reoccupied the territory in 1861, therefore, fears that the “Mother Country” would re-enslave her progeny comprised an immediate and powerful threat to Spanish control.  Spanish actions in newly-recolonized Santo Domingo soon spurred all-out social war that would last for nearly two years, ending only with Spanish surrender. 

In my paper, I consider the varying Dominican responses to Spanish annexation, as colonial officials tried to reconcile a colonial labor system without slavery.  Using documents from archives in Spain, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, the paper explores the political allegiances and identities of the purportedly quiescent population who quickly mobilized en masse to reject Spanish labor strictures.  Responses from the cities were more varied; some elite cheered on the idea of a more productive peasantry, at any cost.  Others questioned the very meaning of civilization in the so-called “century of lights,” however.  These voices, although quickly supplanted in subsequent decades, offer considerable insight into remarkable urban-rural alliances at mid-century, staunch defenses of autonomy, and a development that might have been.