So Far from Home: Foreign Smugglers and the Spanish American Convict Labor System in the Eighteenth Century

Inter-imperial smuggling was a serious offense under the law codes of the Spanish Atlantic.  Unlucky merchants captured and convicted of trespassing across the relatively porous boundaries separating empires routinely found themselves ensnared in the Spanish American convict labor system.  Spanish colonial magistrates condemned smugglers and other interlopers to lengthy terms in garrisons, construction details, and maritime crews throughout the Americas and Spain.  These convicted criminals, most of non-Spanish extraction, built and manned the formidable eighteenth-century fortifications that defended Spain’s besieged kingdoms in the circum-Caribbean.  Paradoxically, Spanish military officials converted strangers in a strange land into forces tasked with protecting Spanish possessions against the same English, French, and Dutch empires from which most of them had come. 

This paper looks at criminal proceedings of smuggling cases, diplomatic correspondence, and prisoner narratives from eighteenth-century Venezuela to investigate the sentencing, forced emigration, and captivity experiences of foreign convicts working in the Spanish Empire.  Venezuela was a hotbed of illicit trade and the site of several of Spanish America’s most active prize courts.  Records of the Spanish convict labor system speak to questions of early modern crime and punishment, the militarization of the Caribbean, diplomatic relations between empires, creolization, and the experiences of non-Spaniards in Spanish American colonies where metropolitan law largely forbid the presence of foreigners.  They also reveal that although much of the Atlantic was a permeable, transnational space, imperial borders still determined the lifecourses, geographic mobility, and legal statuses of many early modern subjects.