Session Abstract

How did imperial sovereignty develop on the ground in the colonial Caribbean? How did authorities and denizens respond when political control was disrupted by inter-colonial conflicts, natural disasters, geographic constraints, or changing geopolitics? And how did their actions shape the imperial legal order?  This panel addresses such questions by following the stories of individuals who inadvertently became caught up in larger imperial imbroglios. Three papers presented by scholars at different career stages examine cases in the British and Spanish Caribbean in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. The material is aimed at scholars of the Caribbean and those interested in legal history and the history of empires and colonies. The papers cover a wide range of seemingly unlikely scenarios, from a fugitive slave who found freedom by crossing imperial divides at the invitation of the Spanish Crown, to a plantation owner put to death for murdering a slave, to a colonial governor who defied metropolitan authorities by not allowing another power to infringe on imperial sovereignty. In spite of the thematic, temporal, and geographic breadth covered, these three papers share several assumptions about the uneven and limited reach of empires and the implications for the behavior of colonial subjects. Seemingly mysterious colonial acts make sense when one adopts a more nuanced understanding of the thorny complexities of imperial power. Rather than blindly serving imperial interests or responding to metropolitan directives, colonial legal and political systems generated formative conflicts at the interface between imperial imaginings of power and the stark realities of life in the colonies. Colonial authorities faced an especially difficult challenge as they were caught between their official role as representatives of the Crown and their immersion in local life. Place also mattered. Geography and the natural world often set the conditions in which the complicated dance of power played out. The stories of these individuals and cases provide a pinhole to frame a clear view of the slow-turning structure of imperial jurisdiction, a legal construct at the nexus between imperial power and human agency.