Border-Crossing as Quotidian Experience: Some Thoughts from the Spanish Main

How exceptional were the lives of the Atlantic travelers whose adventures occupy center stage in the ongoing biographical turn in Atlantic history? How common was it for Caribbean dwellers to cross political borders? How can incorporating New Granada into the communication networks that created the Atlantic world affect our understanding of Atlantic history? Looking at shipping returns from Kingston, Jamaica, and the Neogranadan ports of Cartagena and Santa Marta, this paper stresses the active role that Caribbean Neogranadans played in the transimperial communication networks that gave shape to the early modern Atlantic world. Focusing on the connections between Kingston and New Granada’s Caribbean from the 1780s to the 1810s, I argue that the quotidian nature of border-crossing in the Caribbean firmly positioned the Spanish Main and its outward-oriented coastal population as key pieces of a transimperial Atlantic that, so far, has mostly been interpreted from British-North-Atlantic shores.