The World in One Hot Sweaty Place: Migration, Family, and Global Transformation as Seen from Carúpano, Venezuela, 1860–1940

The port of Carúpano, on Venezuela’s northeast coast, was in many ways typical of the nodal points that drove Latin America’s export expansion in the century after Independence.  By the last decades of the nineteenth century Carúpano was tightly connected to metropolitan markets through transportation and communication infrastructure, capital flows, and commodity chains.  Indeed Venezuela’s first transatlantic cable was laid here: from Carúpano to Le Havre in 1878, at the initiative of Corsican cocoa exporters who sought to base their buying prices on constantly updated information from French and Belgian markets.

But Carúpano’s farflung circuits were not limited to capital and cocoa, nor were cables and steamers the sole sinews of the system.  Labor migration was key to the growth of the export economy and the forms that it took.  Migrants’ interpersonal ties—those created within Venezuela, and those they maintained with family far away—provided key channels for trade, expertise, provisioning, and labor recruitment.  This was a true of the Corsican merchants who came to dominate transatlantic exports and plantation ownership; of the traders from the Levant who filled the ranks of peddlers and shopkeepers; and of the British West Indians who cultivated cocoa and other crops.

Reconstructing migration patterns within each of these communities on the basis of Venezuelan archival data demonstrates the convergence of imperial politics and intimate practice in shaping trajectories.  The timing and conditions of each group’s arrival bore the stamp of nation- and empire-building far away: in the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Levant, the Eastern Caribbean.  At the same time, high politics did not determine all. Sending society gender roles and family patterns interacted with interimperial politics to dictate who travelled when and what they did on arrival.  The combined result, over several generations, would be stark inequalities in outcomes for different immigrant groups.