“Masters of Commerce?” Enslaved Peoples’ Subversion of the Visible Hands during the Age of Enlightenment, 1750–1800

Saturday, January 7, 2023: 10:50 AM
Washington Room A (Loews Philadelphia Hotel)
Randal Grant Kleiser, Columbia University
During much of the early modern period, the Danish, Spanish, French, and British empires generally forbade their colonists from trading with foreigners. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the Dutch entrepôts of Sint Eustatius and Curaçao had emerged as thriving “free ports” where Dutch authorities lowered customs duties and encouraged merchants of all flags to conduct commerce. Denmark, Spain, France, and Britain followed in the 1750s and 1760s, opening specific Caribbean ports to foreign trade.

These Caribbean “free ports” are clear instances of European empires attempting to manage and direct inter-imperial commerce. As John Shovlin has recently put it, “free trade” policies in this era were never fully free, were riddled with exceptions and special arrangements, and lay somewhere between the two ideals of free trade and protectionism in order to benefit the particular interests of the state. These free ports contained certain clauses and restrictions motivated by the varying empires’ different goals (this paper will focus on Spanish, French, and British free ports). No two imperial “visible hands” then were the same.

Of course, many people on the ground worked around these free port prohibitions to advance their own interests. While most historians have considered smugglers as the main saboteurs of imperial free ports, another group deserves acknowledgment: the enslaved. For while most free ports were sites of profound levels of inter-imperial slave trading, enslaved people themselves took advantage of the opportunities offered by free ports to free themselves. Enslaved people made money in free ports to buy their freedom, learned about opportunities of escape through information networks facilitated by inter-imperial trade, and hopped on vessels bound for other imperial realms to flee their enslavers. These men, women, and children profoundly challenged empires’ attempts at directing inter-imperial commerce and associated freedom from bondage with free trade well before Enlightenment theorists.