In the Caribbean, economic policies aimed at controlling commerce and currency provided both opportunity and hardship for people of color. In “Jamaican Blood Money,” Teanu Reid argues that the desire to manage colonial currency intentionally contributed to increased state control and punishment of Black bodies in British Jamaica. Grant Kleiser maintains that the enslaved undermined European empires’ attempts at directing inter-imperial commerce in Caribbean free ports. In “Masters of Commerce?,” Kleiser stresses that the enslaved secured opportunities to buy their freedom or plan their escape in these free ports, thereby challenging such ports’ intended purposes of promoting the inter-imperial slave trade.

Whereas Reid and Kleiser explore on-the-ground realities, Matthijs Tieleman and Nicholas DiPucchio explore how the Dutch and American revolutionaries imagined the promotion of free trade. In “The Guilded Age,” Tieleman argues that Dutch revolutionaries combined demands for free trade abroad with protectionist policies at home in the hopes of reviving the Dutch Golden Age. In “Free Trade, Atlantic Expansion, and the U.S. War for Independence,” DiPucchio contends that U.S. policymakers—envisioning an Atlantic-based, commercial republic—sought to conquer British maritime colonies to promote free trade during the War for Independence (1775-1783).

Taken together, our papers reveal the eighteenth-century struggles over governments’ use of the “visible hand” and the realization of Enlightenment ideals of economy, commerce, and free trade. The panel argues against the modern conception of free trade as "hands-off," instead highlighting that the two poles of “free trade” and “protectionism” existed on a spectrum, whereby imperial officials tried to control the contours of inter-imperial trade for particular advantages. We add to the growing body of scholarship that reveals the abundance of state action and regulation that went into so-called 18th century "free trade” while also noting the various challenges merchant-smugglers, planters, enslaved, and other laborers made to imperially-directed inter-imperial commerce.