Trade and Violence at the Center of the World: Mona Island and the Limits of Ocean Regionalism

This paper explores Indigenous social, political, and economic strategies in the late sixteenth-century Caribbean through a focus on the tiny island of Mona. The Indigenous inhabitants of that island were at the center of global networks of informal trade with Spain's European competitors in a moment of inter-imperial commercial competition. Descended from Indigenous people taken captive by Spanish slave raiders and forced to cultivate foodstuffs on Mona in order to feed Puerto Rico's population in the early sixteenth century, by the 1590s the Indigenous inhabitants of Mona reoriented their agricultural production and established commercial ties with Spain's European competitors. Growing specific foodstuffs, such as lemons to treat scurvy or cassava for ships biscuit, allowed the Indigenous inhabitants of Mona to tap into trade networks as remote as the Indian Ocean world. The majority of the European ships that called at Mona engaged in an informal slave trade shaped by raiding, captive-taking, and smuggling. At the intersection of networks of cross-cultural trade and widespread violence, this paper shows how the Indigenous inhabitants of Mona exploited imperial rivalries in order to create an economic position for themselves beyond the reach of Spanish authorities in Puerto Rico.