Black Captives, Afro-Indigenous Traders, and Colonial Societies in the Southeastern Caribbean

This presentation explores the interplay between plantation societies, Afro-Indigenous trading networks, and their geographical notions in the southeastern Caribbean. I argue that Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous people known as Kalinagos from Dominica, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent capitalized on imperial warfare and the colonial dependency on an enslaved African workforce by integrating the regional slave trade. During the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697), the Dutch blocked strategic African ports, impeding French slave traders’ attempts at purchasing enslaved people and transporting them to the Caribbean. In response, the Kalinagos and French created alternative markets for captives in the southeastern Caribbean. Native traders supplied French planters with Black captives from raiding expeditions to colonial outposts and plantations in the region. In this process, Kalinagos assimilated the French within the existing Indigenous geography of trade, kinship, and political sodalities that extended from the Windward Islands to northern South America. By examining these networks from the Afro-Indigenous perspective, we access a more intricate picture of the regional trade in captives, the consolidation of plantation societies, and how Afro-Indigenous people navigated colonialism in the seventeenth-century Caribbean.