Mobility Control at the End of the Ancien Régime: A View from Curaçao

The island of Curaçao has traditionally been a site of transit and transience; its unique natural harbor and proximity to mainland Latin America helped render it a central hub in the (Dutch) Caribbean as a key center of shipping and trade, with particular importance for privateering and the trade in enslaved Africans. As a result, the island’s population had both a high degree of turnover and of diversity, as free and captive newcomers came and went, and religiously and racially pluriform communities formed among those who stayed. Measures to control this high degree of mobility existed, but primarily focused on unsanctioned departures and, starting around the mid-eighteenth century, the influx of indigent migrants. The situation changed drastically around the end of the eighteenth century, however, when revolutions rocked the Atlantic world and brought an influx of new ideas and people to the island that colonial authorities considered a grave threat to the social order – especially with the outbreak of what is now known as the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s, which prompted the arrival of a diverse range of inhabitants of particularly the Southern provinces of the French colony of Saint Domingue – free and enslaved, black, white, and mixed-race, men, women, and children – whose identity and political allegiance was frequently ambiguous. This paper traces how the regulation of mobility into, out of, and on the island changed in this tumultuous period, which also coincided with the end of the Dutch West India Company’s (WIC) reign and a transition to a modern, state-oriented colonialism in the Dutch Caribbean. In doing so, it aims to highlight both the connections to Curaçao and the wider Atlantic world and the connections, ruptures and continuities between the ‘early modern’ Dutch Atlantic and that of the nineteenth century.