AHA Session 177
Conference on Latin American History 39
Labor and Working-Class History Association 15
Conference on Latin American History 39
Labor and Working-Class History Association 15
Saturday, January 9, 2027: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Napoleon Ballroom B1 (Sheraton New Orleans, 3rd Floor)
Chair:
Ida Altman, University of Florida
Papers:
Session Abstract
This session examines political economies of islands across imperial jurisdictions in the Atlantic. Classic definitions of political economy center institutions as the power that shapes economic life. These four papers complicate this definition by showing how the structures of these institutions were negotiated from below by a multitude of historical subjects representing various aspects of colonial aspects and transatlantic mobility. Islands offer a unique perspective because of their role as transit points across waterways. The flow of goods, people, and information across these porous borders shaped how people interacted with one another and institutions across imperial boundaries. Keith Richards examines the mercantile connections between eastern Cuba and Jamaica through two competing social networks – one composed of an emerging local elite and the other his former slave-turned-maroon leader. This complicates our understanding of transimperial trade and colonial actors in a transitional moment in which Cuba depended heavily on enslaved labor and contraband trade. Arielle Xena Alterwaite examines how the use of public institutions controlled by colonial administrators were negotiated by subjects and the sovereign in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue. Through the study of the Caisse des libertés, a local manumission fund for enslaved people, she shows that planters feared a growing free people of color population on the island and sought to carve out their own autonomy against royal authority. Imen Boussayoud’s paper discusses how Spanish colonists in Tenerife at the close of the fifteenth century sought to ensure a continuous supply of enslaved labor by controlling the mobility of the indigenous Guanche population. This labor was contested from below as the Guanche created their own geographies of refuge and resistance to Spanish colonialism. Oren Okhovat complicates the definition of the Dutch slave trade between Atlantic Africa and Spanish America by showing that Portuguese merchants operated as a key broker of slave trading routes in the late seventeenth century. Their knowledge of networks that used Atlantic islands as key transit points relied on older Portuguese networks but formally crystallized on the Dutch island of Curaçao, where they operated across a constellation of imperial lines and island geographies to provide thousands of captives to ports across the Caribbean. Together, these presentations highlight the diverse actors involved in the political economy of islands in the Atlantic World, ranging from Indigenous shepherds to maroon communities to local planters and a multicultural milieu of merchants. They also bring together the Atlantic and Caribbean islands within a single frame. Where previously these spaces were treated as separate geographies, these papers show the overlapping structures of the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English empires in the early modern Atlantic World.