Proceeding chronologically, they begin with Samantha Billing’s look at how genocidal policies evolved at the limits of the eighteenth-century Spanish empire. Billing shows that—in the wake of the mid-century’s Bourbon Reforms—a global project aimed at wresting control of Indigenous-occupied territories was undertaken by Spanish officials living everywhere from Central America to the Philippines. Her study emphasizes the impact of a 1711 letter from the Bishop of Nicaragua to the King of Spain discussing the Miskitu in advancing one of the earliest iterations of this mandate of total “extermination.”

Linford Fisher’s paper, meanwhile, recounts a 1727 Miskitu expedition that returned with 900 Indigenous captives for sale to British slavers in Jamaica. The Mosquito Coast, Fisher claims, acted as a major node in a transatlantic Indigenous slave trade from 1680-1770, linking Central America to the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Through a careful tracing of the paths over which captives and commodities travelled into and out of places like Bluefields and Black River, Fisher’s piece highlights how a single stretch of shoreline animated an eighteenth-century world of capital and bondage.

The panel concludes with two papers linking the Mosquito Coast to the American Revolutionary War. The first, delivered by Russell Arbic, examines duelling accounts of a little-known incident which brought the War of Independence to its southernmost theatre in April 1776. Having just completed a three-month journey returning the Miskitu King George II to his homeland, a sloop known as The Morning Star was seized by “North-American privateers” and then sailed south to Cartagena. By the time news of its capture reached London, competing reports surfaced which held the Spanish alone responsible, touching off a political firestorm in Europe and skewing the course of Anglo-Miskitu diplomacy in the half-decade that followed.

Come 1780, when Joseph Bienko picks up the story, the conditions were thus ripe for a total collapse in British-Miskitu relations. Attempting a massive expedition against Spanish settlements along Nicaragua’s San Juan River, the British and their Indigenous allies saw their campaign fail in the face of a widespread disease outbreak. What Bienko shows, however, is that the San Juan expedition’s abortive end had as much to do with notions of difference and natural superiority expressed by British leadership as it did with any natural agents. Enlightenment medical theories clashed with Indigenous autonomy in the woods of southern Central America, sending redcoat and Native alike back out to the coast.