Islanders and Empire

"This book focuses on the peoples of Hispaniola and their deep, intimate, and persistent embrace of smuggling, situating their story at the crossing of the fields of colonial Latin American, Caribbean, and Atlantic history. Hispaniola residents traded extralegally in order to circumvent the increasingly marginal space the island occupied within the Spanish colonial system, one which left them on the fringes of lawful commercial connections. During the long seventeenth century (which I define between 1580s and 1690s), the Atlantic world was a growing network of interconnected port towns and cities and their hinterlands that developed simultaneously to the integration of those port cities into their own imperial systems. With this twin dynamic in mind, this book argues that the inhabitants of the Spanish colony of Hispaniola overcame their peripheral status within the Spanish empire by embracing the possibilities that the people, networks, and goods of the nascent new Atlantic world provided. Elites wove themselves into the fabric of the trade and dominated it as they could; other residents also made their lives in the trade. By carefully navigating around Spanish imperial monopolistic expectations - or simply ignoring them - Hispaniola's residents turned the island into an Atlantic center in its own right. They pursued their short-term and intermediate social and economic goals, while also embracing cross-imperial contraband as an economically viable and morally acceptable livelihood for their own personal prosperity. In the process, steeped in the contraband networks that ruled the colony, Hispaniola residents transformed the political dynamics that ruled their relationship with the Spanish monarchy, giving them great control over the decision-making progress of the island and a good part of the Spanish Caribbean region"--