He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Islanders and Empire is the second page of chapter 3, which starts with a vignette from 1598 about a Spanish judge on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola who had been prosecuting contraband cases. He was assaulted by a group of Spanish and French smugglers, who robbed him and destroyed all the documentation of his proceedings. Ambushed while he was resting, the judge was barely able to escape with his shirt. From page 99:Learn more about Islanders and Empire at the Cambridge University Press website.Sáez de Morquecho believed that the attack he suffered at the hands of a mixed French and Spanish force was proof that the northern residents of Hispaniola were actively working against their king and natural lord, his ministers, and their embodiment of the true Catholic faith. If the crown did not act, the loss of the island to the hands of European heretics and rivals of Spain was only a matter of time. In the words of Captain Diego Paredes Carreño, a local resident, the foreign merchants “brought a great quantity of heretical books to spread their sect in this island, and they give them to everyone who wants them.” Sáenz de Morquecho’s comparison of the people of Hispaniola with moriscos situated them for his contemporary Spanish readers as marginal subjects whose loyalty was questionable and whose behavior demanded a prompt response by the crown to enforce acceptable Christian behavior and to maintain its dominion.Who are the moriscos, you may ask? That’s also on page 99!On the Iberian Peninsula, moriscos were men and women who had converted from Islam to Christianity either voluntarily, or in the case of those living in the Kingdom of Granada after 1492, by force after the royal edict of 1502 compelled all Muslims who wanted to stay in Castilla to convert or leave the kingdom. The mass conversions that ensued raised suspicions among established Christians (who referred to themselves as “old Christians”) about the sincerity of these converts, while the Inquisition policed the public and private behavior of these new Christians searching for any hint of heresy. The Second War of the Alpujarras (1568–71), in which moriscos rebelled against the suffocating pressures of the crown upon their lives and customs, only exacerbated such fears. Moriscos were seen as disloyal and rebellious. By the late sixteenth century, they were sometimes believed to be a fifth column, working secretly for the Ottoman Empire and North African corsairs from inside the Iberian Peninsula.This page summarizes one of the main arguments of the chapter: in the eyes of the Spanish crown, contraband trade was not only an act of economic defiance to the monopoly that the monarchy was trying to uphold in its American colonies, it was also an act of religious subversion, since most of the foreign smugglers were (or at least were perceived to be) Protestants. The Spanish crown feared that the interaction of its Catholic subjects and these so-called “Lutherans” would lead to the loss of the souls of the people of Hispaniola, who would become false Christians, just like the moriscos.
Such a grave interpretation of contraband trade in both economic and religious terms led the crown to order the removal of the entire population of the north and west of Hispaniola only a few years later (1605-06), destroying villages and forcing inhabitants to relocate to newly erected towns near Santo Domingo, closer to the watchful gaze of Spanish colonial bureaucrats and the church. This chapter analyzes this entire process of depopulation, which had significant consequences for the history of the island, the Caribbean, and the entire Atlantic world. The origins of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (which would later become the independent black republic of Haiti) in Western Hispaniola was possible in part because of the 1605 depopulations.
Page 99, and the rest of chapter 3 portray a turning point in the history of Hispaniola. While before 1605, local smugglers were able to make illicit deals in remote bays and beaches on the island, in the aftermath of the depopulations they were forced to practice their business under the shadow of Spanish colonial institutions. To this end, they had to gain the trust and complicity of Spanish bureaucrats, who were often happy to fill their pockets while serving in a Caribbean borderland like Santo Domingo. Islanders and Empire, therefore, offers a ground-up reconstruction of trans-imperial and interregional illicit trade networks and the politics that fueled them. It shows a progressive institutionalization of smuggling at the highest levels of colonial governance, the growing influence that local residents had in manipulating colonial administrators, and, by extension, the designs of the Spanish monarchy in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
