Conclusion

The conclusion examines smuggling’s consequences for the larger history of colonialism in the Atlantic world. It reiterates that smuggling is the story of empire building and that, despite the desires of coastal inhabitants and imperial policy makers, this was a collaborative process. Extra-state actors powered the economic development of empires. This process produced common cosmopolitanism as subjects of different empires and cultures interacted over trade and mobility. The conclusion also emphasizes the tension between fluid Atlantic histories and the early modern borders and regulations of empire that enabled and ensnared subjects in this period.

Contrabandists or Cargo?

Chapter 7 analyzes Afro-Caribbeans as participants in illicit commerce, but it also discusses smuggling’s impact on slavery in the coastal circum-Caribbean. People of color were involved in smuggling not only as contraband cargo to Venezuela but also often as active workers in the illegal marketplace. This chapter asks how smugglers amalgamated the slavery apparatus of Venezuela and its surrounding foreign colonies into the black market. Furthermore, how did Africans being trafficked illegally and smuggling conducted by the enslaved alter notions of property, criminality, and subjecthood? Venezuelan planters frequently sent their slaves to trade with unlicensed foreign merchants. These traders, in turn, sometimes employed enslaved people as sailors or porters on smuggling ventures. For enslaved and free people of color alike, contraband trade carried the prospects of wage earning and greater autonomy in labor, but also the risks of captivity and enslavement in Spanish dominions. The embargo of foreign contraband vessels produced thorny questions regarding the freedom or bondage of the slaves aboard. Competing legal jurisdictions, temporary manumissions, and opportunities for marronage only compounded these uncertainties.

“Men of Good Will Who Will Harm No One”

This chapter examines local and provincial Spanish imperial officials as the facilitators of illicit commerce on the Venezuelan coast. Administrators’ tolerance of and personal enrichment through smuggling was unintentionally important for the Spanish Empire in maintaining control over a contented colonial population. Authorities could be active smugglers themselves, invest in the smuggling ventures of others, or earn steady income by purposefully ignoring illegal transactions in exchange for a fee. They created elaborate conglomerations of both foreign and domestic smugglers through their personal and professional connections. This chapter emphasizes that officials and colonial subjects reached a social compact regarding smuggling and corruption. Instead of absolutes of “right” and “wrong,” both royal officials and provincial inhabitants assessed personalistic government on a spectrum of reprehensibility. Venezuelan subjects tolerated administrative graft related to smuggling when, as a by-product, it opened ports and markets to mutually beneficial trade from abroad. By contrast, when officials attempted to monopolize the black market or harmed community values in defending their own interests, locals used all means at their disposal to expel these offending functionaries.

The Societal Ties of Smuggling

Chapter 5 investigates the other half of the interimperial transaction: domestic smugglers in Venezuela. This chapter offers a greater sense of how participants in illicit trade interacted with their home environments. Not all Venezuelan smugglers were alike. Similar to their foreign counterparts, domestic contrabandists were mostly small-time traders earning a living outside of the law after being shut out of the lucrative legal cacao trades with Spain and Mexico by larger merchant and agricultural concerns. Yet, unlike non-Spanish smugglers, Venezuelan participants in illegal trade had to make their homes in the same place where they broke the law. Their uneasy existence was possible because of local contrabandists’ entrenchment in bureaucratic, ecclesiastical, kinship, and criminal groups. The strength of these connections, along with an individual’s wealth and the flagrancy of their transgressions, often determined the likelihood that they would face prosecution. Highlighting these perspectives foreshadows the rebellion of chapter eight and also demonstrates that Venezuelan smugglers believed that, through on-the-ground experience in legal and illegal trading, they knew best how to sustain their livelihoods within the bonds of empire.

Introduction

The introduction discusses the twin market factors leading to illegal commerce: the rise of cacao and dearth of European consumer goods. It points out the colony’s location vis-à-vis non-Spanish Caribbean colonies (Curaçao in particular) and includes maps of the Venezuelan coast. The introduction articulates that this is a rich case study owing to Venezuela’s transition from imperial neglect to the object of persistent and forceful metropolitan reform efforts. It makes three broad arguments. First, communities on the coastal peripheries of empire formed ground-up moral economies that included contraband trade as a basic tenet within them. Second, subjects and officials living in areas of endemic illicit trade agreed upon acceptable levels of criminality and corruption. My book’s third argument is a larger articulation of this sense of negotiation. I contend that illicit trade in the Spanish Atlantic is, in fact, a story of empire making. Many coastal and maritime-oriented subjects felt a sense of statelessness that was intolerable by the standards of imperial law. Confounded by changes to the rules of commercial engagement and an uptick in enforcement, many otherwise loyal Spanish subjects still traded in an economy that was illegal by their empire’s strictures.

Socialized into Smuggling

The chapter analyzes the cultural value of smuggled goods in Spanish America and Europe as a means to understand the acculturation to illicit activity that early modern Venezuelans experienced. For their cacao, Venezuelans received, not the exotic items typically associated with illicit trade, but rather mundane wares and foodstuffs such as flour, coarse cloth, liquor, and firearms. Inventories of contraband confiscated from homes and businesses suggest both the tremendous inability of the Spanish Empire to supply its more marginal colonies with simple trade and the ways that Venezuelans creatively used smuggling to deal with this dearth of subsistence goods. Furthermore, court cases of smuggling highlight the importance of women as retail distributors of contraband on land. All of these circumstances revealed the colonists’ viewpoint on illegality: the cultural superiority manifested in consuming even simple European items merited the complications of illicit trade including bloodshed, commercial policing, and property confiscation. Black-market commerce at even the pettiest levels initiated coastal residents into a criminal world where they developed justifications and subterfuges for their everyday actions. In essence, residents had been socialized into smuggling.

Old Habits

This chapter asks what the implicit understandings were between empire and colony for almost two hundred years before the change to Bourbon governance and an eighteenth-century period of commercial conflict. It discusses briefly how the Spanish Empire addressed smuggling in the immediate decades after Caracas’s mid-sixteenth-century founding, then moves to the seventeenth-century transition to an almost monocrop, cacao-based economy and the rise of interimperial contact that accompanied it. The chapter ends shortly before the establishment of the Caracas Company in 1728. It also includes a basic primer to the Spanish commercial system meant to give the reader a sense of exactly how illicit trade deviated from imperial guidelines. Chapter one functions as an examination of the Habsburg status quo of benign neglect that governed Venezuela from its inception until the rise of the Caracas Company. It argues that this was a colony that received little commercial support but also little outside intervention where extralegal interimperial trade was concerned.

Networking Statelessness in a Bordered World

Chapter 4 investigates Dutch, English, and French smugglers who traded with Venezuelan subjects. Historians know very little about the social composition and trading methods of early modern smugglers. An in-depth analysis of hundreds of cases finds that these enigmatic figures came mostly from foreign colonies close to Venezuela including Curaҫao, Martinique, and Jamaica, but also from farther afield, in some cases. Most traders were part of small, multinational, multilingual, and multiracial crews. Although they were outsiders to Venezuela, these contrabandists maintained close contacts on shore who influenced how they conducted business. Smugglers were savvy and adaptable to local market conditions, customs, languages, and coast guard operations. Particularly important to the strategic intelligence of smugglers were Sephardic Jewish trading networks well versed in Iberian cultural traditions. Such contacts produced a smuggler’s craft that combined deception, force, bribery, and Spanish judicial savvy. At times the historical record indicates the presence of more elaborate and wealthy merchant conglomerates. Yet illicit exchange in the early modern maritime world offered egalitarian and entrepreneurial opportunities for small-time captains willing to trade on their own account. Counterbalancing potential profits were the inherent hazards of coastal violence, wartime privateering, coastguard patrols, exile, and forced labor.

The Political Power of Covert Commerce

This chapter analyzes the Rebellion of Juan Francisco de León (1749-1752) as a conflict demonstrating the political volatility of illicit trade. It asks how and why this rebellion developed and what the ideologies of its insurgents were. In 1749, León, a minor official, led a multiclass, multiracial uprising against the Caracas Company that lasted nearly three years and culminated with the temporary expulsion of both the governor of Venezuela and the Caracas Company from the capital. León’s rebellion was linked to dismally low prices paid by the Caracas Company to Venezuelan producers for their cacao, frustration with the increasing power of the Basque outsiders, and the Company’s role in closing the colonial safety valve of smuggling. Reacting to these affronts, Venezuelans, with the military aid of Dutch sympathizers, defended communal concepts of economic justice and asserted their commercial autonomy nearly sixty years before the colony’s struggle for independence. At its core, this uprising sought to return Spanish imperial trade policy to an earlier colonial status quo of measured commercial neglect and undeclared free trade that was, in fact, incredibly progressive for the political economies of early modern states.

New Cures

Chapter 3 examines the creation and administration of the Caracas Company as an organization designed to increase trade to Venezuela but also to police its coastline. Although realizations of Spanish commercial vulnerabilities predated the Bourbon period, bureaucrats in the new dynasty singled out contraband trade as an especially troubling defect. Venezuelan commercial rejuvenation represented one of the earliest Bourbon reform projects. Crown ministers conceived of the Caracas Company as a solution to the province’s commercial dysfunction. Madrid allowed the Caracas Company to maintain its commercial privileges in Venezuela despite prickly relations with the colony’s subjects because it was a profitable enterprise. This reality delayed the implementation of comercio libre reforms in Venezuela until 1789, long after every Spanish American colony aside from New Spain had been permitted trade liberalization. Essentially, an early Bourbon reform had overpowered the designs of later ones. Continued Company control assured that the province would remain a conflict zone. As this chapter emphasizes, imperial reformers were not ignorant or inflexible where smuggling was concerned. Rather, their plans miscalculated how deeply it was stitched into the fabric of Venezuelan life.