Although the plantation as a social and economic organizing principle continues to dominate early modern Caribbean historiography, recent literature has explored outside of its confines to document a range of Antillean inhabitants who were neither masters nor slaves. These subjects exploited the inter-imperial f luidity of the region to their advantage in order to carve out commercial, strategic, and cultural niches. This article surveys new studies on smugglers, soldiers, and European ethnic minorities in the colonial Caribbean. These groups are representative examples of much larger sinew populations that the dominant historiographical paradigm of sugar and slaves has overlooked. Despite planters' attempts to essentialize race, class, legal status, and occupation into their simplest forms, a broad body of historical actors resisted and coexisted with the plantation complex and reshaped the designs of empires in the process.In his 2007 survey of Caribbean history, Frank Moya Pons writes that one can understand the Caribbean only as an organic economic system, as a throbbing heart continuously pumping sugar and other commodities to the world market via the Atlantic, while at the same time consuming millions of lives forcefully extracted from Africa and other parts of the world. 1 2011 textbooks from B. W. Higman and Stephan Palmié and Francisco Scarano (eds.) offer less plantation-centric interpretations of Caribbean history. Nevertheless, both still identify the colonial Caribbean, and its associated processes of indigenous decimation, African slavery, and monocrop export agriculture, as the bellwether of rapacious commercial modernity. 2 These surveys acknowledge, to differing degrees, many of the historiographical assumptions underlying the study of the early modern Caribbean. With the possible recent exception of the Haitian Revolution, the plantation complex has been the preeminent lens by which scholars have understood the area's social, economic, and political currents. 3 There are obvious reasons why scholarship on the early modern Caribbean has given such primacy to the institution of sugar slavery. More than in other colonial contexts, the Caribbean witnessed the near obliteration of pre-European societies and their replacement by a socioeconomic model designed to extract maximum profit on a totalizing scale. Additionally, the plantation complex has fit smoothly into a variety of historiographical schools. Imperial history renderings of the Caribbean emphasized each European power's sugar holdings. Nationalist, post-war historians of the Caribbean found the plantation a convenient social organizing principle before the rise of modern nations in the region. Some Caribbean observers coupled slavery and sugar to the birth of capitalism and modernity. 4 More recently, the plantation system has served as the backdrop for studies on the slave trade, slave life, and the Black Atlantic. 5 Although new investigations of Caribbean slavery beyond the sugarcane fields have contributed substantially to our understan...

In 1675, William Dampier set sail from Jamaica for the Bay of Campeche on Mexico's Yucatán coast to trade for logwood. Dampier, who would later become famous as a naturalist, a buccaneer, and one of the foremost chroniclers of the Golden Age of English buccaneering, recorded his experiences over the course of a year spent in English logwood communities near this Spanish settlement. The author's account gives a fascinating portrayal of a society beyond the margins of imperial control. In Laguna de Términos, an inlet just west of the town of Campeche (in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula), English sailors cut logwood, a popular dyestuff used in Europe for red, purple, and black clothing dyes and ink, that grew throughout the swampy tropical lowlands of the area. They traded their harvest with merchants who would ship it to ports as far away as Boston, London, and Amsterdam. Seeking an independent life separate from the arbitrary power of shipboard hierarchy, the loggers lived communally. They worked, hunted, and drank on their own schedule.

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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.