Trade and organization in the colonial Caribbean

Trade created connections, whether officially sanctioned or illicit, within the Caribbean. Yet traditional approaches to the history of the early modern Caribbean have often considered only the Spanish, French, or English empires or formal contact among colonies, neglecting the constructive power of networks of interaction among merchants, sailors, and even pirates. These contacts drew the islands and shores into a cohesive region that owed its existence more to regional exchange than to the metropoles of Europe that wished to control particular geographies. By looking at smuggling and the actions of empires such as the Dutch and Portuguese, whose approaches to trade differed greatly from those of imperial powers that controlled larger amounts of land, recent historical work on the colonial Caribbean has revealed the importance of legal and contraband trade in creating an entangled region with linked economies, suggesting the limits of approaching the Caribbean from the perspective of any one single empire.