Operating within the established traditions and broad parameters of social history and historical sociology, Ponce Vázquez’s original and deeply archival work will be relevant to anyone whose interests extend to economic anthropology, political economy, the operation of power in racially and ethnically complex societies, and state-society relations in early modern imperial settings.
How did a thriving contraband trade come to define society and shape political culture in seventeenth-century Hispaniola (today, Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and how did the island’s elites gain control over governing institutions designed to advance imperial interests? This innovative sociopolitical history details islanders’ resistance to Spain’s mercantile system and the reason for their turn to smuggling to survive. In response to royal neglect and indifference, elites increasingly turned governing institutions into vehicles to advance their self-interests. The rapid decline of its sugar economy and the re-routing of the imperial fleet turned Hispaniola into a periphery; islanders...