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  • Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Linda M. Rupert
  • Alan F. Benjamin
Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World. By Linda M. Rupert. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 296. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $69.95 cloth; $24.95 paper; $24.95 e-book.

Early Modern Curaçao was an exemplar of dynamic processes, of colonial agency, and of licit and illicit inter-imperial exchange networks. These networks were established and maintained, in large part, by diasporic populations of free and enslaved peoples of African descent along with Western Portuguese Sephardics, who were mostly Jewish, sometimes Christian, and, depending on circumstances and location, would change their outward religious affiliation from one to the other.

These networks were shaped by past and contemporaneous imperial policies and practices in West Central Africa, Europe, Tierra Firme, North America, and the Caribbean. The networks crossed, circumvented, and reacted to the inter-imperial social order—even aiding in the subsistence of colonial settlements. Rupert follows a long line of historians and others who describe a place and a social system as formed by and reflecting more than local events. Early Modern Curaçao was an expression of the interests, understandings, and interactions of numerous imperial powers, religious organizations and officials, subject peoples, and entities on either side of the Atlantic, as well as of the two diasporic populations that had been constructed, enabled, and oppressed—at times violently. Moreover, Rupert embeds the effects of geography and climate, with good reason, in her narrative. The social history of Curaçao emerged in a particular place and in a nexus of boundaries and social categories that were both rigid and transgressed. The result was creolization—social, cultural, and linguistic—aided and augmented by illicit networks of trade.

The volume's emphasis is on material relations: the resources available, the goods traded and consumed, the people involved (everyday individuals as well as officials), and the trade policies of the relevant imperial powers. Material relations, although they are the dominant subject of the volume, are presented as a kind of skeleton over which experience, most notably language, is constructed. Chapter 6 examines the origins of Papiamentu, the creole language of Curaçao, to the degree they are known. Papiamentu was rooted in the exigencies of the transatlantic slave trade and the need to communicate across social boundaries. Further, it facilitated the licit and illicit trade networks—the necessary collaboration, willing or otherwise, among free and enslaved blacks, Sephardic Jews, Dutch, and many others who crossed paths in the Curaçaoan harbor and in the places at which the ships sojourned. Rupert argues that speaking a creole rather than an imperial language was, like illicit imperial trade, a subversive act. It circumvented and resisted imperial geographic, social, political, and legal boundaries and categories: it expressed subaltern agency and difference. In doing so, it paradoxically facilitated the construction of inter-imperial boundaries. Rupert argues that interactions and exchanges—of goods, services, culture, and language—though often illicit, helped make imperial accomplishments possible. In this respect the volume makes a nod toward Curaçaoan exceptionalism. [End Page 104]

A couple of critiques: the volume's claim of a linkage between pre-Columbian and Early Modern Curaçaoan trade paths is intriguing, due to the significance of geography in shaping travel and to the continuing presence of native Americans in the region. However, considering the chronological and historical disjunctions in these routes, the claim is not fully persuasive. Second, a fundamental conceptual perspective is to deconstruct the social and political boundaries and categories of imperial powers, seeing them as porous, ambiguous, and protean—often through the agency of the two diasporic populations that are the volume's focus. However, these diasporic populations, even though they are recognized as internally diverse (for example, on pages 44-46 and 61-62), are at times discussed as undifferentiated social categories, as if constituted by members who are pursuing collective aims.

The volume is a rich and complex presentation, well researched and dense with information—though some of this information does not appear to advance the volume's themes. Brief summary...

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