Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic by Linda M. Rupert (review)

With her title Creolization and Contraband, Rupert puts a magnifying glass over the island of Curaçao during the seventeenth and eighteen centuries to show how the interplay of these two processes not only shaped the island’s economy and society but also exemplified what occurred in most of the Atlantic Caribbean. She presents Curaçao as a cosmopolitan, polyglot, and ethnically diverse, with productive commercial ties, rich merchant archives, all of which allows the island to become the perfect case study for examining the multifaceted relationships between the extra-official economic and social endeavors that wrought colonial societies in the early modern Atlantic. The book is divided into two parts and six chapters. Part I chronicles the seventeenth century which presents the process of the island of Curaçao becoming an important trading post and spans from chapter one to chapter three; and Part II describes the eighteenth century, focusing more on the intermingling of social, economic and cultural exchanges—it extends from chapter four to chapter six.

The introductory chapter sums up the thesis of the book. Rupert presents the West India Company (WIC) governing the island and its trade from 1634 to 1791. The Dutch seized Curaçao initially to use it as a naval base but as years passed it gradually became a major trade center. The company’s first charter is one of the earliest articulations of the Atlantic world as a cohesive unit. The port of Willemstad was home to a small Dutch merchant elite, sailors, skilled slaves, large numbers of free colored slaves, and a prosperous community of Sephardic Jews who participated in semi clandestine trade and commerce for their livelihood.

Chapter I describes how Curaçao had over a century of clandestine trade before it became a free trade center. A group of Arawaks, called Caquetios were the native inhabitants of the island. In 1513 Diego Colón declares Curaçao along with Aruba and Bonaire “useless” since the Spanish did not find gold or any other sought-after resources. This allowed the enslavement and deportation of natives to Hispaniola. Slaves constituted the first export under European rule. In 1526 Juan de Ampiés obtained the commercial rights to the ABC islands (Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao) and from then on the islands were part of a single political jurisdiction (under both the Spanish and Dutch). Their ties with Tierra Firme were first religious and later political and commercial. By the mid-1500s Curaçao had become a large livestock farm which later transformed to a naval base and finally to an important entreport. The Spanish frowned upon the illicit activities that were carried out, but recognized that these traders supplied an economic demand for colonial inhabitants. In the Atlantic the Dutch (as well as the French and the British) sought to challenge the Spanish hegemony and thus the inhabitants of the Caribbean developed the ability to come together through alternate forms as smuggling, which allowed them to have a better position on the colonial stage dominated by Europeans.

Chapter II explains how the Dutch positioned Curaçao as a trade center using the islands history and tradition and taking advantage of developing currents in the wider Atlantic world which also brought the Diaspora groups of Sephardic Jews and enslaved Africans that became the foundation of the local colonial society. These groups emerged in Curaçao’s landscape embodying a different but complementary existence. Rupert describes how the descendants of refugee Sephardic Jews embarked on this transatlantic migration to the shores of Curaçao. She explains how the names used to describe the Jews who fled the Iberian Peninsula (crypto-Jews, conversos, Sephardic and Sephardim, “Portuguese,” marranos) is problematic since their religion, ethnicity, culture, history shaped their identity in a continuum of dimensions. Rupert argues that perhaps this long tradition of Jews practicing fluid and covert identities helped them successfully engage...