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  • An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada's Transimperial Greater Caribbean World by Ernesto Bassi
  • John Hickman
Bassi, Ernesto. An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada's Transimperial Greater Caribbean World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

The possibility of alternative histories beckon in this exploration of the world views of the people living around the rim of the southern Caribbean Sea in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In six chapters, Ernest Bassi, an assistant professor of history at Cornell University, investigates the range of geopolitical and geo-economic perspectives of ordinary sailors and their captains, of the cosmopolitan and the parochial, of republican revolutionaries and monarchist loyalists, and of anti-racist and racist state builders. The result is an interesting tour d'horizon of the conceptual and material worlds of the inhabitants of Spanish colonial New Granada and its independent successor states. What is revealed is the unrealized potential for a markedly different, much more Caribbean and much less Andean, trajectory for the political development of the region that now encompasses Colombia, Panama, and Venezuela.

Chapter 1 details the scale of trans-imperial and often illicit trade between New Granada and the larger non-Spanish speaking world of the Atlantic. British, American, French, Dutch, and Danish ships arriving with manufactured [End Page 262] goods and provisions undermined the mercantilism that Spain sought to impose on New Granada. British colonial Jamaica in particular benefitted from the sometimes licit, sometimes illicit, trade in commodities not just with Cartagena, but also with many minor and hidden ports along the coast.

Chapter 2 describes the crucial role played by the officers of Spanish merchant ships and ordinary sailors on board insurgent corsairs [pirates] in the flow of information about events across the Caribbean. In keeping with the author's interest in unrealized possibilities, special attention is paid to the ambiguous political loyalties of ordinary sailors, revealed in records of interrogations, that to some degree they lacked a "territorially grounded sense of belonging" and instead felt that they belonged to a "transimperial Greater Caribbean" (65). The author notes the distrust of officers for their foreign and non-European ordinary sailors. Fear of mutiny was suffused with xenophobia and racism. While navies preferred to recruit sailors from among either their own nationals or their own colonial subjects, the crew lists of British ships show that it was common for half the crew to be foreign nationals. Crew lists of Spanish ships noted the race of sailors.

Chapter 3 evokes the world of two indigenous peoples in the region: the maritime Cunas and the cosmopolitan Wayuu; and in the process the fragility of Spanish imperial authority. Living around Darién in Panama, the Cunas were carefully cultivated by the British in Jamaica as trading partners, allies, and potential imperial subjects. This posed an obvious threat to Spanish authority. Ruling the Guajira Peninsula, the numerous and bellicose Wayuu long defied Spanish attempts at conquest and settlement. As a consequence, Spanish territorial sovereignty over the peninsula was largely notional. Wayuu autonomy was in part a function of the weapons they received in trade with the British and Dutch.

Chapter 5 examines the salience of Simón Bolívar as inspirational historical figure in the nationalist politics of contemporary Venezuela, highlighting his preference for external support for the revolution against Spain from the British in Jamaica rather than revolutionary Haiti. In the author's account, Bolívar only reluctantly abandons Jamaica for Haiti in December 1815. The subsequent alliance between Haitian President Alexandre Pétion provides the financing, weapons, and logistical support necessary to carry on his liberation struggle. Bolívar was one of hundreds of republican revolutionaries from across Spanish America to find support in Haiti. Pétion's motivation in aiding [End Page 263] them included the desire to escape from diplomatic isolation imposed by powers like the United States and the United Kingdom where investments in plantation slavery were enormous and to liberate the slaves of the Spanish America. Bolívar's anxiety about accepting support from Pétion reflects the scientific racism tragically common even to enlightened criollo republican revolutionaries. Racism is also offered as explanation for the executions of...

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