An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada's Transimperial Greater Caribbean World by Ernesto Bassi (review)

How did people imagine and experience the Caribbean world in the Age of Revolutions? Covering the 1760s to the 1840s, An Aqueous Territory offers compelling answers to this question, envisioning Caribbean history from the shores of New Granada/Colombia. Focusing on trade networks, seamen, Indigenous peoples, colonial authorities, and revolutionary leaders, this book opens up exciting ways to better grasp geographic space as a lived experience, and the Caribbean as a transimperial region: a social world built on cultural, political, and economic overlaps and tensions. Caribbean peoples inhabited "a space that was not exclusively Spanish, British, or French but simultaneously Spanish, British, French, as well as Dutch, Danish, Anglo-American, [and] African" (9). At the heart of this work is an effort to capture this simultaneous reality, extending an invitation to let go of our contemporary frameworks—from imperial histories, to national borders, to academic compartmentalization—in order to better understand a society that was bound by other types of constraints.

Take the case of New Granada's overseas trade connections, studied in chapter one. While conventional wisdom holds that British agents dominated the commercial scene in the Caribbean at the turn of the nineteenth century, legal and illegal traders operating from New Granadan ports did rely heavily on their links to Kingston (Jamaica), but were also in contact with French and Dutch traders. Moreover, trade with Danish Saint Thomas also existed, and a more important and long-lasting connection with the coastal cities of the United States began to develop in the 1780s.

Seamen, of course, made these connections possible. Chapter two turns to their histories, demonstrating that it was sea captains and sailors who embodied the overlapping economic and cultural dynamics of the transimperial Caribbean. As they travelled from the islands to the continent and back, carrying merchandise, contraband, and information, they "challenged imperial demarcations," and imagined a space that was not "territorially grounded" (58, 65). A flexible sense of political identification thus emerged among seamen, making them ideal wartime operatives and go-betweens.

Cuna and Wayuu travelers and agents proved no less cosmopolitan, and tremendously active as political players across supposedly stark imperial borders. Chapter three tells the stories of these "maritime Indians," whose fluency in several languages, sophisticated commercial outlook, and opposition to cooperation with Spain threw into question territorial sovereignty in the Darien and the Guajira borderlands. Establishing commercial and diplomatic contact with the Dutch, British, and French, Indigenous peoples accessed goods and information, crucial supplies in their ongoing efforts to keep Spanish domination at bay.

Spanish officials resented contact between Indigenous peoples and the British, especially after British presence in the south Caribbean increased. In chapter four we learn how collaboration between British and Spanish subjects also emerged following the American Revolution, but only to be truncated. Jamaican planters hoped in vain to turn the Spanish Main into a source of foodstuffs; British adventurers failed to avenge Great Britain by taking over Spanish territories; and New Granada began to supply Spain and England (via Jamaica) with cotton, only to be displaced by growing international competition.

Even though these political and economic scenarios failed to materialize, Bassi reminds us that such projects were of vital importance for their protagonists, whose visions of potential geopolitical re-arrangements in the revolutionary Atlantic remained open-ended. Perhaps the most important lesson from this book, this attention to alternative, truncated, or imagined futures continues to take centre stage on chapters five and six. First, a case study of the anti-Spanish revolutionary Simón Bolívar allows the author to highlight the "Caribbean and Atlantic dimensions" of Colombian independence (143). Bolívar's journeys to the Antilles and back over the years 1815–1816 hinged on Haiti's vital support. Finally, however, Bassi turns to the efforts by early Colombian leaders to disown Haiti and its citizens of color. As they drew maps...