The Smugglers' World. Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela by Jesse Cromwell (review)

The historiography of the southern coasts of the Caribbean is undergoing a renaissance. Important works focusing on contours and impact of the multiethnic and multinational interactions in this maritime and coastal region, as well as the revolutionary winds that swept Colombia and Venezuela towards independence, have recently emerged. Despite the importance of contraband to colonial Caribbean societies in this period, and the southern Caribbean in particular, works on illicit trade are few. For this reason, Jesse Cromwell's The Smugglers' World is a much welcome and needed entry into this collection of new works.

Dealing mostly with the first two thirds of the 1700s, Cromwell's argument is brilliant in its simplicity and persuasiveness. By the time the Bourbons came to power, inhabitants of Venezuela, experiencing commercial neglect from Spain, turned to engaging in an active contraband trade with their English, French and Dutch neighbors in the Lesser Antilles and Curaçao. Borrowing the term "moral economy" from E. P. Thompson, Cromwell describes how coastal Venezuelans saw illicit trade as an inherent right, normalizing contraband as substantively equal to legal commercial practices. Royal bureaucrats generally permitted illicit trade as a necessity, and at times they participated and benefitted themselves from it. Bourbon Spain's desire to increase colonial revenue sources, however, brought tolerance for smuggling to an end. In order to maximize Venezuela's revenue, the crown granted the Basque-led Caracas Company a monopoly on Venezuela's growing cacao production, while entrusting it with policing and curbing the illicit trade in the region. Spain's thrust to tighten its imperial control Venezuela led to increasing local hostility and dissatisfaction, and conflicts over contraband increased throughout the century.

Cromwell uses the first two chapters of the book to situate the reader in the social and cultural landscape of Venezuela in the eighteenth century. In chapter one, the reader becomes acquainted with the history of Venezuela as a colonial periphery that Madrid mostly ignored. This led to the development of a moral economy of smuggling in a region that Cromwell describes as a "transimperial space" (54) in which smuggling was considered "one of their political liberties." (58) Locals supplied themselves with everything they needed (European goods, African enslaved laborers) through illicit commercial interactions with their neighbors in the region. With time, the development of a profitable cacao monoculture gave Venezuelans a desired crop for their exchanges, but it also brought the attention of the Spanish crown, which tried to benefit from it. Chapter two focuses on the Venezuelan demand for smuggled goods and how it was shaped not by the monetary value of the goods illicitly exchanged, but through the multitude of symbolic meanings that residents assigned to these goods, which were ordinary in Europe but very scarce in the Spanish colonies. Some colonists asserted their whiteness in their consumption of food and clothing choices, for example, thus trying to distinguish themselves from indigenous and African peoples. This chapter offers glimpses into domestic dimension of smuggling networks, the cat and mouse strategies between smugglers and colonial authorities, and their consequences for coastal residents.

Cromwell provides a kaleidoscopic study of contraband trade in coastal Venezuela, and chapters three to seven is each dedicated to study a group of actors in the local contraband culture, as well as those in charge of suppressing it. The Caracas Company (1728-1784) is the subject of chapter three. Its purpose was to turn this periphery turned profitable colony into an economic agent for Spanish imperial goals. Cromwell attributes the company's long life to the ability of some Bourbon economic policies to outlive the times and designs that created them, even when they had become counterproductive. The Company monopolized the sale of cacao, militarizing contraband suppression methods, but was unable to fully stop it. As the company faltered in its responsibilities to supply the colony with European goods and repress cacao prices...