Creolization and Contraband: CuraCao in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Conclusions

Conclusions By the time slave rebellions broke out in Curaçao and Tierra Firme in the summer of 1795 new political currents were coursing through the Caribbean and the Americas, currents that would have a major impact on regional politics, economics, and cultures.1 In January of that same year the French army had invaded the Netherlands, overthrown the Dutch Republic, and installed a puppet government, the Batavian Republic. The Netherlands remained under French control until 1813. The West India Company had been abolished in 1791, four years before the slave revolts, after teetering on the brink of financial ruin for several decades.2 Following the company’s demise, Curaçao and the other Dutch Caribbean islands came under the administrative control of a new body, the Council of the Colonies, which would enact policies in the overseas possessions through the mid-twentieth century. It was the end of an era in the history of both Curaçao and of the Dutch Republic, after both had played pivotal roles in the early modern Atlantic world for some 150 years. The economic and sociocultural legacies of this period would continue to imprint island society thereafter. Over the next two decades, as new geopolitical tides swept through the Atlantic world, Curaçao would twice come under British control (1800–1802 and 1807–16), before reverting to the Dutch at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.3 By the early nineteenth century, the rise of the United States as a regional economic power the consolidation of a British economic empire in Latin America. and the independence of most of Spain’s American colonies, including Venezuela, were among the factors that 246 / conclusions contributed to the decline of Curaçao as a major regional trade center.4 By the time Britain ceded Curaçao back to the Dutch in 1816, the island had lost its place in regional and Atlantic trade. For the next hundred years, Curaçao would be a Caribbean backwater. The relative economic and geopolitical importance of the entire Caribbean region also declined in this period.5 With the dismantling of the WIC, Dutch administrators and merchants had less of a presence and influence on Curaçao. Fewer ships, sailors, and merchants visited the island. Free blacks and urban slaves dominated the society and culture of Willemstad, especially the growing multiethnic neighborhood of Otrobanda. Sephardic Jews continued to rise in economic importance, and several well-established families became part of the island elite. Sephardim also took on a greater role in the overall island society after they were granted full political rights in 1825. Papiamentu thrived, promoted actively by the Roman Catholic Church and further stimulated by the arrival of the printing press in the 1820s.6 The Roman Catholic Church played an important role in sustaining the language, not only via printed publications, but also by proselytizing and preaching in Papiamentu among the island’s majority population of African descent.7 Curaçao’s Sephardic merchants and urban black residents, enslaved and free, continued to depend on regional trade, much of it extra-official, throughout the nineteenth century. They maintained especially close economic and sociocultural ties with inhabitants of the northern coast of South America, which was briefly unified in the federation of Gran Colombia and later became the independent republics of Venezuela and Colombia. Both countries welcomed Sephardic immigrants from Cura- çao, who had a generations-old track record of close, mutually beneficial trade ties with the mainland, and for whom emigration was a particularly attractive option whenever (frequent) droughts or economic recession struck the island.8 Smuggling continued, as did the flight of fugitive slaves, who were attracted by Gran Colombia’s abolition of slavery in 1821. (Slavery was not abolished in the Dutch realm until 1863.) They often found refuge in communities that had been established by previous generations of Afro-Curaçaoans. After a century on the periphery, Curaçao reemerged on the world economic stage with the opening of the Royal Dutch Shell oil refinery in 1918. As tens of thousands of immigrants poured in from throughout the circum-Caribbean and beyond, the island once again became a regional economic center. The Dutch refinery processed Venezuelan petroleum conclusions / 247 for the world market, annually sending dozens of tankers across the Atlantic.9 The resulting boom lasted for most of the twentieth century, and it transformed Curaçao into one of the most prosperous...