Publications
Published
“Reconceptualizing the Spanish Caribbean in the Long Seventeenth Century: A Review Essay,” The Latin Americanist 68, no. 2 (June 2024): p. 297-300. https://doi.org/10.1353/tla.2024.a929910
This review essay juxtaposes Juan José Ponce Vázquez’s Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690 (2020) and Joseph M.H. Clark’s Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century (2023) to argue for the emergence of a new understanding of what the early modern Spanish Caribbean was.
In Progress
“Competing Loyalties in Eastern Cuba: The Bayamo Rebellion of 1603.” Journal article currently under review.
Abstract: At the start of the seventeenth century the eastern Cuban town of Bayamo became a regional entrepôt. Merchants from France, England, Genoa, and the fledgling Dutch Republic arrived at the shores of the port of Manzanillo to trade linens, silks, and enslaved Africans for hides from the Cuban interior. The governor of Cuba, Pedro de Valdés, sought to stop this unlicensed trade and sent his lieutenant governor to Bayamo to investigate. His investigation found that Bayamo was a microcosm of the Caribbean itself, with people from all nations congregating on the shores of the Cauto river, where they formed both mercantile and social bonds in defiance of Spain’s trade monopoly. The lieutenant governor’s efforts to end contraband trade provoked a rebellion in Bayamo and a raid in the nearby city of Santiago de Cuba, where English raiders attempted to capture the investigator. The townsfolk appealed to the royal audiencia of Santo Domingo and reaffirmed their loyalty to the Spanish empire, in which the appellate court sought to pacify the rebels through appeasement. This article demonstrates the complex relationships between local Spanish colonists, foreign merchants, and the regional colonial institutions that impacted the way local actors navigated commercial and legal channels.