A spanish colony made of foreigners: Transimperial Trinidad during the age of revolutions

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the initial transformation of the island of Trinidad into a transimperial contact zone during the final decades of the Eighteenth century and how it became a particularly revealing space for colonial experimentation. This process began two decades before the British invasion of 1797 and originated from the core of the Spanish reformist state that sought to experiment with new political, legal, and economic arrangements for its American domains. The intensification of complex transimperial and transcolonial networks that connected imperial agents in Spain, colonial officials in the Venezuelan coast, local residents in Trinidad, and potential French and Irish Catholic migrants in the Lesser Antilles gave shape to the transformation of Trinidad. This article contributes to the history of the transimperial Atlantic by analyzing the initial phase of Trinidad’s transformation into a plural slave-based colony.