Marronage, Manumission and Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Caribbean

Abstract

This article analyses the permeable boundaries between slavery and freedom which developed in the context of illicit inter-imperial trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Caribbean, focusing on ties between the Dutch island of Curaçao and the neighbouring northern coast of Spanish South America. As smuggling opened opportunities for enslaved people to cross political borders, it spurred authorities to develop flexible legal frameworks to meet the challenge of conducting free trade in colonial slave societies. The evidence indicates that, even in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, slavery sometimes existed along a legal continuum, rather than as an immutable, absolute category.