More than Slaves and Sugar: Recent Historiography of the Trans-imperial Caribbean and Its Sinew Populations

Abstract

Although the plantation as a social and economic organizing principle continues to dominate early modern Caribbean historiography, recent literature has explored outside of its confines to document a range of Antillean inhabitants who were neither masters nor slaves. These subjects exploited the inter-imperial fluidity of the region to their advantage in order to carve out commercial, strategic, and cultural niches. This article surveys new studies on smugglers, soldiers, and European ethnic minorities in the colonial Caribbean. These groups are representative examples of much larger sinew populations that the dominant historiographical paradigm of sugar and slaves has overlooked. Despite planters' attempts to essentialize race, class, legal status, and occupation into their simplest forms, a broad body of historical actors resisted and coexisted with the plantation complex and reshaped the designs of empires in the process.