Portuguese Jews and Dutch Spaniards: cultural fluidity and economic pragmatism in the early modern Caribbean

Abstract

ABSTRACT Traditional studies of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world often describe it in terms of discreet imperial territories governed by distinct imperial systems. This study joins recent scholarship that has observed how the Atlantic and, more specifically, the Caribbean remained an entangled space rooted in the regional trade of both basic and lucrative commodities. This paper examines how Portuguese Jewish merchants in Curaçao helped facilitate mutually beneficial economic relationships between Spanish and Dutch ports that functioned independently of grander imperial designs. These relationships reveal that Portuguese Jewish, Spanish Catholic, and Dutch Protestant actors in the Caribbean could be flexible in their attitudes towards religious ‘others.’ The transfer of both goods and people (free and enslaved) across imperial borders in the Caribbean thus relied on a culture of pragmatic tolerance (but not necessarily acceptance) adopted by such diverse actors as Spanish and Dutch governors,asiento factors, and local and foreign merchants.