Operating within the established traditions and broad parameters of social history and historical sociology, Ponce Vázquez’s original and deeply archival work will be relevant to anyone whose interests extend to economic anthropology, political economy, the operation of power in racially and ethnically complex societies, and state-society relations in early modern imperial settings.How did a thriving contraband trade come to define society and shape political culture in seventeenth-century Hispaniola (today, Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and how did the island’s elites gain control over governing institutions designed to advance imperial interests? This innovative sociopolitical history details islanders’ resistance to Spain’s mercantile system and the reason for their turn to smuggling to survive. In response to royal neglect and indifference, elites increasingly turned governing institutions into vehicles to advance their self-interests. The rapid decline of its sugar economy and the re-routing of the imperial fleet turned Hispaniola into a periphery; islanders responded by engaging in trade with Spain’s enemies and rivals.Ponce Vázquez brings the understudied period of this colonial periphery to life, using a rich array of sources housed in Spain’s Archivo General de las Indias. He uses the framework of moral economy to explore how islanders rationalized their defiance of imperial authority, and he expands the concept to account for the behavior of Hispaniola’s elites and its racially mixed popular classes. Taken together, the range of responses by locals, though rarely undertaken in concert, turned the island into a relatively vibrant hub for contraband trade. Ponce Vázquez analyzes more than a century’s worth of correspondence sent to Spain’s Council of Indies from a broad cross-section of Hispaniola’s population in order to reconstruct islanders’ social and political responses to imperial policy. He supplements these fragmentary materials with documents generated by royal officials, including cases brought before the regional court (Audiencia) that survived only because they were sent to Seville on appeal, and records of official inspections and judicial proceedings (visitas and juicios de residencias).The creative discipline that Ponce Vázquez brings to his analysis of these challenging sources allows him to reconstruct the social worlds of the island’s diverse and fractious inhabitants. He concludes that the enduring patronage networks that took shape in this period subverted imperial rule throughout the Caribbean; that alliances across conventional boundaries of faith, status, race and “national” loyalties were common (if unstable); and that residents’ involvement in contraband trade provided the basis for the island’s economic growth.Smuggling shaped governance and determined the limits of Spanish imperial authority; Hispaniola’s residents survived by engaging in contraband trade with Spain’s rivals and enemies. Lightly inhabited regions and remote ports became thriving centers of illicit commerce. Slavery and a racialized social hierarchy did not prevent Afro-descended peoples—free or enslaved—from contributing to a political economy based on contraband trade and creating elaborate social networks that included agents of other European powers. These networks may well have outlasted the people who created them. Ironically, this widespread defiance of imperial law and policy, typically covert rather than openly confrontational, structured the island’s precarious stability and defined the contours of its politics and its economy within a broader, trans-imperial setting. The actions of residents operating outside the law, by continuously challenging imperial authority in ingenious ways, turned an imperial periphery into a trans-imperial center in the broader context of the Atlantic world. Hispaniola became a hub for a contraband trade that provided its poorer residents with a livelihood, its elites with increased authority, and members of both groups with greater access to European and regional markets.This rich and detailed portrayal of social relationships and economic encounters that transcended distinctions in doctrine, status, and race deserves a broad audience. It reinforces the value of bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives and analytical techniques to archival research. It illustrates that even though the challenges of the archive should never be underestimated, recalcitrant documentation can be made to reveal the complex lives of both the elites and the marginalized subjects of empire. Relevant to scholars with interests outside colonial Latin America and the Caribbean, this book’s significance extends to global history, comparative politics, and the historical sociology of colonial societies.