Dark, bitter, and aromatic, Venezuelan cacao beans fueled a vital and dynamic informal commerce in the 17th- and 18th-century Southeastern Caribbean region. Trading this coveted cacao anywhere else than Spain and Mexico was illegal by Spanish law and actively suppressed as contraband; yet, the Dutch authorities on Curaçao, Bonaire and Aruba (ABC islands) encouraged commercial interactions with the adjacent Venezuelan mainland, openly violating inter-imperial economic boundaries. This informal commerce thrived for more than two centuries between the Dutch islands and Spanish colonial Venezuela, seducing a diversity of regional trans-imperial seafarers and mobilizing vital commodities. Curaçaoan merchants traded indispensable European ceramics, along with textiles and foodstuffs, to Tierra Firme chronically neglected by Spanish provisioning fleets, while local Venezuelan ceramics for everyday domestic needs itinerated onboard the ships that returned to the ABC islands loaded with cacao, hides, mules, and tobacco.
While much is known about the socioeconomic and political history and impacts of this longstanding commerce, nothing is known of its material dimensions and how the indispensable smuggled ceramics changed or maintained the identities and gender relations of peoples in the colonial societies on the islands and the continent. The central research question of the ArCarib project is: how did the informal maritime commerce of ceramics in the 17th- and 18th-century Southeastern Caribbean impact the everyday life of communities on the ABC islands and on the Venezuelan coast, particularly their identity formation processes and gender relations? This interdisciplinary historical archaeological project employs the innovative theoretical and methodological framework of assemblages of practice, developed by the PI, to critically contrast new and existing archaeological, archaeometric, and documentary evidence and answer this central research question. This first cross-border archaeological study between the ABC islands and Venezuela breaks new ground, revealing how through informal commerce the colonized agentially contributed to the dynamics of continuation and/or change in their communities’ identities and gender relations beyond the restrictive, acculturating, and engendering policies imposed by the colonizer. This project is poised to generate completely new knowledge that will advance interdisciplinary understandings of contraband and informal commerce in early-modern colonial contexts.
