“Betwixt Ye Two Rivers”: Trafficking and Colonization in Early Seventeenth-Century Saint Christopher

Abstract

Starting in the mid-sixteenth century, European traffickers frequented the Caribbean in search of ships to plunder and gained access to Spanish America’s closed markets by seizing captives and smuggling them into underserved ports. For traffickers, these activities depended on alliances with Kalinago populations in the Lesser Antilles, who allowed traffickers to refit their vessels and trade for food, wood, and water. By the 1620s, this political economy of raiding and smuggling led to the establishment of English and French colonies in the Lesser Antilles, which created new markets for bound captives and deepened regional and intercolonial commercial networks. The Lesser Antilles developed into sites of colonization because of their centrality to networks of raiding and informal trade in the Spanish Caribbean.