Event Description
“Warfare, Imperial Competition, and Serial Displacement in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean”
Casey Schmitt, MCEAS Barra Postdoctoral Fellow
This paper examines violent slave raiding that became a central part of seventeenth-century warfare in the Caribbean, particularly the decades between 1650 and 1670. It focuses on the serial displacements of enslaved people as a result of this warfare, as well as the negotiations that occurred between slave-owners surrounding the return of their human property. Holding people as property in the Caribbean meant contending with the proximity of rival European and indigenous settlements in an aquatic geography that facilitated movement. Enslaved people labored on or near the sea and some permanently escaped the jurisdiction of their bondage through maritime mobility. This paper focuses especially on the disorder and violence of the Anglo-Dutch Wars and how raiding created conflicting claims of ownership over enslaved people. These claims came to a head during the negotiations that ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and this paper traces those debates and the subsequent arguments about legal claims to property in people.
Everyone attending the seminar should read the paper in advance. For increased security, seminar papers will be individually password protected. Papers will be available for downloading for a limited time. Please email Irene Cho at itc25@drexel.edu if you would like me to forward you the download instructions.
Sponsored by Drexel University's Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships and coordinated by the McNeil Center with Drexel's Department of History
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