2024 Theses Doctoral

Exchanging Empires: Free Ports, Reform, and Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1750-1784

Kleiser, Randal Grant

Mid-eighteenth-century Caribbean free ports constitute crucial sites of both imperial domination as well as revolutionary potential in the development of the modern world. While Spain, France, and Britain’s establishment of Caribbean “free ports” from 1756-1784 marked a significant shift in European imperial political economy, few historians have investigated or compared the motivations for these reforms. Also, little scholarship exists on how various people throughout the Atlantic world reacted to these new free ports. However, this movement affected many of the dramatic political and economic changes made during the second half of the eighteenth century. Drawing on U.S., European, and Caribbean archives, this dissertation asserts that, for some, Caribbean free ports buttressed and revitalized various empires, while, for others, they helped combat these empires’ worst abuses.

While varying over time and place, “free ports” generally describe places where merchants of all flags could enter and conduct commerce with each other. This policy constituted a meaningful economic reform within European imperial commercial regimes that often excluded foreign traders from colonial ports. This has prompted some scholars to describe the promulgation of free ports as an early moment of “liberalism.” Instead, I argue that Spain, France, and Britain used this same commercial “tool” to accomplish distinct goals, but all with the aim of directing rather than completely “opening” foreign trade. Spain established free ports in the colony of Santo Domingo in order to encourage Spanish and Canary Island settlers to populate a tenuous borderland region that was under threat of French conquest. Spain’s free ports thus successfully maintained Spanish territorial control in the region. French policy-makers, on the other hand, opened several ports in the Lesser Antilles and Saint-Domingue primarily to provide essential supplies of lumber, livestock, and foodstuffs to Caribbean planters which helped sustain France’s lucrative plantation regime. Finally, Whitehall passed the Free Port Act to export British manufactured goods and enslaved Africans to foreign markets, thereby “ruining” their rivals’ colonial trade and extending Britain’s commercial empire to foreign realms. While subject to different regulations, all these reforms drew on previous Dutch and Danish models, as well as on each other, in a spirit of jealous emulation. And while exhibiting distinct goals, all these (heavily-restricted) free-port policies sought to control colonial commerce and augment the relative wealth and power of their particular empire.

Building off these imperial perspectives and goals, this dissertation then reveals these Caribbean free ports’ effects on other people in the Atlantic world. I argue that American revolutionaries viewed British free ports as an insufficient and illogical reform, thus heightening their disappointment of and distance from the mother country. Foreign free ports also served as key sources to replace British commerce, inspiring nascent revolutionaries that life outside the British commercial system was possible. Later, foreign free ports provided essential supplies for the American war effort and helped the nascent U.S. economy to survive. Moving to the intellectual realm, Caribbean free ports also provided material evidence for European philosophes who published influential works on political economy. People like Adam Smith and Abbé Raynal (and his co-authors of the famous Histoire des deux Indes) observed Caribbean free ports and used Dutch ones as models to demonstrate how more liberalized foreign commerce could foster mutual prosperity, consumer benefits, and some degree of non-antagonistic peace between polities. Free ports, therefore, were essential in the development of “classical liberalism” and doux commerce. Finally, this dissertation uncovers how many enslaved people used such ports to escape their enslavers and spread across the Greater Caribbean. These harbors attracted many foreign trading vessels through which enslaved people could receive essential information, gain money through petty commerce, or stow away. Contrary to imperial desires, free ports offered more opportunities for freedom-seekers and thus challenged the slave-based foundations of these Atlantic empires. As such, Caribbean free ports sit at the center of key debates and conflicts regarding the nature of empire, economic sovereignty, and the benefits and detriments of international trade in the eighteenth century and beyond.