Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690, Juan José Ponce Vázquez, 2020, Cambridge University Press
As Donald Trump prepares to enter the White House, technocratic bean counters everywhere are focused on one thing—tariffs, and their impact on global trade and national economies.
Theirs is an understandable concern—punitive tariffs on Mexico, for example, could hit 25 per cent which, given that 82 per cent of Mexican exports head for the US and were valued at over $424 billion in the first 10 months of 2024 alone, could inflict severe economic pain.
Yet what no one is talking about is one of the most important yet concealed side-effects of tariffs and something that governments never like to discuss—smuggling.
The reason economic and political elites don’t like to talk about this illicit activity, however they like to dress it up as the nefarious doing of corrupt foreigners, is that since the dawn of modernity they have been among its main beneficiaries.
And the irony is that, for all its protectionist pretensions, the United States has throughout history been at the very top of the global trafficking food chain.
Indeed, when it comes to smuggling, the US is a superpower whose popular culture celebrates the ingenuity and libertarian instincts of traffickers from John Hancock, a Founding Father, to Al Capone.
There is an intimate relationship in American history between tariffs and smuggling which, as the writer Andrew Wender Cohen has shown in his books tracing the history of contraband, has helped shape Washington’s interactions with the world.
And it is no exaggeration to say that the US economy remains a major beneficiary of smuggling today: undocumented immigrants, who are mostly smuggled into the US, make up more than 4 per cent of the labour force, providing up to 70 per cent of the labour for agriculture, a sector that contributes $1 trillion to the US economy annually.
The US drug trade depends on a smuggled products to generate more than $150 billion annually in consumer spending.
Up to 21 per cent of the US cigarette market is contraband, with cigarette smuggling worth about $5 billion per year.
Smuggled goods represent a sizeable portion of products on sale. In 2021, the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized 27,107 shipments containing counterfeits worth nearly $3.31 billion, a 153 per cent increase on 2020.
The US is also the main global destination for smuggled wildlife and exotic goods in a trade valued at $23 billion internationally.
America—and Texas in particular—are major smugglers of firearms globally, above all to neighbouring states racked by violence such as Mexico and Haiti. Figures for the revenue generated by this illegal trade are understandably sketchy, but one estimate suggested the nearly 213,000 legally purchased firearms in the US illegally smuggled across the border into Mexico between 2010 and 2012, for example, represented 2.2 per cent of all US arms sales in that period, valued at around $200 million.
The lesson here is that capitalist economies—but more importantly, the imperial centre of global capitalism—whilst simultaneously imposing tariffs on competitors rely upon smuggling as a key component of international supply chains.
One outcome of this is that economic and political elites within both metropolitan and peripheral societies quickly come to depend upon the large revenues that trafficking generates. They live double lives, advocating tough justice against smugglers while reaping rich rewards from the latter’s surplus.
Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola offers a perfect example of this phenomenon, while also taking a giant leap towards correcting histories of the Caribbean sub-region that have largely ignored its significance in the imperial equation.
This book dwells upon Hispaniola’s persistent embrace of smuggling within the Spanish colonial system in the 17th century, which turned the island—modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic—into a hub of transimperial and interregional illicit trade.
Juan José Ponce Vázquez explores the progressive institutionalisation of smuggling at the highest levels of colonial governance and among Hispaniola-born local elites, which led to mutually beneficial interactions between colonial bureaucrats and local inhabitants.
His work has important implications both for the wider understanding of Spanish colonialism beyond the island, but also for how the Spanish Caribbean has figured in broader histories of Latin America.
He writes: “Despite the best attempts of the Spanish monarchy to curb contraband trade and reassert control of Santo Domingo’s commerce and institutions, its efforts were ultimately thwarted by local interests bent on pursuing the path that suited their social and economic ambitions.
“The study of a colonial periphery such as Hispaniola in the seventeenth century demonstrates how local peoples actively negotiated and transformed the meaning and reach of imperial bureaucracies and institutions for their own benefit.”
Ponce notes how the Spanish Caribbean has been sidelined from the main historical narratives of the Caribbean and Atlantic world during the seventeenth century, for various reasons—an over-emphasis on later sugar and plantation societies; a concentration on English, French and Dutch settlers that pushed Spanish settlement to the background; and a strong focus on the Haitian revolution.
One result of this, he points out, is that the role of smuggling in the socioeconomic construction of the Spanish Caribbean remains a mystery, even though it was a period of frenetic negotiation and competition between the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch for land and economic primacy.
Yet, Ponce suggests, we ignore this smugglers’ paradise at our peril. He writes: “Smuggling and the relationship that local smugglers formed with royal officials and foreigners defined early modern Atlantic empires. It established the personal connections that bound together interimperial and transimperial relationships, thus linking these competing empires.”
One of the important implications of this observation, with direct contemporary relevance, is how “corruption” was, as a result, understood.
As Ponce notes, the scale of smuggling as an illicit yet economically essential activity was such that it not only involved local residents but also royal officials, who benefitted directly or indirectly from these practices either by facilitating illicit exchanges, looking askance when they happened, or mediating the contraband trade.
This makes it all but impossible to establish a watertight definition of corruption, which helps to explain why in Hispaniola, many of the worst offenders in cases of smuggling and associated infractions escaped punishment.
The author writes: “Smugglers did not believe that their practice of contraband was illegitimate. At times they defied the crown’s authority violently; more often, they simply ignored its mandates.
“From the point of view of colonial officials engulfed in these accusations of misconduct, they understood that the support of a powerful cadre of local residents who tolerated and encouraged such illicit behaviour was more important than a rigid understanding of the law.”
Given this—and given the contemporary economic role played by smuggling, which is likely to expand in the coming era of “Trump tariffs”—it is easy to forget that we are talking about an often overlooked island society in the seventeenth century.
In short, just as in the colonial era smuggling served imperial designs, implicated imperial officials, and ultimately enriched imperial coffers, it will continue to do so today.
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Categories: Caribbean, Dominican Republic, Haiti, North America, United States