English troops arrived in Hispaniola in 1655, initiating a first strike of the “Western Design” intended to expand militant Protestant influence in the Americas. No longer would Albion skirt the edges of Spain's empire, but aim at its center, invade established colonies, and insert English merchants, goods, and capital directly into existing trade networks. Although a powerful Spanish defense repulsed these forces, the English shortly thereafter captured the neighboring colony of Santiago, which they called Jamaica. There, despite residents’ resistance and repeated Spanish efforts to dislodge them from the island, the English remained and built a colony at the “navel (as the Spanyards call it) of the Indies,” as Jamaica's governor, Thomas Modyford, put it in 1664 (1). Jamaica provided proximity to Spanish American markets, and the promise of stable access to silver and global trade.
But what sense did residents of and travelers in the early modern Caribbean make of the ambitions of distant European leaders, their imperial rivalries, or contested jurisdictions? April Hatfield's latest monograph answers these questions, examining how “imperial definitions of who belonged to the body politic evolved” over the seventeenth century (3). In seven thematic chapters that progress from the 1650s into the eighteenth century, Hatfield examines how factors including religion, race, language, and commerce framed a subject's political status as they moved between English and Spanish territories in the early modern Caribbean. Specific debates in colonial spaces shaped political concepts—including sovereignty, subjecthood, and the law of nations—that transformed European states and international legal systems. The slave trade and political status of enslaved people stood at the center of these debates. In contrast to Catholic monarchs’ “insistence that enslaved women and men were members of the body politic,” Hatfield highlights how English political concepts and law forged in the Atlantic crucible sanctioned the kidnapping and brutal enslavement of people of African and Indigenous descent, excluding them from subject status (80). English officials experimented with notions of political belonging rooted in language, shared economic interests, or emergent racial categories rather than religious conformity. In response, many enslaved and free people of color fled English colonies for territories held by the Spanish or Portuguese.
For example, Juan Catalan, a free soldier of mixed descent, testified in 1667 that he had been enslaved by English pirates and forced to build forts in Jamaica. He had escaped the island by canoe, paddling with eleven others to the southern coast of Cuba. Explaining his motives to the governor of Havana, Catalan observed that he “fled to the land of Christians and left the captivity of those pirates” (91). For Catalan and thousands like him, announcing one's Catholic religious identity provided an unimpeachable rationale for seeking sanctuary in Spanish colonies. Meanwhile, many Jews “moved in the opposite direction,” pulling up stakes to seek opportunities in the English and Dutch Caribbean with promises of increased religious freedom (110) and expansive civil and political rights (122). In this process, Jews leveraged English discussions of whiteness to bolster claims to political inclusion.
As a scholar of colonial Virginia and the Atlantic world, Hatfield demonstrates mastery of the British archival materials that form the book's evidentiary core. But she foregrounds the perspectives of colonial officials and residents of the Caribbean and incorporates Spanish records to illuminate key debates. As a result, this volume sets an ambitious standard for all scholars of the early modern Atlantic to move beyond national frames, and it demonstrates the value of such an approach.
