Cartagena de Indias y la región histórica del Caribe, 1580–1640

In the early seventeenth century, Cartagena de Indias was—with Havana and Veracruz— one of the three major hubs of the Spanish Caribbean’s commercial system. Despite this importance, the port city has received surprisingly little in the way of serious and sustained attention by colonialists—until now. Antonino Vidal Ortega’s study of Cartagena de Indias not only provides a thorough reconstitution of the city’s commercial and social life but also handily illustrates how these activities fit into the early economic development of the Caribbean basin. In this last respect, Vidal Ortega’s work can profitably be read alongside studies by Alejandro de la Fuente and Carmen López Yuste on Havana and Veracruz. Together they provide a long-needed, specifically Caribbean counterpoint to the historiography on internal colonial markets pioneered by Carlos Sempat Assadourian and Juan Carlos Caravaglia.Vidal Ortega’s writing is clear, and he logically divides the book into thematic units covering the early history of the city, its place within the Spanish Atlantic and Caribbean trading systems, its ties to its hinterland in the Nuevo Reino de Granada, and, finally, its patterns of urban social and cultural life. Within this classic frame lays a wonderfully detailed and rewarding account of a vibrant Caribbean port. The author has mined long runs of previously neglected legajos s in the Archivo General de Indias and relevant local archives. The results of his labors shine through.Readers will encounter here a multiracial, even cosmopolitan, port. In 1619 an estimated 20,000 Africans and Afro-Caribbeans lived in the city and its environs, making it one of the most African cities of the Spanish colonies. They shared the city with urbanized Amerindians, mestizos, mulattoes, a sizeable group of foreigners (including a Pole, a Scotsman, and a former “resident of Tangiers”), as well as representatives of the various nations of the Iberian Peninsula. The city lived to trade, and Vidal Ortega does a fine job of describing the different sites and practices of all this trafficking. Of particular note is his depiction of the extramural barrio of Getsemaní, a dense maze of houses, stockades, and dead-end alleys uniquely suitable for illicit dealing. Informal exchange proved to be the norm in Cartagena. This led to the development of what the author terms a “burlesque” civic culture of dissimulation and even parody. Individuals of all groups and conditions participated, but few could rival the Portuguese, who simultaneously dominated the port’s contraband trade and took up leading positions within its public institutions.Vidal Ortega extends his study to the city’s hinterlands. This move allows him to incorporate wonderful material on frontier life, marronage, the development of mines and plantations, and the conduct of contraband in the outports of the Venezuelan coast. It is worth noting the book’s ability to shift smoothly between social and economic phenomena and to show how each affected the other.Descriptively rich as it is, the book’s principal contribution is in situating Cartagena within a broader context of regional economic development. The port has traditionally been portrayed as the American terminus of the southerly leg of the Spanish transatlantic commercial system. Vidal Ortega shows that this was but one of Cartagena’s many commercial roles. Following upon the work of Enriqueta Vila Vilar, he offers a detailed account of the direct trade of slaves from Africa to, and through, the city. More important, perhaps, is his careful demonstration of Cartagena’s connections to the expanding hinterlands of the Venezuelan coast and the gold fields of Nueva Granada, to the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain, and to the various islands of the Caribbean. Vidal Ortega’s evidence clearly shows that the majority of Cartagena’s trade flowed through regional and intercolonial circuits.Vida Ortega argues that Cartagena de Indias exercised a “hegemonic” role in the burgeoning Caribbean system of the seventeenth century. Here it is possible to voice some reservations. The book’s focus upon a single market makes it difficult to establish, with precision and evidence, Cartagena’s relative weight within the overall Caribbean economy. To substantiate this claim, data from the different trading centers of the region, both Spanish and non-Spanish, must be brought together. Still, Vidal Ortega has provided us with a key piece of this puzzle, and an artfully crafted one at that.

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