An Aqueous Territory

Front matter

AN AQUEOUS TERRITORY

AN AQUEOUS TERRITORY Sailor Geographies and New Granadas

Transimperial Greater Caribbean World

PART I. Spatial Configurations Vessels: Routes, Size, and Frequency 23 Sailors: Border Crossers and Region Makers 55

PART II. Geopolitics and Geopolitical Imagination Maritime Indians, Cosmopolitan Indians 85 Turning South before Swinging East 114

Simón Bolivar’s Caribbean Adventures 142

CONCLUSION: Of Alternative Geographies and Plausible Futures 204 APPENDIXES 213

NOTES 243

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing about border crossers and the transimperial milieu they inhabited requires lots of international travel. Like Antonio Machados (and Joan Manuel Serrat’s) caminante, I have walked along many roads in the process of writing this book. And while I have not sailed a hundred seas, researching the lives of many who actually did has taken me to multiple archives and libraries on both sides of the Atlantic. In the process I have acquired many debts, met lots of wonderful people, and turned several libraries into my personal office.

Cornell University and the University of California, Irvine (uct), the two institutions that I consider my academic homes, provided most of the financial support that made this book possible. Funds from Cornell's History Department and the Society for the Humanities covered a postdissertation trip to Colombia’s National Archives in 2013. Cornell’s Institute for the Social Sciences gave me the physical space and time I needed to finish the revision process. Grants and fellowships from vcrs Humanities Center, the School of Humanities, the Center in Law, Society and Culture, and the All-uc Group in Economic History allowed me to conduct archival research in Colombia, Spain, and the United Kingdom. A residency scholarship from the Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos made research in Sevilles Archivo General de Indias (AG1) possible.

Archival research cannot be conducted without those who retrieve the documents from their hidden underground repositories. The staff of London's National Archives and the friendly and collaborative employees of Seville's AGI provided invaluable help. In Colombias Archivo General de la Nación, I benefited from the expertise of research room director Mauricio Tovar and the whole staff. I am particularly grateful to Ana López, Fabio Castro, Rovir Gómez, Anhjy Meneses, Zenaida López, Fredy Duque, Enrique Rodríguez, and Doris Contreras for guiding me when I had little idea of how to find what I was looking for.

My intellectual debts are many. Since 2012, I have been part of a superb academic community where I have found many friends and even more critical readers. Cornells history department has not only given me the space and time needed to revise the dissertation on which this book is based but also offered a captive audience of fantastic colleagues, most of whom read substantial portions of this book and offered valuable feedback. Ray Craib has been the best senior colleague one could ask for. He read many full versions of the manuscript, and our numerous conversations clearly made this a better book while also making me a better historian. Robert Travers and Jon Parmenter also read the whole manuscript and made insightful comments that helped me better pitch the book to non-Latin Americanists. Most of my department colleagues read parts of my work for two lively and productive meetings of the Comparative History Colloquium. I am particularly grateful to Durba Ghosh, Derek Chang, and Eric Tagliacozzo for reading several chapters and offering useful advice, criticism, and bibliographical suggestions. Aaron Sachs, Camille Robcis, Margaret Washington, Rachel Weil, Mary Beth Norton, Judi Byfield, and María Cristina García also read portions of the manuscript and offered fruitful thoughts. Julilly Kohler-Haussman and Mostafa Minawi not only read large chunks of the manuscript but, most importantly, were cosufferers in the process of writing our first books. As department chair, Barry Strauss showed his full support of my career advancement by becoming a dear protector of my writing time. The administrative, technical, and logistical aid Katie Kristof, Barb Donnell, Judy Yonkin, and Kay Stickane provided allowed me to navigate Cornell and made many additional writing hours possible. Outside the history department, my fellow Cornell colonialist Ananda Cohen-Suárez has been one of the best interlocutors one could wish for. Some of the most stimulating conversations that greatly helped me frame and reframe my arguments took place during the first time I taught the graduate seminar on entangled histories of the Americas and the Atlantic. I thank Josh Savala, Kyle Harvey, Molly Reed, Esmeralda Arrizon-Palomera, and Elise Amfreville for their careful reading, thought-provoking questions, and provocative papers.

Before Cornell, I acquired my intellectual debts at uci. My dissertation supervisor, Jaime Rodríguez, provided constant encouragement, read and reread every dissertation chapter, always offering precious feedback, and made sure to let me know that he expected much of me. I hope that I am fulfilling his expectations. In Rachel O'Toole I found the best mentor a grad student could hope for. Countless conversations with Rachel during and after my ucI years decisively influenced and continue to influence my approach to history, the historical profession, and life in academia. Steve Topik is a historian worth imitating. I certainly take from him the interest in locating Latin America and

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Latin Americans in a larger global setting. Steve's office was always open, and sitting by his fair trade cups I participated in some of the most intellectually inspiring and exciting conversations of my graduate student years. Winston James paid careful attention to my initial attempts to define the Caribbean, and, despite not always agreeing on the matter, he took seriously my answers to the question, What is the Caribbean? Laura Mitchell introduced me to world history, an approach that decisively permeates my arguments and writing. Her Approaches to World History seminar greatly contributed to turning my initial idea of writing a local history of Caribbean Colombia into a much more stimulating project concerned with transimperial connections. David Igler, Pat Seed, Dan McClure, Eric Steiger, Alberto Barrera, Annette Rubado, Heidi Tinsman, Aubrey Adams, Tina Shull, Annessa Stagner, David Fouser, and Young Hee Kim read aspects of my graduate work that, in hindsight, I now see as my initial attempts to approach the transimperial Greater Caribbean from New Granada's shores. Raúl Fernández provided unconditional support and sabor throughout my Irvine years.

Beyond my two intellectual homes, many people and venues have made research, writing, and spreading my work a highly stimulating experience. In Bogotá, workdays at the archives often included lunch, coffee, and after-hours historical conversation with Daniel Gutiérrez, Jesse Cromwell, Sergio Mejía, and Carlos Camacho. In Seville, the midmorning breaks to get a timely cafelillo con leche provided both physical energy and mental stimulation to continue plowing through documents. I thank Ramón Aizpurüa, Luis Miguel Glave, Esther González, and Cameron Jones for the many great conversations we had over coffee. During my stay in London, my friend Bill Booth provided much-needed research assistance that made my short visit to Kew extremely productive.

As graduate student and assistant professor, I have benefited from participation in multiple seminars and conferences where I have met peers and mentors, many of whom later became friends. My participation in the annual meetings of the American Historical Association, the Gran Colombia Studies panels of the Conference on Latin American History, and the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction allowed me to share and receive valuable feedback on my work and to become part of an exciting community of historians whose work and ideas greatly influence my own. In particular, these venues allowed me to meet and share ideas with Alex Borucki, Marcela Echeverri, Pablo Gómez, Fabricio Prado, Linda Rupert, Elena Schneider, Madalina Veres, Molly Warsh, and David Wheat. Numerous invitations to

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi present aspects of my work were also critical in refining my arguments and ideas. I thank the organizers of the New York State Latin American History Workshop (Bridget Chesterton), the Colloquium of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (Elena Schneider), the conference “Placing History, Historicizing Geography" (Bertie Mandelblatt and Dean Bond), the conference “Rethinking Space in Latin American History" (Stuart Schwartz, Gil Joseph, Santiago Muñoz, and Adrián Lerner), the workshop “Entangled Histories of the Early Modern British and Iberian Empires and Their Successor Republics” (Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Bradley Dixon, Christopher Heaney, and Mark Sheaves), and the conference “Rethinking Historical Space/Area in Historical Study” (Martin Klimke, David Ludden, Lauren Minsky, and Mark Swislocki) for putting together outstanding venues for intellectual exchange. I also thank the attendants at these events for pushing me to think harder about regions, geography, the sea, and more. Invitations by Johanna von Grafenstein (Instituto Mora), Jonathan Ablard (Ithaca College), Francisco Scarano (University of Wisconsin, Madison), and Nancy Appelbaum (Binghamton University) forced me to organize my thoughts and further refine my arguments. Many conversations and e-mail exchanges with Anne Eller on the Greater Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions shaped my thinking. I also thank her for close readings of the introduction and the conclusion. Nancy Appelbaum, Lina del Castillo, and Andrea Wulf taught me a great deal about Colombia's politician-geographers and the Bolívar- Humboldt connection. Anne McPherson's comments on an early version of chapter 3 helped me present the story of maritime Indians better. Before I decided to become a professional historian, Linda Newson and Alberto Abello introduced me to the history of colonial Latin America and to the serious study of Caribbean Colombia that, in the long term, resulted in this book.

At Duke University Press, Gisela Fosado has provided fantastic guidance to this neophyte of book publishing. She liked what I presented at a conference, asked for more, and continued to like the succeeding versions. Art editor Christine Riggio drew beautiful maps and helped me prepare all the illustrations. Lydia Rose Rappoport-Haskins guided me through the final stages of manuscript preparation. I am deeply thankful to the two anonymous readers whose wise comments, critiques, and suggestions pushed me to revise, reorganize, and rewrite important portions of the manuscript. Both readers demonstrated an enthusiasm for the book that greatly encouraged me to work hard on the revision process.

xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Throughout the research and writing process I was lucky to count on supportive friends and family who made research and writing possible. In Bogotá, Mauricio Calderón and Isabella Gardeazábal and my aunt Carmen Arévalo made their homes my home. Staying with them not only allowed me to stretch my meager financial resources but, most importantly, gave me companionship during lonely weekends when I missed my family the most. In London, María Isabel Irurita, Juan Camilo Cock, and Martina were the best hosts one could ask for. Staying with them not only resulted in a free-of-charge London but also gave me the great joy of meeting old friends again.

The help of my immediate family has been simply immeasurable. My parents, Chila and Rafa, have always supported my historical endeavors and have actually been pretty interested in my research and writing. My interest in the Caribbean, in fact, I owe in great part to them. Muchas gracias mami y papi! Claudia Roselló and Santiago Bassi have been my fellow travelers along this historical road. When I was abroad doing research, they held the fort back in California. When I was home, they encouraged me and created regenerative distractions that helped me think better and pushed me to keep writing. Elisa Bassi joined us later in the journey. For most of her life, Ithaca has been home, which means that she has had to put up with less research-related absence than Clau and Santi. But, like Clau and Santi, Elisa has caught me (several times) thinking about the book at moments when I should have been giving my undivided attention to my playful daughter. Even before this book was in the makings, Clau, in the words of Serrat, cerró su puerta y echó andar. Today, three countries and more than a decade later, she is still here and, with Santi and Elisa, continues to hold the home fort when I am away.

Clau, Santi, and Elisa, I thank you for joining me in creating our own geography and envisioning a wild variety of potential futures. This book is for you. It is what it is, in part, because of you. I am the historian that I am, in large part, because of you. The flaws, though, are solely mine.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

Introduction

Geography discursive attachment to stasis and physicality, the idea that space “just is; and that space and place are merely containers for human complexities and social relations, is terribly seductive. . . . If space and place appear to be safely secure and unwavering, then what space and place make possible, outside and beyond tangible stabilities . . . can potentially fade away. Geography is not, however, secure and unwavering; we produce space, we produce its meanings, and we work very hard to make geography what it is.

—KATHERINE MCKITTRICK, Demonic Grounds

On October 13, 1815, the legislature of the young republic of Cartagena approved a proposal to put the city under the protection of the British Crown. Swearing allegiance to His Britannic Majesty, Cartagena’s governor Juan de Dios Amador believed, constituted “the only measure capable of saving this city” Besieged since mid-August by a strong Spanish contingent under field marshal Pablo Morillo, Cartagena, independent since November 1811, was targeted for favoring political autonomy over allegiance to King Ferdinand VII after the French invaded the Spanish Peninsula in 1808. “Let us,” Governor Amador said, “offer the province [of Cartagena] to a wise and powerful Nation, capable of saving... and governing us. Let us put [the province] under the shelter and direction of the Monarch of Great Britain.” Cartagenas legislature did not need much time to reach a decision. Persuaded that "under the circumstances manifested" the governor's proposal was “the only one capable of saving the State,” the legislature unanimously approved Amador’s measure and granted him power to contact the British authorities of Jamaica.! On the next day, Amador dispatched a commission to inform the authorities of Jamaica of the decision. That same day (October 14, 1815), Gustavo Bell Lemus tells us, “the British flag was raised in the city [of Cartagena]? In Jamaica, reasserting their recent commitment to remain neutral in Spains conflict with its American territories, British authorities refused to provide any help to Cartagena's delegates. Without external support, Cartagena, unable to resist the Spanish siege, surrendered to Spanish forces on December 6, 1815?

The siege of Cartagena is a well-known piece of Colombias patriotic narrative.* Because of its tenacious resistance during the siege, the city is known to all Colombians as "the heroic city" The request of Cartagenas legislature to offer the province to the British Crown is less known. Historians of Colombia, especially those specializing in the local history of Caribbean Colombia, are familiar with the declaration but have not delved into its analytical possibilities, simply regarding it as a desperate measure taken under desperate circumstances. Since the proposal was ultimately rejected, it has been considered inconsequential, a mere anecdote with little value to understand Colombias nation-making process.

While this book is not about Cartagena (although Cartagena figures prominently in its pages), the city's 1815 siege and, in particular, the request of its legislative body serve as a good introduction to the books approach. Instead ofa history concerned with explaining origins (i.e., a genealogy of what ended up happening), this book advances a history that rescues the notion that for any given historical outcome there were many alternatives. These alternatives, many of which, as Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker put it, “have... been denied, ignored, or simply not seen,” offer us a window to understand that what ended up happening was not bound to happen.? Read in this light, the request of Cartagenas legislature emerges as a telling example that "another world was possible,” one in which, as Cartagenas legislators unsuccessfully hoped, the wars of independence that resulted in the creation ofthe Republic of Colombia could have resulted in the establishment of a British colony in the Caribbean coast of the Viceroyalty of New Granada.$ This study does not depict that unrealized future (i.e., it does not pursue the counterfactual question of what might have happened if the British authorities had accepted the request of Cartagena's legislature). It does, however, take seriously the notion that a British Cartagena was a constitutive part of the "horizon of expectation" of the city's legislators.’ It was part of what, in her analysis of colonial internationalisms in the twentieth-century interwar era, Manu Goswami called the “open-ended constellation of contending political futures" that informed what Cartagena's legislators and other city residents considered a plausible world.*

The implications of this approach for our understanding of Caribbean and Colombian history are considerable. To think of what the subjects we study considered plausible forces us out of entrenched habits of narration that naturalize a definition of the Caribbean region as consisting only of the Caribbean islands and an understanding of Colombia as a country lacking strong historical connections with its Caribbean neighbors. By stressing the thick connections linking New Granadas coasts with Jamaica, Curacao, Hispaniola, Saint Thomas, and the coastal cities of the United States (chapters 1 and 2), and by explaining the "decaribbeanization" process through which early Colombia's nation makers chose to erase these connections (chapter 6), this book uncovers ways of inhabiting the world that are not captive to anachronistic world-regionalization schemes and, thus, allows us to understand how the historical subjects we study developed a sense of place—how they located themselves in the larger world—and envisioned potential futures for themselves and those whom they claimed to represent.

An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granadas Transimperial Greater Caribbean World traces the configuration of a geographic space—the transimperial Greater Caribbean—and the multiple projects its inhabitants developed to envision their future, their geopolitical imagination.? It approaches these two processes from the perspective of the Caribbean coast of northwestern South America—from Cape Gracias a Dios to the Guajira Peninsula, or what during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was referred to in Spanish sources as the northern provinces of the Viceroyalty of New Granada and in British sources as the Spanish Main. From this geographical vantage point, the study of the configuration of a transimperial Greater Caribbean and its inhabitants’ geopolitical imagination turns into a study ofthe creation ofa transimperial geography that connected Caribbean New Granada with the "British" Caribbean (especially Jamaica), the "French" Caribbean (especially Saint-Domingue or Haiti), the “Dutch” Caribbean (especially Curacao), and, under specific circumstances explained in chapter 1, “Danish” Saint Thomas and the United States.'?

The geographical vantage point of the analysis is important because it allows for the transimperial Greater Caribbean—a regional space that in chapter 2 I define as malleable and flexible—to look different, to cover a different area depending on the vantage point taken. While from the vantage point of New Granada's Caribbean coast, Neogranadan ports like Portobelo, Cartagena, Santa Marta, and Riohacha and ports that face the southern Caribbean Sea (Kingston, Les Cayes, Curacao) appear prominently, the use of a different vantage point results in other ports taking center stage. Studies of New Orleans as commercial center of a geographic space similarly evolving from transimperial or transnational connections, for example, make ports like

Havana and Cap Francais (later Cap Haitien) more visible. Something similar happens when Florida becomes the vantage point. When studying commercial connections between New Spain (Mexico) and the Caribbean, Veracruz, Havana, Puerto Rico, Spanish Florida, Spanish Louisiana, and Santo Domingo, all of which received situados (financial transfers to cover defense expenditures) from the Viceroyalty of New Spain, appear as the key nodal points of the Greater Caribbean."

The geographical vantage point also highlights the extent to which key economic and social institutions spread unevenly through space. Slavery, for the purposes of this book, provides the best example. While from the vantage point of Cuba the demand for more slaves that emerged immediately after the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution ushered in the island's sugar revolution and its concomitant loyal adherence to the Spanish Crown, similar cries voiced from New Granadas Caribbean shores were initially ignored or not heard by imperial authorities and then completely silenced by the turmoil and diplomatic imperatives of the wars of independence. From Cuban shores, thus, slavery and enslaved people were among the most visible elements ofa transimperial Greater Caribbean.? The view from New Granada was quite different. Because An Aqueous Territory embraces the Greater Caribbean from New Granadas shores, slavery appears in this book more as a project in the minds of bureaucrats and local elites who aspired to become wealthy planters than as a reality experienced in the flesh by a large group of the region's inhabitants. This is not to say that there were no slaves on New Granadas Caribbean shores but that the northern provinces of the viceroyalty were, like Cuba before its sugar revolution, “more a society with slaves than a slave society? P?

An Aqueous Territory advances two central arguments: first, that in the decades between the end of the Seven Years' War and the final years of the wars that led to the emergence of the Republic of Colombia, sailors frequently crisscrossing political borders in Caribbean and Atlantic waters and gathering and spreading information obtained at ports and on the high seas constructed the space of social interaction, or region, that I call the transimperial Greater Caribbean; second, that, like sailors, many other less mobile subjects used this transimperial geographical framework as a chalkboard on which they conceived analyses of their present and visions of potential futures. While many of these visions never came to fruition, those who envisioned them certainly intended to turn them into reality. Because both mobile sailors and less mobile coastal and island denizens influenced and were influenced by the development of this transimperial geography, it can be asserted that the actors of this book lived in what Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof has called “a transnational [or transimperial] social field? Life in this transimperial milieu led them to develop what Micol Seigel called "transnational [or transimperial] mental maps" that allowed them to make sense of the world they inhabited."

Given the agitated geopolitical environment of the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, the circumstances under which Caribbean dwellers created spaces and envisioned futures were complex and full of contradictions. During the Age of Revolutions the political map of the Atlantic as well as its commercial codes and legal cultures were greatly transformed. New republics began to emerge where there had previously been colonies and European overseas territories. Imperial reformers successfully pushed for less stringent commercial restrictions, and European powers began to view interimperial trade in more favorable terms while remaining wary of the smuggling practices associated with these commercial transactions.” Slavery and the slave trade became targets of criticism—from below and from above—that led several empires and emerging republics to abolish one or the other during the first decade of the nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the period witnessed the biggest increase in slave imports to the Americas, a trend that was particularly marked in Spanish America, which, in the century between the outbreak of the American Revolution and 1866, imported 60 percent of the slaves it imported since the beginning of the slave trade. As Greg Grandin forcefully argued, the Age of Revolutions, sometimes characterized as the Age of Liberty, was also the Age of Slavery. From Spanish American shores the calls for “mds libertad" were accompanied by cries for "más comercio de negros—more liberty, more free trade of blacks?" These dramatic transformations and contradictions nourished Caribbean inhabitants' sense of what was possible, sharpening their awareness of what geographer Doreen Massey has called “contemporaneous plurality" and, most likely, emboldening many to pursue chimeric projects conceived within the Greater Caribbean's transimperial geography.?

This book uncovers other worlds by making visible a geographic space that was lived and experienced but not necessarily filled with the patriotic sentiment of nation-states or the geopolitically charged justifications of area-studies divisions. Additionally, because most ofthe projects pursued by the subjects who populate this work did not reach fruition, An Aqueous Territory uncovers other worlds in the sense that it complicates standard narratives of the Age of Revolutions that see this period as one of violent, but straightforward, transition from colony to nation. By contrast, taking seriously the conception of these projects and the belief that they constituted plausible scenarios, this book reveals the existence of "structures of feeling" that crossed imperial borders and determined transimperial “ways of being in the world,” many of which have remained silenced by the historiographical weight of national states, nation-making projects, and nationalisms.”

Border-Crossing and the Creation of a Transimperial

Greater Caribbean

The process of creating spaces is associated with one of two key terms that constitute the conceptual foundations of this study: spatial configurations. Following Edward Soja and other scholars of space, I argue against the existence of “an already-made geography [that] sets the stage" for history to happen.” Instead, with Doreen Massey, I take space “as always in process,’ “as always under construction”?! The recognition of this dynamic and constructed nature of space is crucial in two respects. First, it forces us to ask questions about the nature of the construction process. Who is constructing the space? Through what processes? Under what circumstances? Second, it requires us to interrogate the outcome of the process. What is the shape of the space that is being created? To whom is this space meaningful and how? How does this space enable a better understanding of the world, peoples, and period we are studying? While these questions are empirically answered in chapters 1 and 2, it is worth laying out some of the theoretical and methodological sources that inform my approach to these spatial questions. The idea of region is a good place to begin. Region, like nation, is a commonly used term. Unlike nation and nationalism, however, region and regionalism have not been subjected to acute historical scrutiny. The fact that region is used to describe both subnational and supranational geographic spaces reveals the degree to which the term remains undertheorized.? In fact, as historian Michael Goebel put it, it seems that the most common way to define a region is “through what it is not: a nation?” Despite this sharp distinction, regions and nations (or, more precisely, the territorialized versions of nations: nation-states) have many things in common. Like nation-states (and empires), regions occupy space and, because of that, can be located on maps. Unlike nation-states (and empires), however, regions precise locations tend to be difficult to determine. Even for regions with denominations commonly used (e.g., the South East in the United Kingdom, the South in the United States, the Bajío in Mexico, Southeast Asia, Latin

America, the Atlantic), “it is very difficult to say precisely where [a regions] edges" are or when a particular region constitutes a coherent geographic unit of analysis.” Regions, historians tend to agree, are "elusive" and characterized by their “fuzziness?” Should the elusiveness and fuzziness of regions be regarded as a problem to be solved? Should historians aim to establish criteria that make it possible to define regions as clearly bounded spatial units? In other words, how should historians conceptualize regions and what, ultimately, is the trouble with regions?

Following geographers John Allen, Doreen Massey, and Allan Cochrane and critical theorist Michel de Certeau, I contend that regions should be conceptualized as fluidly bounded and amorphously demarcated spatial units shaped and reshaped through everyday social interactions.” This approach calls for understanding regions as meaningful geographic spaces that make sense to those who experience them on a daily basis. While what is meaningful and makes sense appears to be intangible and difficult to measure, it allows me to point to a crucial element of regions: “they are,” as Eric van Young put it, “difficult to describe but we know them when we see them"

Thinking of regions in these terms, in turn, creates another set of problems associated with the need to make regions comprehensible and visible to scholars accustomed (and even trained) to see spatial units in close connection to political geographies, most of which are constructed based on what Neil Smith and Ann Godlewska called a “European planetary consciousness" that privileges empires, republics, and other clearly bounded spaces over equally cohesive (at least to those who experienced them) but less clearly demarcated spatial units. The problem, as Fernando Coronil argued, is that we “lack... an alternative taxonomy" that allows us to identify and name spatial units that might have been lived realities but that did not benefit from the elaborated apparatus that enabled empires and nation-states to occupy central stage in the historical imagination.? After all, regions, unlike empires and nation-states, are not generally backed up by administrative bureaucracies, nationalist ideologies and discourses, political agendas, and other propagandistic devices that grant political geographies archival visibility and the ability to endure in collective memory? How, given their lack of this elaborated apparatus that, taught to those who learn to feel national pride and nationalist fervor, works as the glue that holds nations together, can regions— especially those constructed from below— be imagined and made visible? My contention is that taking mobility as a defining criterion has the potential to illuminate regional configurations and communities that escape the eyes trained or coerced to look for “imagined communities” that cohere around linguistic, religious, or ethnic units, the weight of imperial bureaucracies, and the printed trail left behind by patriotic narratives, cartographic representations, and other cultural artifacts of nation making.”

Mobility, Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman claim, “create[s] spaces and stories”? Through mobility individuals fill space with meaning; they develop “a sense of place”; they “endow . . . significance to space"? During the Age of Sail, sailors were the mobile actors par excellence. Frequently moving across political borders in a constant circulation between ports, islands, and coasts, individual sailors traced personal paths that gave shape to their very own lived geographies. The aggregation of innumerable lived geographies makes it possible to see the contours of what in chapter 2 I call the aqueous territory that constitutes the transimperial Greater Caribbean. The region that emerges of the sum of individual sailors mobilities is one that can be characterized as amorphously bounded, flexible, malleable, multicultural, geopolitically unstable, and both personally threatening and liberating. In this transimperial space, in addition, the sea, far from being “just . . . a space that facilitates movement between a regions nodes,’ emerges as a central component of the regional configuration? "Rather than an interval between places,” it becomes “a place.”