Following the 1655 invasion of Spanish Jamaica, English forces waged guerilla warfare on two fronts. The first was against a small Spanish resistance that maintained a toehold on the island despite the initial Spanish surrender. The defeat of that beleaguered resistance, however, depended on the outcome of the second front, a conflict waged between the English and several autonomous communities of African descent. Far deadlier and more threatening for the English, that front waged on until the leader of one of these communities, Juan Lubolo, switched sides, forcing the remaining Spanish resistance to abandon Jamaica and giving the English an invaluable ally in the continuing war against the palenques that continued to fight for autonomy on the island. In this presentation, I will trace the history of the Afro-descended captives seized by Lubolo and his forces. Securing Jamaica for English settlement depended on transforming these captive enemies into enslaved people through inter- and intra-imperial human trafficking. Africans and Afro-Jamaicans, the majority of Spanish Jamaica’s population on the eve of the invasion, proved too dangerous for the English to enslave, in part due to their knowledge of the topography, flora, and fauna of the island as well as their likely connections to armed, autonomous communities. In order to transform Lubolo’s prisoners of war into enslaved laborers, English officials in Jamaica used human traffickers to smuggle the Afro-Jamaican captives into neighboring Spanish colonies. The goal was to create wealth that English colonists, in turn, could use to purchase enslaved Africans from the transatlantic slave trade. And, by 1671, English Jamaican lawmakers codified this practice of trafficking “dangerous” captives “to foreign parts” into law, turning an illicit, wartime practice into a method of social control in Jamaica’s burgeoning slave society.

Professor Schmitt a historian of early America and the Caribbean, with particular interests in human trafficking, colonization, and illicit economies over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In her research and her teaching, she is interested in tracing individuals who crossed imperial boundaries—by choice and by coercion—in order to understand how processes like colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and trade functioned in the interstices of early modern empires. Professor Schmitt is currently at work on her book manuscript, tentatively titled The Predatory Sea: Human Trafficking, Colonization, and Trade in the Greater Caribbean, 1530-1690, which analyzes the ubiquity of human trafficking and captivity in the greater Caribbean and North America from the 1530s until the 1690s and what that meant for colonization, trade, and warfare in the region. At Cornell, she teaches classes on colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and corruption.