Rethinking the Age of Revolution

Michael McDonnell, Michael A. McDonnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138715042
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351857789
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the last twenty years, scholars have rushed to re-examine revolutionary experiences across the Atlantic, through the Americas, and, more recently, in imperial and global contexts. While Revolution has been a perennial favourite topic of national historians, a new generation of historians has begun to eschew traditional foundation narratives and embrace the insights of Atlantic and transnational history to re-examine what is increasingly called 'the Age of Revolution'. This volume raises important questions about this new turn, and contributors pay particular attention to the hidden peoples and forces at work in this Revolutionary world. From Indian insurgents in Columbia and the Andes, to the terror exercised on the sailors and soldiers of imperial armies, and from Dutch radicals to Senegalese chiefs, these contributions reveal a new social history of the Age of Revolution that has sometimes been deliberately obscured from view. This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

“The sole owners of the land”: Empire, war, and authority in the Guajira Peninsula, 1761–1779

Forrest Hylton

Department of History, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

ABSTRACT

This essay reverses conventional images of the colonial Atlantic world by showing how Native power and politics set the parameters within which Spanish colonial officials acted. It charts shifting alliances between the latter and Guajiro alaulayus (leaders) – who were related by blood or marriage – in the 1760s and 1770s, and between alaulayus and the captains of non-Spanish ships. It argues that conflict and competition among alaulayus determined the contours and limits of such alliances. Conflict and competition among alaulayus, in turn, was fueled by perceived violations of Guajiro law concerning property rights, principally cattle rustling, as well as by conflicts over access to key Atlantic ports. Thus Guajiro kinship, law, property relations, trade, and politics dictated the terms, extent, and success of Spanish engagement, missionary as well as martial. Spanish presence was contingent on the goodwill of one or more Guajiro alaulayus, whose power derived in part from the broader Atlantic trade networks in which they participated, and constrained Spanish imperialism. This view rejects conflict and competition among European imperial agents as the chief determinants of indigenous autonomy. Native peoples such as the Guajiros shaped the course of European empires as much as they were shaped by them.

The Age of Revolution ushered in a general crisis of sovereignty in the Atlantic world, and the continental Caribbean, known as Tierra Firme, was the weakest link in the Spanish imperial chain. Spanish claims to sovereignty were guided by mercantilist ideas about trade monopolies, which made Spain’s vulnerability two-sided: first, vis-à-vis unconquered indigenous peoples like the Kuna, the Moskitu, and the Guajiros, and second, vis-à-vis the captains of French, British, and Dutch ships who traded with them.¹ Native peoples, born out of processes of ethno-genesis, shaped colonial markets and Atlantic commodity circuits, and through trade networks, helped the rise of the Holland, France, and especially Great Britain. War and trade were two intertwined aspects of the Atlantic world, and during the Age of Revolution, Spain devoted most of its increased revenues to strengthening military defenses. After the British occupied Havana and nearly took Cartagena in 1762, Spanish policy dictated constant vigilance.

Beginning in the 1760s, through military campaigns and garrison frontier settlements from Alta California to Patagonia, Spain aimed to block trade between agents of competing European empires and unconquered indigenous peoples – who occupied half the land, and made up one fifth of the population, that Spain claimed to rule.² One of Spain’s earliest moves to build fortified settlements unfolded in the Guajira, the northernmost coastal peninsula of New Granada, in what is today Colombia and Venezuela, during the 1760s and 1770, and it provoked an anti-colonial insurgency. Armed with rifles as well as bows and arrows, beginning on 2 May 1769, some 7000–10,000 Guajiro warriors burned and looted seven Capuchin mission towns in the Lower Peninsula, killing hundreds of colonial settlers, and taking dozens captive.³

The uprising surprised no one. Leading citizens of Riohacha, the port town of 4000 Spanish, creole, and mixed-race people east of Santa Marta and west of Maracaibo, warned Governor Gerónimo de Mendoza that a revolt was coming. They knew this because their Guajiro compadres – fictive kin – told them so. Authorized by Mendoza in late 1768, and led by Spaniards and creoles, mixed-race settlers carried out assaults on Guajiro persons, settlements, and cattle that constituted a grave violation of Guajiro law, which led Guajiro authorities (alaulayus) Antonio Paredes and Juan Jacinto to seek payment for damages, as stipulated by Guajir law, under which crimes were collective rather than individual, so that all settler colonists were held responsible for the crimes committed by those acting on Mendoza’s authority.⁴ In 1771, with Riohacha still besieged and the rest of the peninsula entirely in Guajiro hands, one Spanish military official asserted, “They say they intend to continue their hostilities and to be the sole owners of the land.”⁵

By showing how Native power and politics set the parameters within which Spanish colonial officials acted, this essay reverses conventional images of the colonial Atlantic world, which stress European action and Native reaction, as well as European strategies of divide and rule. The essay charts shifting alliances between Spanish officials, and Guajiro alaulayus (leaders) – who were related by blood or marriage – in the 1760s and 1770s, and between alaulayus and the captains of British, French, and Dutch ships. It argues that conflict and competition among alaulayus determined the contours and limits of such alliances. Conflict and competition among alaulayus, in turn, was fueled by perceived violations of Guajiro law, principally property rights in cattle, as well as conflict over access to key Atlantic ports. Thus Guajiro kinship, law, property relations, trade, and politics dictated the terms, extent, and success of Spanish engagement, missionary as well as martial. Spanish presence was contingent on the goodwill of one or more Guajiro alaulayus, whose power derived in part from the broader Atlantic trade networks in which they participated, and which constrained Spanish imperialism. This view rejects conflict and competition among European imperial agents as the chief determinants of indigenous autonomy. Indigenous peoples such as the Guajiros shaped the course of European empires as much as they were shaped by them.⁶

How did the cycle of insurgency and counterinsurgency develop in the Guajira in the 1760s and 1770s? Part of the answer lies in the militarization of Spanish frontier policy in the Americas after 1759 under Charles III, achieved through the construction of garrison settlements. But there were more contingent, local causes as well. In 1765, Cecilio López Sierra, whom the Spanish appointed “General Cacique of the Guajira Nation” in 1735, stepped down due to old age and illness.⁷ López Sierra, whose father was Spanish and mother was Guajiro, began his service to the Spanish Crown in the early eighteenth century, along with other members of his lineage. Though the results were ephemeral and ambiguous at best for Spain, when López Sierra resigned, there were seven Capuchin mission settlements in the Lower Guajira, composed mostly of mixed-race people – mulatos, zambos, and mestizos – rather than Spanish or creoles (criollos-people of Spanish descent born in the Americas). This new population grew rapidly in the second half of the eighteenth century, and embraced the Spanish colonial project by converting to Catholicism and settling in missions and garrisons.⁸ Yet it was dwarfed by Guajiro predominance.

Without López Sierra as a mediator between Guajiro alaulayus, to whom he was related by blood – through his mother – and marriage, relations between alaulayus and Spanish colonial officials and settler colonists deteriorated. López Sierra appointed his son to succeed him as General Cacique, and his son led a group of settlers on a murderous rampage, first in 1766, then again in May 1769, against a backdrop of escalating conflict between mixed-race colonial settlers and Guajiro leaders.⁹ In this López Sierra’s son had the support, financial as well as military, of the Governor of Reiohacha, Gerónimo de Mendoza.

We might have expected the breakdown of Spanish-Guajiro mediation in the mid-1760s, followed by state-sanctioned settler colonial violence in the late 1760s, to have united Guajiro alaulayus against settlers, especially given close kinship ties among the Guajiro leaders. When these events are remembered and discussed among clan authorities descended from colonial-era alaulayus, they are taken as proof of the Guajiro capacity for unity across clan divisions when faced with outside threats.¹⁰ However, following the eclipse of Cecilio López Sierra and the success of the 1769 uprising against Spanish missions in the Lower Guajira, competition between López Sierra’s Guajiro brother and brother-in-law – Antonio Paredes and Juan Jacinto, respectively – for control of the port of Bahía Honda, and the market in pearls, and conflict over property rights in cattle, determined what the Spanish could and could not do to colonize the Upper Guajira.

These findings have important methodological consequences, namely that in this part of the revolutionary Atlantic, and perhaps elsewhere, we cannot explain conflict, competition, or cooperation using ethnic and national identities as a theoretical baseline. Instead, this essay examines changing relationships between specific Guajiro leaders, specific captains of non-Spanish ships, and specific Spanish colonial officials in a context in which Guajiros were far more powerful than Europeans, and in which Guajiro law provided a normative framework for Guajiro actions and exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Rethinking the Age of Revolution
• 1. “The sole owners of the land”: Empire, war, and authority in the Guajira Peninsula, 1761–1779
• 2. Militarizing the Atlantic World: Army discipline, coerced labor, and Britain’s commercial empire
• 3. “The supreme power of the people”: Local autonomy and radical democracy in the Batavian revolution (1795–1798)
• 4. Rethinking Africa in the Age of Revolution: The evolution of Jean-Baptiste-Léonard Durand’s Voyage au Sénégal
• 5. Sovereignty disavowed: the Tupac Amaru revolution in the Atlantic world
• Index