“It is ticklish meddling with the navy”: The British navy and Caribbean contraband trade, c. 1713–1750

Abstract

In the early eighteenth century, slow communications between the metropole and the margins of empire combined with fuzzy relationships among the various institutions of the composite imperial state to enable British naval officers to act with relative impunity. Facing little oversight and scant consequences for misbehavior, many captains took advantage of the entanglement of European empires in the Caribbean to pursue personal profit. They both protected local merchants engaged in illicit inter-imperial trade and themselves transported enslaved Africans across imperial lines. This article explores the extent of those activities and the intra- and inter-imperial conflicts they generated, emphasizing how naval officers’ behavior mirrored that of other public and quasi-public officials at the periphery. It also evaluates the conditions that allowed naval trading to persist despite its violation of longstanding laws and regulations, arguing that there was no powerful political stakeholder who clearly suffered by the naval officers’ actions.