8. The consular Caribbean: consuls as agents of colonialism and decolonisation in the revolutionary Caribbean (1795–1848)

Simeon Simeonov

In the last decades of the 18th and first decades of the 19th century an official who had previously remained all but unknown in the Caribbean made a forceful and lasting appearance in the region (de Goey, 2014; Ulbert and Prijac, 2010; Dickie, 2008; Kennedy, 1990; Simpson and Weiner, 1989; Fernández, 1971). The consul, a public official residing in a foreign country and representing the interests of his nation’s mercantile community, had become a main feature of European socioeconomic life since at least the 12th century, yet he had remained conspicuously absent from the Americas (de Goey, 2014, pp. 1–32).¹ In the age of mercantilism, when trade between the European colonies in the Americas bore the stigma of illegality, foreign consuls seemed unnecessary for American colonial development. Moreover, because consuls were often foreign nationals, European states expelled them from their colonies to increase colonial security.² Therefore, at the dawn of the so-called age of revolutions (1776–1848), British, French, Dutch and Spanish consuls crowded the important sea ports in Europe and the Mediterranean, but they were nowhere to be seen in the Americas (de Goey, 2014, pp. 1–17; Hobsbawm, 1996, pp. 1–7).

The emergence of Caribbean consulates during ths period would play a significant role in the transformations that shattered the old colonial order in the age of revolutions. Only recently have scholars begun to suggest that examining the history of Atlantic revolutions through the lens of Caribbean consular establishments can provide a unique opportunity for exploring the transnational and extra-territorial origins of Atlantic revolutionary thought and action (de Goey, 2014, ch. 4; Rugemer, 2008, pp. 180–221; Horne, 2012). Because Caribbean consulates were so crucial to the development and sustainment of imperial, trans-imperial, and transnational networks of information and commerce, their study can inform a more integrated approach to the age of revolutions that mitigates the nationalist biases entailed by an exclusive emphasis on particular colonial empires. As information brokers interlinking colonial spaces, consuls shed invaluable light on the interplay between such important processes as colonisation and decolonisation, nation-building and empire-making – processes that stood at the very heart of what Atlantic revolution was about. As state agents promoting national commercial interests and disseminating scarce – often invaluable and secret – information about foreign places, peoples and empires, studying consuls provides an opportunity for examining how colonial practices of control and surveillance intersected with revolutionary ideas about citizenship and national sovereignty.

Consulship made its first forceful impact on American politics following the US-French Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1778), which provided for the establishment of bilateral, reciprocal consular relations between the contracting parties. With the revolutionary war still raging, US state officials realised that consulates could be highly advantageous both diplomatically, in securing US independence, and economically, for the development of national commerce. Politicians such as John Adams, John Jay and Thomas Jefferson familiarised themselves with European consular systems and informed Congress about the importance of consular institutions in Europe, paving the way for the creation of the US consular service.³ Over the following decade, leading US officials emphasised the importance of consuls as a major institution of the federal government and enshrined it in the US constitution.⁴ As a result of these revolutionary developments, the United States became the first country in the western hemisphere to establish consular relations. In the 1780s and 1790s the first European consulates in the western hemisphere appeared in such important maritime hubs as Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Norfolk, Charleston and Baltimore. Simultaneously, US consuls opened their establishments on both sides of the Atlantic, gradually gaining importance as key players in transatlantic affairs. For example, consuls featured prominently in the first treaties between the United States and European nations, including the US–French Consular Convention (1788), the Jay Treaty (1794) and the Treaty of San Lorenzo (1795) (Kennedy, 1990, ch. 1–3). In all these agreements, consulates became an important attribute of US national sovereignty, yet the prolonged and highly divisive debates around them also testify to the fact that US leaders remained apprehensive about the potential of consulates to confer non-reciprocal commercial advantages, or even to act as secret agencies of foreign colonisation.⁵

Indeed, the greatest clashes over the conduct of consular affairs in the late 18th century revolved around the application of the principle of reciprocity to the practice of establishing consulates in two particular regions: the North American Gulf Coast and the Caribbean Basin. In 1795 the Treaty of San Lorenzo, remembered for settling boundary disputes between the US and Spain in North America and opening the Mississippi to free trade between the Spanish colonies and the American republic, enshrined the principle of reciprocal consular relations and paved the way for a new age in Atlantic political history.⁶ One of the treaty’s most significant consequences was that US consular appointees and officials began to use the principle of reciprocity and push for the recognition of US consulates in the Spanish Caribbean, which Spanish officials held to be exempt from the treaty provisions.

These debates over the limits and meaning of an emergent ‘consular Caribbean’, a political geography of contested, unauthorised, elusive and entangled (by virtue of treaty-reciprocity) consulates, left an important, indelible imprint on the birth of the modern Caribbean and its complex history of colonialism and decolonisation. This chapter argues that the emergence of Caribbean consulates in the period between 1795 and 1848 transformed the history of the western hemisphere and the Atlantic world in four important ways: (1) consulates placed the Caribbean at the centre of Atlantic debates about the meaning of colonial rule; (2) they fostered greater opportunities for inter-colonial trade and conflict; (3) as quintessentially European institutions, the consular establishments that proliferated throughout the Caribbean region sparked new questions about the meaning of colonial governance; and (4) finally, they fostered an ambiguous transition between colonial rule and decolonisation. When taken together, these four propositions suggest the crucial, complex and historically contingent role that consular establishments played in the age of revolutions.

First, between 1795 and 1815 consulates placed the Caribbean at the centre of international debates about the limits of colonial rule and the meaning of national sovereignty.⁷ As state officials claiming jurisdiction over foreign citizens or subjects, consuls challenged the common assumption entertained by colonial officials across the Caribbean that foreign representatives had no place in their jurisdictions. For the first time in the history of the region, colonial and consular jurisdictions were in open competition, which created new challenges for both colonial and metropolitan authorities. At the root of these contestations of the old colonial regime stood the new republics of France, the United States and, later, Haiti, which expressed a much greater interest in setting up Caribbean consulates than the imperial regimes of Spain and Great Britain. In the late 1790s and early 1800s consuls from these new republican governments proliferated in the Caribbean port cities, pressuring reactionary colonial elites into reactive measures that sought to curtail the reach of consular power (Michelena, 2010).

The aggressive policies of US, French and Saint-Dominguan/Haitian consuls in the Spanish empire, for example, confronted traditional views of the absoluteness of colonial jurisdictions. In the late 1790s a Saint-Dominguan consul by the name of Agustin Paris sought the recognition of local authorities in San Juan (Puerto Rico), sparking intensive exchanges about the threat such consular agents posed to the future of sovereign rule in the Spanish colonies.⁸ In nearby Havana, a US consular appointee called Henry Hill championed new models of colonial rule that sought to accommodate the rising power of republican merchants in the revolutionary Caribbean. Like Paris, Hill encountered the complete refusal of local officials to recognise his consular character.⁹ Hill’s counterpart in Batavian Curaçao, the French consul Tierce Cadet, developed a wide-ranging network of correspondence with French republicans throughout the Caribbean, whose very existence unsettled Spanish colonial governors eager to block the bane of republican consulship and protect national sovereignty.¹⁰ Even though Hill and Tierce Cadet pursued different objectives in different colonial jurisdictions, the fact that both of them claimed jurisdiction over their national citizens made them main targets of Spanish and Batavian colonial policies directed at asserting national sovereignty and marginalising foreign migrants, particularly those from a republican or, in the case of Cadet, an abolitionist regime.

In the 1790s and 1800s, Spanish officials in Havana, New Orleans and Caracas came to regard US and French consular appointments as a dangerous precedent in colonial history. Spanish authorities were unsure of how to treat these republican officials, pondering whether they were private merchants representing discreet capitalist interests or whether they were public agents championing foreign policies. Were these foreign consuls beneficial to the commercial development of the islands, or were they actually undermining Spanish sovereignty by claiming jurisdiction over foreign subjects? In their voluminous correspondence, Spanish American officials came to regard US and French consuls as spies whose secret mission was to spark widespread discontent among a colonial underclass of slaves and people of colour with the goal of overthrowing colonial government and claiming these islands for a foreign power (Jordaan, 2011).

The harshest response to the consular appointments in the early 1800s came from Havana, where a new captain-general, the supreme civil and military officer on the island, came to power in 1799. Captain-General Salvador de Muro y Salazar, Marquis de Someruelos, immediately instructed the new US consular appointees that the Laws of the Indies – Spain’s colonial body of law – did not permit the admission of consuls, agents or any foreign national representatives in the Spanish Indies. Strikingly, US consuls Henry Hill and Vincent Gray continued to exercise their consular jurisdiction despite Someruelos’s explicit orders. Someruelos wrote an infuriating letter to consul Hill, arguing that US consuls were violating both US and international law.¹¹ The Cuban authorities then went on to detain Vincent Gray, creating a precedent of contesting the legal immunity of consular appointees. Disputes between US consuls and Cuban officials continued throughout the first half of the 19th century. In the wake of the Spanish American revolutions European consuls likewise faced an increased risk of criminal prosecution, which put a greater strain on the relations between the Spanish American republics and Europe.

The political transformations wrought by republican consuls in the Caribbean at the turn of the 19th century gradually began to recede in the face of a powerful reactionary backlash. In the 1800s Napoleon’s ascendancy to the imperial throne in France and Thomas Jefferson’s presidential terms in the United States contained the radical revolutionary impulses unleashed by the initial wave of Caribbean consular establishments. The shifting historical conjuncture was most evident in the US and French moratoria on Haitian consulship, which sought to foreclose the possibility of a radical redrawing of the hemispheric and global political map (Gaffield, 2015, pp. 1–15; Willentz, 2005, pp. 218–53; Matthewson, 2003; Logan, 1941). A similarly conservative approach to consulship animated the regulation of diplomatic ranks during the Congress of Vienna (1815), which sought to standardise consular establishments and sever their link to the diplomatic world. However, as subsequent contestations by various consular appointees demonstrated, the revolutionary ‘opening’ of diplomatic consulship left a lasting imprint that transcended the impact of the Congress of Vienna in the everyday practices of Caribbean consulates.¹²

Related, second, to the political and diplomatic aspects of the consular Caribbean is its importance within the history of European colonialism. The emergence of consuls in the Caribbean meant that states and empires now had a new tool at their disposal for conducting foreign policy. In their previous institutional history consuls had accrued myriad responsibilities, from certifying ship papers, providing passports and monitoring commerce to maintaining public relations and spying on foreign officials (de Goey, 2014, introduction). All these functions now became part of the history of the Caribbean and of Caribbean colonialism in particular.

Obviously, the political and diplomatic conflicts over consular affairs had profound implications for the system of Caribbean colonialism. In order to appreciate the impact of these new consulates on the trajectory of colonial rule, we have to comprehend the specific colonial context in which Caribbean consulship emerged. In the late 18th century, Spain introduced a new series of laws, within the framework of the so-called Bourbon reforms, in order to stimulate its colonial trade in the Americas and the wider Atlantic world. Historian John Fisher has described this age as a transitional period for Spanish Caribbean colonialism. Even though the Bourbon reforms opened up Spanish Caribbean ports to free trade, Spain’s renewed wars against Britain and France undermined the beneficial operation of these legislative acts in the region. For almost two decades, from 1795 to 1815, constant warfare between these powers jeopardised the intercolonial links within the Caribbean and the transatlantic links between the Caribbean and Spain. The ‘free trade’ envisioned by the Bourbon reforms came under attack due to constant Caribbean warfare and privateering, giving way to a period of ‘neutral trade’ carried on ships from non-belligerent nations such as the United States, Sweden, Denmark or the Hanseatic League for the purpose of covering colonial shortages (Fisher, 1997, pp. 160–206). Even though neutral trade risked undermining colonial regulations and the development of colonial agriculture, Spanish-American officials quickly realised that it was absolutely necessary for the sustainment of monocultural, export-based colonial plantations. As Carlos Martinez de Irujo, the Spanish ambassador to the US, revealed in 1797, ‘[t]he declaration of war [against Britain] will no doubt expose [our] navigation to many risks and contingencies … [so] I will take the opportunity to issue, from time to time, a license to an American merchant so that he can bring here a small quantity of provisions on his account’. Irujo’s main reason for securing these contracts with US commercial agents was to ‘prevent exposing the colony [of Cuba] to scarcity’.¹³

The fact that the Spanish ambassador in Philadelphia envisioned Spanish consuls and US commercial agents as vital to his plan of sustaining the ‘pearl’ of the Spanish Caribbean speaks to the centrality of consulates in sustaining an agricultural plantation economy in the age of revolution and neutral trade. Irujo’s remarks also illustrate the vast scope of the consular Caribbean. In his letters the Spanish ambassador paints a picture in which the highest-ranking Spanish diplomat in the Americas was, in fact, a peripheral agent of the Cuban authorities.¹⁴ As the Spanish-American revolutions intensified in the 1810s, the pre-eminence of Cuba within a Spanish-Caribbean system of governance, stretching from the Spanish consulates in Baltimore and Charleston to the South American littoral, only increased (Murray, 1980). Understanding the ‘consular Caribbean’ as the intelligence-gathering and policy-making centre of a new transnational economy, specialising in matching the supply and demand for news, foodstuffs, armaments, manufactured and agricultural goods, migrant labourers and African slaves, is crucial to reconsidering and reframing current narratives of colonialism and decolonisation.

It is in regard to Caribbean politics and colonialism that a third feature of the consular Caribbean merits closer discussion: the political geography of consulship. Until the 1820s the consular Caribbean remained a somewhat homogenous geography, largely shaped by US consular establishments, but over the next decades many new actors entered this region as revolutions in Spanish America were steering countries toward national independence. Studying this later stage of the consular Caribbean is important inasmuch as it enables us to understand the role of consulates in shaping, and being shaped by, revolutionary processes taking place at the intersection of Caribbean, Central and South American politics. By adopting a transnational institutional approach that integrates accounts of French, Spanish and British Atlantic revolutions into a single analytical framework, we can understand how the personal or structural changes in consular networks informed the trajectories of insurgency and counter-insurgency in a wider political geography. Such an approach, whose contours can only be suggested here, emphasises trans-imperial movement, miscommunication, the importance of timing and the significance of ‘missed opportunities’ as crucial factors in Caribbean – as well as Atlantic – political history. In addition, this method provides a new perspective on the problem of Haitian exceptionalism by historicising one of its most lasting and central components: Haiti’s exclusion from the consular Caribbean until 1825.

If the Napoleonic wars marked the emergence of the consular Caribbean, their end almost seamlessly merged into another series of world-historical events known as the Spanish American revolutions, which would in turn also play an important role in the changing meanings of consulship. Most historians date the beginning of these revolutions back to the year 1808, when the overthrow of the Spanish king Fernando VII by the Napoleonic armies created a crisis of legitimacy and sovereignty throughout the Spanish empire (Langley, 1996, pp. 166–9). Not surprisingly, Spanish officials came to suspect foreign consuls, particularly from the United States, of plotting to undermine Spanish sovereignty in the Americas. In 1808 the Spanish ambassador to the US exclaimed:

What promoted the US’s interest in sending consuls to Cuba was the island’s growing importance as a global exporter of sugar (Fraginals, 1978). In the years of the Napoleonic wars, US consuls in Cuba pursued two main objectives: stimulating commerce with this geographically proximate colony and stopping French privateering off Cuba’s numerous privateering bays (Ferrer, 2014, pp. 157–204). Secretary of State James Madison came to regard consuls as the most effective means of putting an end to the notorious French assaults on US shipping, and pushed for the expansion of US consulates on the island.¹⁶ In the eyes of Madison and other US officials, consuls could reshape the colonial regimes in the Spanish Caribbean into a sphere of increased US influence by fostering closer economic ties with the United States, establishing transnational networks of maritime regulation and adjudication, and contesting the imperial sovereignty of European metropoles.

The history of the consular Caribbean in the 1810s and 1820s thus took place against the backdrop of Cuba’s ‘sugar revolution’, which had only been possible because two other revolutions – the French and the Haitian – ended the dominance of the world’s greatest sugar-producing colony in the 18th century, Saint-Domingue (Ferrer, 2014). However, just as the Haitian revolutionaries had realised the importance of the United States as the hemisphere’s largest weapons-manufacturer and market for colonial produce, so, too, did Cuban officials increasingly fix their eyes on the northern republic as a proximate and large supplier of foodstuffs able to cover the growing agricultural needs of an expansive, slave-importing, plantation economy.

Given these commercial relationships between Cuba, Saint-Domingue and the United States, it is not at all surprising that the first US consuls to Cuba and Saint-Domingue arrived at their destinations almost simultaneously. In 1799, in the middle of the quasi-war between the United States and France – a conflict which itself revolved around the issue of consular diplomacy – the newly appointed US consuls in Havana and Le Cap demonstrated a more assertive foreign policy as they ostensibly desired to legalise the illicit commercial links connecting these Caribbean islands with the northern republic. These US consuls would fulfil the dual purposes of fostering the already significant commercial ties of the early republic to the Caribbean and of undermining the imperial sovereignty of European metropoles (Salvucci, 2003). Nevertheless, while the US consular presence in Cuba continued and expanded throughout the first half of the 19th century, the US consulate in Saint-Domingue remained primarily a temporary policy to pressure France into a rapid conclusion of the quasi-war (Logan, 1941; Childs, 2006).¹⁷

The brief opening of the US consulate in Saint-Domingue seemed to suggest a radically new trajectory for the consular Caribbean, yet the ascendancy of Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Bonaparte cut short this momentous window of opportunity. Thus, notwithstanding the short episode of US consulship, Haiti, the largest colonial economy at the end of the 18th century, remained strikingly peripheral to the political geography of Caribbean consulship in the first decades of the 19th century. Although Julia Gaffield has recently argued that Haiti’s isolation from the world of Caribbean foreign relations remained more of a wishful thought than a reality, it is important to note that the lack of official consular representatives on the island nevertheless created a serious impediment to Haitian independence (Gaffield, 2015, p. 152). In an 1826 senate debate on the failed US prospect of joining the Pan American Congress, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, from the slaveholding state of Missouri, aptly summarised US foreign policy towards the black republic: ‘Our policy towards Hayti … has been fixed … for three and thirty years … [W]e interchange no consuls or ministers. We receive no mulatto consuls, or black ambassadors from her. And why? Because the peace of eleven states will not permit the fruits of a successful negro insurrection to be exhibited among them’.¹⁸ Senator Benton skilfully turned the principle of consular reciprocity on its head. This principle had been incorporated in hemispheric relations as enabling the intercourse between equal partners, but Benton turned it into a grotesque rationale for the racist discrimination against the young Caribbean republic (Matthewson, 2003, pp. 1–4).

Benton’s words are a cautious reminder to a new school of diplomatic historians who aim to illuminate the past and present conduct of foreign affairs through adopting a broader definition of diplomacy that questions and historicises the implicit assumptions behind the social construction of diplomatic affairs. Indeed, this ‘new diplomatic’ history has yielded important insights about the record of foreign affairs at the intersection of diplomatic, social, political, transnational and cultural history. However, the contestation of older and more exclusive definitions of diplomacy has at times engendered presentist assumptions about the historical trajectory of diplomatic affairs. The shortcomings of new diplomatic history are particularly evident in the problem of Haitian consulship in the age of revolution. On the one hand, while new diplomatic historians regard sailors, ship captains and foreign travellers as ambassadors of their country, such a view is at odds with 19thcentury concepts of diplomacy (Rouleau, 2014, introduction). Indeed, as the history of Caribbean consuls attests, whether one received an accreditation as consul, and whether consuls had diplomatic character, were far from purely definitional or trivial matters (Logan, 1941, pp. 84–117). These questions were indeed among the most hotly contested issues in the age of revolution. It is only by appreciating the importance of consular recognition – rather than dismissing the construct of consulship as the mere paraphernalia of diplomatic affairs – that historians can appreciate the disavowed modernity of the Haitian revolutionary project and its wider repercussions throughout the Atlantic world.¹⁹

On the other hand, new diplomatic historians have also tended to obscure the crucial distinctions within the consular ranks. If one assumes that ambassadors, consuls, commercial agents and foreign merchants – not to mention mariners or travellers – were all diplomatic agents, then asking who received a diplomatic appointment, and what that diplomatic appointment entailed, seems irrelevant. In a similar interpretive approach, Julia Gaffield has de-emphasised the question of consular recognition and claimed that the opening of the US commercial agency in Haiti in 1813 presented a welcome economic opportunity for the fostering of international commerce (2015, p. 152). However, such an interpretation is at odds with the claims of historical actors, such as Senator Benton, as well as a host of contemporaneous observers who understood the gravity of the difference between consular and commercial agents. Indeed, the distinction between commercial and consular agents would arise many times during the age of revolution and plague international relations just as much as – if not more than – the ostensible similarity of these institutions would foster international understanding.²⁰

Haiti’s exceptional status in the consular Caribbean – its blurring of the practical line between a consul and a commercial agent – undoubtedly provided greater space for transnational commerce, yet it would be erroneous to assume that this was an indisputable blessing for the fledgling republic (González, 2015). Instead, such a policy clearly served the interests of the United States, which promulgated a rather porous distinction between consuls and commercial agents in order to pry open restrictive Caribbean colonial regimes to US manufacture. The presence of US commercial agents in Haiti suited the needs of US mercantile elites, who wished to tap into the island’s considerable commerce without pledging the northern republic to any contractual reciprocity, to protect its seamen and – most importantly – without incensing the powerful southern elites who regarded Haiti as an existential threat to their economies. It is only by recognising the complexity of Haiti’s exceptionalism in the consular Caribbean, by stressing the strong lobby of southern plantocrats in the federal capital and by historicising the boundaries of the ‘diplomatic sphere’ that we can attempt a contemporary re-evaluation of what it meant to be (or not to be) a consular representative in the age of Atlantic revolutions.

Finally, the investigation of all three previous points – politics, colonialism and revolution – touches on the question of decolonisation, the fourth key feature of the consular Caribbean. It is a little-known fact that consuls played a crucial role in the decolonisation of Haiti and the Spanish American republics encircling the Caribbean (Gaffield, 2015, pp. 1–15). Indeed, Haitian consulship – first in the late 1790s and early 1800s and then in the 1820s – played a crucial role in the first comprehensive debates about consulship, Eurocentrism and colonialism in international law (ibid., pp. 93–152). The presence of foreign consuls in Haiti, debates about consular reciprocity with the new republic, and a revolutionary discourse of ‘black consulship’ all helped to push the boundaries of the political imaginary in the early 19th century (James, 1963, pp. 241–68). They also created an important political precedent of linking the presence of consuls to anti-colonial revolution and political independence, providing a script for the Spanish American Creoles who would later apply the Haitian consular experience in establishing new republican governments.

With the establishment of the first independent Spanish American republics – a process in which Haiti played a crucial role – the consular Caribbean entered a new period of expansion and growing conflict over the meaning of freedom, the contours of citizenship and the future of slavery (Murray, 1980; Salvucci, 2005). It was not until the late 1820s and 1830s, in the wake of the Spanish American revolutions, that British consuls first came to contest US primacy in Caribbean consular affairs, both in terms of their expansive presence and in terms of their liberal, at times fervently abolitionist, ideology (Murray, 1980; Sonesson, 1999). Tellingly, in that same year that US slaveholders dominated the Senate debate on the exclusion of Haiti from the consular Caribbean, the English foreign secretary George Canning transformed the British approach to Caribbean consulship. Canning dispatched the first British consuls to Cartagena and Port-au-Prince in order to foster stronger links to both the newly emergent South American republics and the republic of Haiti, which had significantly contributed to their independence.²¹ Although the US had had a head start in the consular Caribbean since the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, it was British abolitionist consuls that came to transform the political discourse on Caribbean colonialism, slavery and anti-colonial rebellion in the late 1820s, 1830s and 1840s.

The British moment in the consular Caribbean came as a counterpoint to US dominance throughout the first quarter of the 19th century (Murray, 1980). Thus, just months after Senator Benton from Missouri discarded the possibility of admitting and sending consuls to Haiti, due to the increased risk of slave insurgency, Charles Mackenzie became the first man of colour to act as consul in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince (Horne, 2012, p. 88). Mackenzie neatly encapsulates the new dynamism of British consulship in the Caribbean under the Canning administration. Gathering experience during his first consular appointment at the Mexican Caribbean port of Veracruz, Mackenzie acquainted himself with the first emancipated Spanish American nation in order to transfer this experience to Haiti in a career move that was not uncommon in the consular Caribbean.

Mackenzie arrived in Haiti less than a year after France had recognised its independence. He studied the island’s history with a particular emphasis on the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period. As a proponent of free trade, Mackenzie used his consular authority to stimulate the liberalisation of Haitian regulations towards Great Britain, the island’s second-biggest commercial partner after the US. His position as consul immediately suggested to his Haitian peers – the president and secretary-general of Haiti – the opportunity of signing a Treaty of Amity and Commerce and thus breaking Haiti’s diplomatic nonrecognition.²² However, Canning cautioned Mackenzie that his authority did not cover the signing of transnational treaties, a prerogative reserved for British ambassadors.²³ In his later assessment of Haitian independence, Mackenzie did not emphasise Haiti’s marginalisation in the consular Caribbean, instead arguing that the ‘failure’ of Haitian post-revolutionary recovery was the direct consequence of revolutionary anarchy and economic mismanagement.²⁴

In Cuba, too, British consuls became proponents of economic liberalisation, a policy that had a different meaning for US, Cuban and British officials. Although Cuban authorities had initially resisted the admission of foreign consuls throughout the Napoleonic wars, they eventually realised that they could use this institution to their own advantage. In the 1830s and 1840s, Cuba’s sugar complex would be intimately connected to the fate of the US and British consulates. United States’ consuls could secure Cuba advantageous deals with the US and strengthen the ties of Cuban sugar planters to US slave traders. Conversely, British consuls threatened to undermine the Spanish colonial regime, as British public opinion and diplomacy in the 1830s and 1840s cast the continuation of the Cuban slave trade as an ‘odious commerce’ that had to be abolished immediately (Murray, 1980).

To be sure, the initial steps of British consuls against Cuban slave-trading were rather cautious and ambivalent, much like the early history of the mixed commission courts in Havana (Paquette, 1988; Murray, 1980). Characteristically, it is not until Great Britain abolished slavery in its own colonies that British consuls began to play a greater role in the abolition of the Cuban slave trade. Nevertheless, in the 1840s – a period marked by a British crusade to suppress the slave trade in the Atlantic – the diverging trajectory of US and British consulship in the Spanish Caribbean could not be more evident. Just as the US slaveholder Nicholas Trist had become the lifeline of Cuban sugar barons, his British counterpart and famous abolitionist David Turnbull turned into their worst nightmare.²⁵ In the subsequent decades the tensions between US and British consuls in the Spanish Caribbean intensified, putting greater stress on the Cuban sugar planters and traders who dominated colonial governance. Just as the commercial activities of US consuls raised the prospects of Cuban annexation to the United States, the abolitionist agenda of Great Britain introduced uncertainty about Spain’s ability to protect the local Creole elite. In the end these two opposite dynamics challenged the viability of Cuba’s colonial subordination to Spain.

In conclusion, although consuls were a quintessentially colonial institution, in the age of revolution they also became – somewhat paradoxically – agents of decolonisation (de Goey, 2014). Characteristically, the leaders of the first free nation in the Caribbean – Haiti – realised that admitting and appointing consuls was a necessary part of attaining international recognition and national sovereignty.²⁶ Indeed, the first country to send a consul to revolutionary Saint-Domingue was the United States, a republic that had fought and won its own anti-colonial war (Johnson 2014; Girard, 2009; Rossignol, 2004).²⁷ The precedent of establishing consular relations as a precondition to securing international recognition, first established in the wake of the American and Haitian revolutions, had far-reaching consequences throughout the early half of the 19th century, challenging some of the basic assumptions and practices in the law of nations.

A focus on consular relations demonstrates that the institutions of colonialism and decolonisation are not inherently antithetical but, in fact, ambivalently interrelated. As the emergence of the consular Caribbean shows, the institution of consulship embodied practices of both colonial domination and anti-colonial emancipation. This chapter suggests that consulship provides a unique lens through which to explore the inherent ambiguities, inconsistencies and contradictions of colonialism and decolonisation, as well as the problematic relationship of these concepts to each other. By virtue of its extra-territorial and transnational emphasis, the concept of a consular Caribbean can help historians to rethink some of the basic assumptions that govern our analysis of the complex political and transnational history of the modern Caribbean.

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1 The masculine gender is used when describing early 19th-century consular officials to emphasise that this group comprised exclusively (mostly upper-class, white) men.

2 On the effects of mercantilism in the Americas, see Fisher, 1997, esp. pp. 134–216.

3 E.g., Thomas Jefferson, ‘Proclamation Concerning Consuls’, Virginia Gazette, 8 Jan. 1780; C. W. F. Dumas to John Adams, 25 Feb. 1785, in: Massachusetts Historical Society, Adams Papers <http://www.masshist.org/publications/adams-papers/index.php/view/ADMS-06-16-02-0313> [accessed 2 April 2019].

4 The constitution of the United States, article II, section 2: ‘[The President] . . . shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States’; article III, section 2: ‘The judicial Power shall extend . . . to all cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls . . . in all cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction.’

5 On the divergent issues and debates surrounding consulship, see ‘Instructions to Benjamin Franklin in re Consuls, [2 January] 1783’; and Madison (1969 [1783]), pp. 5 and 15–7.

6 Treaty between the United States and His Catholic Majesty, 27 Nov. 1795, Article XIX.

7 In the years immediately following the Treaty of San Lorenzo, Presidents George Washington and John Adams took advantage of the treaty’s reciprocity clause by making the first US consular appointments to the Spanish American colonies, to the towns of Havana, New Orleans and Caracas. What is interesting about these consular appointments is that they all featured Caribbean ports. Already at the turn of the 19th century, the Spanish Caribbean was arguably one of the most important, if not the most important, theatres of US foreign policy in the Americas. The appointment of consuls to Havana, New Orleans and Caracas both confirmed and augmented the importance of Spanish Caribbean markets to early US foreign affairs. See Count de Someruelos to Pickering, Havana, 18 Sept. 1799 (Archivo General de Indias [henceforth AGI], Cuba 1660); Someruelos to Mariano Luis de Urquijo, 17 Sept. 1799 (AGI, Estado 2); Manuel de Guevara Vasconcelos to Secretary of State, Caracas, 31 July 1800 (AGI, Estado 67). On the US mercantile ties with the Spanish Caribbean, see Chambers (2015) and Salvucci (2003).

8 Melchor Josef de Foncerrada to Principe de la Paz, 16 July 1797 (AGI, Estado 13).

9 Manuel Gayoso de Lemos to Count de Someruelos, New Orleans, 21 Jan. 1806 (AGI, Cuba 134B).

10 Andrés Boggiero to José Antonio Caballero, Coro, 10 Nov. 1799 (AGI, Estado, 71, 4).

11 Count de Someruelos, ‘Introduccion o exordio’, not signed or dated, but most probably late Aug. 1805 (AGI, Cuba 1660).

12 One of the best examples for such contestations is provided by a US consular letter from imperial Brazil. See Condy Raguet to Henry Clay (15 Sept. 15, 1825), in Despatches from United States Ministers to Brazil, vol. 4, File Microcopies of Records in the National Archives, no. 121.

13 Carlos Martínez de Irujo to Baron de Carondelet, Philadelphia, 13 Jan. 1797 (AGI, Cuba, 104).

14 See also Carlos Martínez de Irujo to Baron de Carondelet, New York, 12 Dec. 1796; Philadelphia, 26 Jan. 1797; 29 April 1797 (AGI, Cuba, 104).

15 Valentin de Foronda to Captain-General Count de Someruelos, Philadelphia, 3 Nov. 1808 (AGI, Cuba 1710).

16 James Madison to Count de Someruelos, Philadelphia, 19 April 1805 (AGI, Cuba 1660).

17 M. Childs (2006, pp. 38–45) has described the 1790s and 1800s as a period of isolation in the island’s political history, but the chronicle of unauthorised consulship illustrates that this political isolation was more a political desideratum of Havana’s captain-general than a historical reality.

18 T.H. Benton, Speech by Mr. Benton, of Missouri, Delivered in the Senate of the United States, 13 March 1826 (Washington, DC: Columbian Star Office, 1826), pp. 84–5.

19 On the concept of disavowal, S. Fischer writes: ‘The modernity that took shape in the Western Hemisphere (in theoretical discourse as well as in cultural and social institutions) in the course of the nineteenth century contains, as a crucial element, the suppression of a struggle whose aim was to give racial equality and racial liberation the same weight as those political goals that came to dominate nineteenth-century politics and thought – most particularly, those relating to the nation and national sovereignty. Unless we submit the concept of modernity to a radical critique, our emancipatory goals and strategies will continue to reproduce the biases that came to shape modern thought in the Age of Revolution’ (2004, p. 274). Consulship was a crucial aspect of the struggle for emancipation, sovereignty and the nation-state and as such formed an important part of the contest for modernity that Fischer so aptly analyses.

20 See, e.g., Count de Someruelos to Henry Hill, 22 Aug. 1805 (AGI, Cuba 1660); John Morton to James Madison, Newport (CT), 9 Aug. 1802, in Despatches from U.S. Consuls in Havana, 1783–1906, National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration, Washington, D.C., microform T 20, reel 1.

21 George Canning to consuls in Columbia, Foreign Office, 10 Oct. 1823 (The National Archives, Kew [TNA], Foreign Office (FO) 18.1); George Canning to Joseph Planta, Foreign Office, 25 Dec. (TNA, FO 35.1).

22 Charles Mackenzie to George Canning, Port-au-Prince, 28 May 1826 (TNA, FO 35.3).

23 George Canning to Charles Mackenzie, Foreign Office, 26 Jan. 1826 (TNA, FO 35.2).

24 C. Mackenzie, Notes on Haiti, Made during a Residence in that Republic (London, 1830), pp. 24–53.

25 MacMaster observes that in his position as consul of the United States and Portugal in 1837 and 1838, Trist provided official papers for nearly every vessel in the Cuban slave trade (1968, p. 56). Charles P. Trant, US vice-consul at Matanzas, followed in Trist’s footsteps, clearing out ‘American’ vessels which consisted entirely of Spanish slave-trading crews (cf. ‘Enclosure 46. Abstract of the Papers of the Schooner “Traveller”, Andrew Johnson, Master’, in Parliamentary Papers. Slave Trade, Class A. 1841, p. 63).

26 Cf. C. Mackenzie to G. Canning, Port-au-Prince, 28 May 1826 (TNA, FO 35.3).

27 See also ‘Letters of Toussaint Louverture and of Edward Stevens, 1798–1800’, American Historical Review, 16 (1910): 64–101.