In this paper, I present the results of a study looking at wills, probate records, and governmental correspondence to explore interisland inheritances in Dutch St. Eustatius in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many of these inheritances were interisland ones, crossing the sea to Swedish St. Barths. This could make obtaining an inheritance doubly complicated, for example in the case of the widow Elizabeth Pantophlet, whose family members across the sea disputed her inheritance claims. At other times, interisland inheritances were necessitated by the death of a person without any immediate family members, as in the case of Albertus Ebbens. Other examples in this study include men and women from different strata of society, both the fabulously wealthy, such as Abraham Salomons who owned Fair Play Plantation, and those of extremely modest means, such as Eliza Harriott whose entire estate consisted of some spoons, a bed, and a stool. Those who were legally married and those who were common-law spouses are represented, as well as those who died with and without wills. By comparing the circumstances faced and strategies employed to manage their inheritances by people from each of these different groups, we can reach a better understanding of gendered experiences of property management, familial relations, widowhood, guardianship, and legal rights and responsibilities in interisland interactions.

This paper explores the role of Dutch merchant and planter families on the Danish West-Indian island of St. Croix. As the Danish were forced to govern with a policy of open admission across their West Indian possessions the islands were mainly settled by ‘foreigners’. Foreign inhabitants connected the relatively small islands to the larger Caribbean, and ultimately shaped the Danish presence in the Atlantic world. The island of St. Croix, with the town of Christiansted as the government centre of the Danish West Indies, found itself primarily settled by British planters, as well as groups of Dutch and Irish planters. Even though, the group of Dutch inhabitants made up a smaller portion of the overall inhabitants in comparison to islands like St. Thomas, these merchant and planting families found ways to integrate themselves into the larger island communities. They went on to marry into other foreign families as well as Danish families and became significant landowners with the Heyliger, Salomon and van Beverhout families owning a notable amount of the plantations by the mid to late eighteenth century. The aim of this paper therefore is to create a deeper understanding of the role of foreign nationals, and in particular Dutch nationals, in maintaining the Danish West Indian colonies throughout the eighteenth century. This paper will do so by exploring themes of international relations, family networks and religion.

Sweden’s West India colony St. Barthélemy – a small, dry island which operated a free port in its capital Gustavia – represented by the end of the Napoleonic wars the whole of the Swedish involvement in the slave trade. Smuggling and illicit trade was, as it always had been, its raison d’etre. By the end of the war the island had also become a financial and diplomatic liability. Despite this, king Karl Johan expected much of his crown colony, relying on it for the realization of his economic goals in South America. The slave trade was an integral part of the complex commercial world of the circum-Caribbean and its contacts with the emerging republics of South America. Slave trading through the Swedish colony took many shapes, and Swedish subjects, both naturalized and born, participated in it. The paper examines what incentives and ambitions lay behind St. Barthélemy becoming an auxiliary to the illegal slave trade, even as Sweden entered into bilateral treaties with Britain to abolish it.

This paper explores negotiations of honour, social status and privacy for free people of colour through an analysis of police court records from St. Thomas and St. Barthélemy 1780-1800. Several studies over the past years have shown the fruitfulness of comparative studies between St. Barthélemy and St. Thomas. Still rather under investigated within the broader field of early modern Caribbean history, a combined study of the rich archives of these two islands therefore allows for investigation of how free people of colour across gender, imperial connections navigated the social life of Caribbean free ports.The police court records showcase how boundaries between for instance the home and the public street were negotiated, or how much was at stake when free people of color (in/)voluntarily took private disputes to the police courts. Free people of color (and free women of colour especially) were frequently present in the police court records both pointing at their importance as social figures in the Caribbean urban areas, but also their vulnerability in a world of a society based on hereditary racial slavery.This paper is a part of my PhD project where I investigate the intersection of slavery and privacy in eighteenth century St. Thomas, St. Barthélemy and Curaçao. The PhD project is a part of the Centre for Privacy Studies at UCPH.

Previous studies of transimperial connections within the Lesser Antilles, meaning the movement of goods, people, knowledge and information across imperial borders, have primarily considered them as subversive to local government and metropolitan mercantile policy. Smugglers, escaped enslaved people, pirates and others utilized these connections to avoid the legal imperial gaze. However, less discussion has been made regarding how governors and administrators utilized the connections between neighboring islands for their own benefit, or joint benefit. The Swedish Caribbean island of St Barthélemy was during the early 19th century a free port and a transimperial hub for the Lesser Antilles. The colonial administration of St Barthélemy used the exchange of legal codes, spreading of information, a shared postage system and a broader regional print culture to facilitate and improve its own governance. Discussions regarding cholera outbreaks and conspiracies between governors also point to a joint understanding of colonial safety. We can also see how the local perception of British abolition of slavery in 1834 impacted and shaped the Swedish Caribbean’s own abolition process, leading to the final abolition in 1847. In this way, I want to challenge the concept of transimperial connections, and encourage scholars to also consider the utility these connections had for colonial power structures, instead of only for those avoiding them.

The church records of Swedish Saint-Barthélemy contain impressive amounts of information about the living conditions, connections and relationships of the island’s enslaved people and its free population (both white and of colour). They also show how the inhabitants negotiated different types of spiritual and colonial authority according to their requirements. By investigating two specific aspects visible and traceable in colonial parish records, namely, illegitimacy and parrainage - the choosing of godparents - this paper will analyse the specific social worlds of Saint-Barthélemy through the religious practices surrounding unwed mothers and the births of illegitimate children both free and enslaved. It will address different types of authority and governance visible in these practices, but also the networks and ties spun around children and adults that were baptized – networks that included men and women both Black and white, enslaved and free. By focusing on illegitimacy and practices of parrainage in Swedish Saint Barthélemy, it is possible to question some of the harder lines that historical, anthropological and demographic studies have drawn between the different population groups of the island. In their stead, networks of blood relations, kinship, and dependency come into view which allow us to look at questions of power and agency, gender, “race” and class in a less static and more situative way.