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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Juan JosĂ© Ponce VĂĄzquez, "Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580â1690" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Description: Dr. Juan JosĂ© Ponce VĂĄzquez's new book, Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580-1690 (Cambridge UP, 2020) tracks the importance of smuggling to the society, economy, and politics of the island of Hispaniola in this âlong seventeenth century.â Smuggling, in his words, made people's lives on the island, an island that had suffered from imperial commercial neglect and a declining sugar industry. Concomitant with this endemic smuggling, local elites began asserting their authority over local and imperial institutions on the island, taking advantage of royal officialsâ isolation from the Spanish metropole and their need for local alliances. The...