FAITH AND FORTUNE: RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND THE POLITICS OF PROFIT IN THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CARIBBEAN by KRISTEN BLOCK A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in the Department of History written under the direction of Phyllis Mack and approved by ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ___________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2007 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Faith and Fortune: Religious Identity and the Politics of Profit in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean” By KRISTEN BLOCK Dissertation Director: Phyllis Mack “Faith and Fortune” examines the intersection between religious allegiance and economic ambition on the volatile frontiers of the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Encompassing both Spanish and English colonies, it employs four case studies to explore how ordinary individuals created and manipulated the meaning of their religious affiliations. The first chapter examines cases of Christianized slaves in Cartagena de Indias who denounced their masters’ harsh mistreatment as un-Christian, using their membership in the community of believers as leverage to demand better conditions. The second chapter is a study of the motley crew of Protestant Northern Europeans who, as sojourners in the Spanish Caribbean, converted to Catholicism as an assimilation strategy. The ideas and practice of English puritanism animate the third chapter’s case study of the political economy of Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design—a puritan crusade against the Spanish Catholic empire in the New World—using an analysis of race, class, and gender to examine its failures. The final chapter takes place in Barbados, birthplace of the English colonial “sugar revolution,” where Quaker missionaries intent on Christianizing the local African slave population churned up fears of slave rebellion and challenged local Friends’ interpretation of their own faith and convictions. “Faith and Fortune” personalizes the history of Caribbean inequalities from the perspective of slaves, sailors, servants, and sectarians who made their lives and fortunes in the profit-saturated landscape of the Caribbean. It illuminates how for them, articulating a Christian identity was a political act, an important power negotiation, and a way to articulate injustice. ii Acknowledgements I must begin by acknowledging the support and guidance of my mentors, my teachers. Phyllis Mack gracefully agreed to guide me as chair on what turned out to be an American-focused dissertation, and has always supported me in my ambitions. Christopher Brown was an especially generous partner in the writing of this text; his perceptive comments and suggestions as I struggled to put my thoughts on paper pushed me to greater clarity in my analysis, conceptualization, and organization. As the recipient of Herman Bennett’s astute advice, I was challenged to better express my project’s relationship to some of the field’s more challenging historiography. Jennifer Morgan provided welcome planning support for my first trip to Barbados, and offered especially useful comments towards the end of the process of writing and revising. Jane Landers’ work has been an inspiration to my research, and I benefited tremendously from her advice at various stages in the planning and writing of the dissertation. The flaws that remain in this paper are entirely my own, but I know that there would have been many more without my committee members’ tremendous input. Among those I also count as mentors, I must thank Karen Kupperman at New York University for allowing me to sit in on her Atlantic World readings course, and for inviting me to be a participant and presenter in her Atlantic Workshop over the years. For encouraging me to begin my journey towards graduate school, I am especially grateful to my undergraduate advisor, Linda Sturtz, and her husband, James Robertson. iii Special thanks to those grants, organizations and people that made it possible for me to imagine and carry out such a wide-ranging project: the Graduate School at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for a grant to assist in my language and paleography training in Seville, Spain; Harvard University’s International Conference for the History of the Atlantic World for funding to travel to London and the opportunity to take part in their summer seminar, “The Transit of Christianity”; the Ruth and Lincoln Ekstrom Fund at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island, for a summer fellowship; the Department of History at Beloit College, Wisconsin, for offering me a one-semester teaching position that funded several months of research; Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores de España) for a grant to return to the Archive of the Indies in Seville; the American Historical Association, for support during a research stay in Cartagena de Indias; and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, for the Barra Dissertation Fellowship which gave me the funding and intellectual space to begin writing the dissertation. Without the support of these institutions I would never have had the wherewithal to perform research in five countries and the time to write about it. Special thanks to the directors and administrators of those funding agencies, especially Bernard Bailyn, Pat Denault, Norman Fiering, Valerie Andrews, Daniel Richter, and Amy Baxter- Bellamy. I would also like to show my appreciation to Teresa Delcorso, for the time she spent guiding me through the intricacies of grant-writing, and Dawn Ruskai, for always helping to manage departmental paperwork. During these periods of institutional support, I had the privilege of meeting many established scholars whose advice and conversations helped shape the direction of my research and writing, among them: iv Antonio Barrera, Hilary Beckles, Wayne Bodle, Brycchan Carey, Antonio Feros, Sylvia Frey, Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, April Hatfield, and Stuart Schwartz. I have had the good fortune to meet an extraordinary collection of people during my graduate school career, many of whom I still count as friends. To those who knew me before I became a grad student and have persevered despite my erratic correspondence —especially Jennifer Troester, Jaclyn Kordell, and Kathleen Lane Spencer—thank you for staying in touch. For conversing with me in Spanish and helping to decode the archives during my first trip to Spain, my thanks to Andrea Campetella, Katrina Olds, Asmaa Bouhrass, Lupe Fernandez, and Esther Gonzalez. Special thanks to Esther, Fernando, Pepe, Nana, Álvaro, and Javier for taking me into their close-knit group on my second trip to Seville, and to Graciela Cruz Lopez and Heather Peterson for fun inside and outside the archives. In London, I enjoyed exploring the archives and the city with Kathy Wheeler, Jenny Anderson, Abby Swingen, and Matt, Cassie and Avi Wolfgram. In Barbados, I had the pleasure of spending some of my non-archival time with Marisa Fuentes, Karl Watson, Martin Bowden, and Eric Seeman and his family. Special thanks to Lina del Castillo and her family for taking me in and taking me out when I first arrived in Colombia. Alfonso Múnera, Father Tulio Aristizábal, Lucely Salgado, Maryelis Rivero Seña, and Raúl Ramón helped me feel at home during my month-long stay in Cartagena de Indias. The remainder of my stay in Bogotá was very enjoyable and productive thanks to Mauricio Tovar, Jorge Gamboa, Adriana Maya Restrepo, Jaime Gomez Borja, Marcela Echeverri, Olga Fabiola Cabeza, Diego Garcia Marquez, Esteban Reyes, Fernando Garcia Vasquez, Joanne Rappaport, Chris Lane, Renée Souloudre-La France, and Carmenza Botero. v Back at Rutgers, I could always count on intellectual support and social stimulation from Kate Keller, Margaret Sumner, Lesley Doig, Tim Alves, Carmen Khair, Joe Bonica, Carla MacDougall, Jacki Castledine, Amanda Pipkin, Danielle McGuire, Justin Hart, Charley Foy, Cat Howey, Greg Swedberg, Rob Alegre, Rebecca Scales, Rachel Schnepper, and so many more. My fellow graduate students Piedad Gutierrez, Carolina Giraldo, and Nadia Celis all served as personal Spanish tutors and helped me experience their native Colombia through their delicious company. I was lucky enough to develop similar networks of serious-but-fun academic friends at Princeton and New York University. Special thanks to Jenny Anderson, Karin Velez, Kaya Cook, and the members of our Greater New York/New Jersey Writing Group: Christian Crouch, Marcela Echeverri, Heather Kopelson, Katrina Olds, and Jenny Shaw. Other of my peers who deserve mention for their friendship and assistance at various points include: Yvie Fabella, Catherine Molineux, Juan Ponce-Vázquez, Linda Rupert, and David Wheat. A sincere namasté to Joanne Carter, Carol Cook, and Jimmy Richardson at Simply Yoga, Kingston, for helping me survive the stress of dissertation writing. A number of my friends have been especially stalwart sources of encouragement through the occasional bouts of loneliness on the road and during these last, very difficult months of writing, and so I’d like to recognize them separately here. Kate Keller has served alternately as buddy, roommate, and travel partner—but most importantly, has been my most loyal of friends and an unfailing correspondent. Marisa Fuentes has also become a steadfast