Mena García’s book is based on extensive research in the Archives of the Indies, Seville, and on judicious use of the small body of solid publications on early Panama and its peoples by such scholars as Pablo Alvarez Rubiano, Alfredo Castillero Calvo, Mario Góngora, Juan Friede, Omar Jáen Suárez, and Carl O. Sauer. There is little evidence of American research. (To be fair, Panama’s sixteenth-century documentary holdings are almost nonexistent.) There is also a lack of comparative context, especially striking given the predominance of long-distance trade in the isthmus. These inconsistencies in sources and emphasis are, to many, typical of the publications of the Sevillian school.
The author begins with a long chapter on demography. The small white population, heavily male and more or less typical in its regional and class origins, was vastly outnumbered by the Amerindian population at first. Heavily exploited by slave raiding, slave exporting, gold panning and pearling, this native population had almost disappeared by mid-century. It was replaced by a laboring population composed of imported black slaves who again outnumbered the whites. By the end of the century, blacks made up over 70% of the population, and the number of castas was growing rapidly.
Mena García then turns to the economy of Panama. Agriculture was chronically weak; not enough food was grown to feed Panama City and Nombre de Dios, especially when the fleets were in. Stock raising was somewhat more successful, at least as far as meat supply was concerned, but mules for transportation had to be brought in from Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Cartagena. Early booms in gold and pearls died quickly because of wasteful overexploitation of finite resources, and the disappearance of the Amerindian population. Soon after the discovery of Peru, Panama’s economic role was settled, and its main industry became and remains transportation and related commerce and manufacturing.
The chapter on Spanish society discusses encomenderos, government officials, merchants and traders, the lower classes, and the cabildo. The picture emerges of a society, troubled by strife between interests and between races, where miscegenation was more common and trade more socially acceptable than elsewhere in the Indies. Cimarrones and unruly people in transit were a constant problem.
The Amerindians, under slavery, naboría, and encomienda, declined rapidly in number, and were soon reduced to a handful of tiny and economically marginal villages. Blacks, on the other hand, played various basic roles, although information is scarce on some aspects. Freed people occupied many of the important intermediate positions, such as artisans, shipwrights, and muleskinners, which whites would not or could not accept. Black slaves provided the labor, and large numbers of cimarrones disrupted Spanish society and transportation in the isthmus, especially between mid-century and the early 1580s.
Mena García, then, has provided us with large quantities of judiciously sorted and arranged raw material. This book will be important to those who wish to put early Panama in a larger theoretical and geographical context.
Fortune’s book has several interrelated themes. It argues that the new English commercial expansion of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, already described by Ralph Davis, Phyllis Deane, and others, depended more than previously thought on imports of trade goods and bullion from the West Indies. The export economies of Barbados and Jamaica, after brief episodes of dependence on tobacco and piracy, came to rely heavily on sugar. Nevertheless, the cyclical and fragile nature of this monoculture made it an intermittent and thus unsatisfactory basis for export prosperity, both in the two islands and among those in England interested in them. Much of the steady prosperity of Barbados, and especially Jamaica, was built on trade among the islands of the Caribbean and, illegally, with the Spanish mainland. Thus, Fortune claims before 1750 smuggling was at least as important a basis for prosperity as were the better-known plantations.
Enter the Jewish merchants. Many of these Sephardics had come to the two islands via Brazil, Holland, Curaçao, or England. (The author’s case that some came from Spanish America, and still had relatives and business partners there, is poorly demonstrated.) In general, these Jews eschewed plantation ownership and preferred to act as commercial intermediaries between the American mainland and the islands, and between the islands and England. This role caused a split between commercial interests on the islands and in the metropolis. Government and commerce in England, by and large, welcomed the Jews for their liquid capital, commercial expertise, and knowledge of international trading networks, and accordingly enacted legislation favorable to them. Creole merchants on Barbados and Jamaica hated the Jewish merchants for the same reasons, and found them to be skilled, sophisticated rivals. These local groups demonstrated their fears of this rivalry by monopolistic demands, anti-Semitic complaints to England, and by pushing through, when they could control the island legislatures and governors, various acts of discriminatory legislation. Thus Jewish merchants, as well as sugar and the labor of black slaves, fueled England’s early commercial revolution.
These themes, some old, some quite new, are poorly presented here. There are constant repetitions and other signs of confused organization. Solid primary evidence is mixed with secondary materials of the most general and impressionistic kind. In spite of many efforts, Fortune fails to state clearly what he wants to prove. Obviously he has done considerable research and has interesting findings. It is a pity that he has presented his readers with such a laborious and aggravating task when they attempt to find out what he knows and what he concludes from it.
