(Post)colonial scholarship in recent decades has undergone methodological and conceptual revisions and scholars have increasingly adopted the premise that social and political transformations are the product of both global and local struggles. The goal of this paper is to position healthcare as an “imperial force field” by focusing on the development of a colonial healthcare system in the nineteenth-century Danish West Indies. I argue that challenging seemingly self-evident concepts such as healthcare forces us to recognise that interventionist healthcare was contested and negotiated at multiple levels. This paper mobilises archival and archaeological research from a plantation hospital at Estate Cane Garden, St. Croix, Virgin Islands, to provide a context for interrogating the practical negotiations of colonial healthcare policy. While colonial administrative documents and physician reports depict a rather narrow range of healthcare practices, archaeological evidence from a plantation hospital suggests that healthcare, within plantation institutions, was more heterogeneous than the documents indicate. The goal of this paper is largely methodological. It mobilises colonial transcripts and material culture in ways that disrupt and reimagine taken-for-granted assumptions to show how those most affected by colonial policies complicate colonial institutions via on-the-ground practices.

The article explores the emergence and workings of the free port of Gustavia, founded in 1785 shortly after the Swedish acquisition of its first Caribbean colony, St. Barthélemy. Its free trade policy was modelled closely after Dutch and Danish predecessors in the region, which had been successful for centuries as neutral marketplaces, especially during times of international conflict. An increasing field of scholars have begun reconsidering the significance of contraband trade in Caribbean and Atlantic history. Arguments have been made for a more nuanced understanding of Caribbean geopolitics, one that acknowledges the necessity of informal transnational trade networks. The history of Gustavia is poorly explored in this context. With the aid of new sources, it has become possible to assess the economic role of Gustavia in the Caribbean transit trade during the European conflict of 1793–1815; these sources show that the free port was of greater importance than previous research has found it to be. Through its creation, the Swedish government hoped to commercially exploit a colonial territory of marginal value. War was the primary catalyst that drew people as well as capital to the island, contributing to both its commercial strength and cultural diversity. Former inhabitants of Dutch and French colonies sought refuge there in the wake of the French Revolution and the subsequent wars. Albeit for a brief time, Gustavia gained the character of an international, polyglot merchant community and functioned as an imperial crossroads where business could be conducted as usual between allies, neutrals, and enemies.

By examining how a Dutch firm in Lisbon operated two Portuguese tobacco tax farms from 1722 to 1727 and failed subsequently, this article brings together, on the one hand, research on the relationship between state and business groups through a monopolistic rent provided by the empire and, on the other hand, a growing literature discussing institutional and economic variables, as well as human agency, in business failure in early modern Europe. The article aims to achieve two goals. The first is to shed light on the perspective of the Dutch tax farmers, highlighting why they chose to incur the risks of managing a nationwide sales monopoly and the business model they implemented to maximize profits and mitigate risks, while the second is to examine the general and specific reasons behind their ultimate downfall. It concludes that, despite the organizational innovations they introduced and that led them to exploit interconnected businesses, the Dutch partners were unable to overcome the negative effects of conjunctural and contingent factors that temporarily squeezed the domestic consumption of tobacco.

By weaving the political economy of the Portuguese empire into business history, this article highlights the role of metropolitan and colonial tax farming in the rise and fall of an elite that dominated the business scene in both mainland Portugal and colonial Brazil between roughly 1730 and 1760. It takes the Torres family business as a case study and argues that, while tax farming undoubtedly represented an opportunity to accumulate private wealth, it was also a risky business. Adding to the irregularity of fiscal income, tax farming imposed strict rules on tax farmers, deriving from the legal framework for public finance, while the Crown's policy of seeking to maximize revenue through competitive bidding also increased the risks to which they were exposed. While being highly concentrated on tax farming in Portugal and the South Atlantic empire allowed the Torres family business to amass extraordinary wealth, it also proportionately increased the firm's exposure to those risks, which were then further compounded by a succession problem that eventually led to its demise.

The port of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas has long been a vibrant centre for ship trafficking in the Caribbean, as it was during Danish colonial rule starting in 1672. In 1917, Denmark officially sold and left what became the US Virgin Islands. Not everybody left, though. The Danish-owned West Indian Company, which owned the majority of the St. Thomas port and its attendant facilities, stayed until 1993. At that point the harbour was sold to the Virgin Islanders, who for some time had complained about the fact that a Danish company still profited from the islands. The harbour of Charlotte Amalie, which is my central analytical unit here, thus provides a lens through which to approach Danish colonial imprints.

The harbour is and has been characterised by activities of a temporary and opportunistic kind: industries blossom, people and crops from far away get uprooted and replanted in the Caribbean, businesses provide work for locals, goods are shipped out to be consumed in other places. The transitory nature of projects designed by people elsewhere, I argue, is part of what colonialism is. As I will show, the traces of such projects appear not only as particular ecologies but also as dilemmas to be grappled with long after the foreign decision-makers have left. My approach to colonial legacies on the Virgin Islands, then, mobilises the shifting flows of people, commodities, and interests shipped in and out of Charlotte Amalie to leave behind altered landscapes that are continuously debated.