This essay reviews the following works:

Staying Afloat: Risk and Uncertainty in Spanish Atlantic World Trade, 1760–1820. By Jeremy Baskes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 381. $54.57 hardcover. ISBN: 9780804785426.

The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800. By Robert S. DuPlessis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. vii + 332. $29.99 hardcover. ISBN: 9781107105911.

The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire. By Adrian Finucane. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 1 + 211. $45.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812248128.

Guiana and the Shadows of Empire: Colonial and Cultural Negotiations at the Edge of the World. By Joshua R. Hyles. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Pp. ix + 185. $76.56 hardcover. ISBN: 9780739187791.

The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora: Seven Centuries of Literature and the Arts. By Darlene J. Sadlier. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. 314. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781477311486.

Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil. By Michiel van Groesen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xx + 272. $47.50 hardcover. ISBN: 9780812248661.

On the afternoon of April 20, 1749, a force of between 400 and 600 armed men amassed on Caracas's central plaza. Entering the city under blue and white flags emblazoned with red crosses, to the sound of beating drums, the deployment comprised a cross section of Venezuela's socio-racial groups, social estates, and occupations. The men followed Juan Francisco de León, a cacao planter and small-town sheriff (teniente), and had shouldered their weapons as a popular protest “in the name of the city [of Caracas], the nobility, and the masses.” Disregarding the potentially ominous specter of so many armed insurgents, Caraqueños instead welcomed León's troops with open arms. As one observer remarked, all in the city from shopkeepers “to the nuns give thanks to León, wishing him success and commending him to God.”

In 1675, William Dampier set sail from Jamaica for the Bay of Campeche on Mexico's Yucatán coast to trade for logwood. Dampier, who would later become famous as a naturalist, a buccaneer, and one of the foremost chroniclers of the Golden Age of English buccaneering, recorded his experiences over the course of a year spent in English logwood communities near this Spanish settlement. The author's account gives a fascinating portrayal of a society beyond the margins of imperial control. In Laguna de Términos, an inlet just west of the town of Campeche (in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula), English sailors cut logwood, a popular dyestuff used in Europe for red, purple, and black clothing dyes and ink, that grew throughout the swampy tropical lowlands of the area. They traded their harvest with merchants who would ship it to ports as far away as Boston, London, and Amsterdam. Seeking an independent life separate from the arbitrary power of shipboard hierarchy, the loggers lived communally. They worked, hunted, and drank on their own schedule.