This chapter offers a brief overview of the multiple transformations the island went through with the rise and fall of the colonial economy in the sixteenth century, as it cycled through gold extraction, and then the expansion of African slavery with the establishment of sugar plantations, all the while exploiting indigenous labor. After the decline of the sugar economy, ginger and cattle ranching followed as the most important economic activities in the last two decades of the century. The chapter ends with a description of the city of Santo Domingo as the social and political center of the colony.

During the final decades of the 1600s, French and Spanish residents in Hispaniola had developed a deeply ambivalent yet fluid relationship that ranged from the open violence to collaboration in their daily dealings. By the end of the century, however, Spanish residents on the island, especially in the north, came to rely on French merchants and settlers, who provided Hispaniola residents with a certain level of economic prosperity that legal (and illegal) Spanish traders operating in Santo Domingo could only provide at much higher prices and limited quantities. This rise of the intercolonial trade between both sides of the island happened as the efforts of the Spanish crown to eliminate French settlements from Hispaniola also increased. The participation of Spanish local residents in the war effort allowed them to manipulate the Spanish offensive and foil the imperial objective of consolidating Spanish control over all of Hispaniola, thus choosing the commercial benefits of accommodation to the neighboring French presence, despite the risks, instead of a safe reunification under Spanish control that would once again commercially isolate them.

This chapter analyzes the implementation of a plan the crown approved in August 1604 to depopulate by force the northern and western coasts of Hispaniola by destroying the existing villages and relocating their population to newly erected villages around Santo Domingo. The depopulations of Hispaniola were an attempt by the crown to impose order on a colony that in the previous two decades had been perceived as increasingly disorderly from the perspective of its extremely active contraband trade, but also from a social and religious perspective. Even though smuggling might have been the cause of the increasingly frequent alarms that reached Madrid during these years, the perception of religious and political impropriety, and the risks that these posed to the presumed religious purity and loyalty of Spanish vassals on the island might have been just as important (or arguably even more so) in spurring the Council of the Indies to action. This narrative, however, was fiercely challenged by the Hispaniola elites, who exculpated themselves of all wrongdoing while blaming any and all questionable behavior on landless peasants, whom they accused of leading all the smuggling efforts.

This chapter reveals the great level of control that local elites accumulated over both local and royal institutions in Santo Domingo, to expand their influence to other parts of the Spanish Caribbean and acquire a profitable network of associates and introduce contraband goods into the city. Rodrigo Pimentel’s political life provides an illuminating example of the particularities of Santo Domingo’s institutional life, but on a larger scale, it also reveals the profound limitations that the Spanish Monarchy’s bureaucratic apparatus had to govern its own Caribbean territories and, by extension, most of its colonial dominions beyond Mexico City and Lima. Under the Habsburg, colonial centers of royal authority, Audiencias and governors often became extensions of the communities that hosted ministers and royal officials, and not anchors of royal power in remote Spanish possessions, as the crown initially intended. In their dealings with high courts, these local groups of power both made and unmade the Spanish empire: they limited the influence of Madrid, but by using royal institutions for their own ends, they shaped the edges of the empire according to their own interests.

This chapter explores two complementary dimensions of acquisition and display of power by local elites in Santo Domingo. The first is political and institutional. In the early sevententh century, the sale of offices became standard practice in the Spanish empire allowing local elites to buy seats of regidores in local Cabildos across the empire in perpetuity, thus gaining control of their own local governments. A seat on the Cabildo of Santo Domingo became a prized possession for elites to reaffirm their position in the island social hierarchy. It also enabled access to important economic opportunities, which triggered rivalries among its members. The second one is also political, but it is more narrowly focused on racial politics, on the role of these elite men as slaveholders and the way they used their enslaved workers in their personal and political rivalries. The elites of Santo Domingo proudly manifested their power and tried to impose it upon their peers through their use of their enslaved workers, whose obedience (particularly when deployed in opposition to others) gave true meaning to the institutional and class power these elite men had acquired.

In the early days of 1694, tireless traveler Gregorio de Robles arrived at a bay on the northern coast of Hispaniola, where the town of Puerto Plata once stood. He journeyed on the ship of an asiento slave merchant, and once ashore, he encountered two Dutch sloops and an English one full of goods and openly trading. Locals had prepared 1,000 hides and the English and Dutch sailors went ashore “as if it was their own land,” ready to exchange their wares for all kinds of agricultural products. Robles suggested that this port needed to be better defended and that the city of Santiago should have a “good commander” because vigilance was crucial to protect the region. If Gregorio de Robles suspected that the local militias were involved in allowing this illicit trade, he was correct. Less than a century after the depopulations, the northern residents of Hispaniola had once again restored their transnational mercantile connections with the complicity of local militias and officials.