6 - War, Race and Marginality: The Mosquito Coast in the Eighteenth Century

Summary

The Mosquito Coast or Shore, as it was often called, fits uneasily into the conventional historiography of the eighteenth-century Caribbean and Latin America. The Coast belongs to what is now Atlantic Honduras and Nicaragua, a jagged coastline of some 400 miles stretching from Cape Gracias à Dios to the San Juan river in Costa Rica. Geographically it is part of the Caribbean Rim; jurisdictionally, it was part of Hispanic Central America. Yet the Mosquito Coast was not part of the central plantation zone. It did not import large numbers of African slaves to harvest the products that were found there. Nor was the Shore under effective Spanish rule for much of the eighteenth century. Whereas the Spanish stamped their presence upon the Pacific region of Central America, where the rich soils of the tropical savanna provided sustenance for over a million people at the onset of conquest and good ranch land for the Spanish, the region on the other side of the mountain range that divided Central America proved largely inaccessible. The Shore was a disputed territory for much of the eighteenth century, with the British establishing an informal superintendence over the area from 1740 onwards. Until quite recently, it was only in relation to Belize, the strip of forest that the British carved out of Spanish Honduras in exchange for the Shore, that the Mosquito Coast entered the political history of the Central American isthmus.

And yet the very marginality of the Mosquito Coast has now become its principal attraction. In recent years, in the wake of renewed globalization and new waves of mass migration, historical attention has shifted away from the master narratives of nationhood and liberation, colonialism and dependency, towards more mobile concepts, whether diasporas, travelling cultures, or hybridities. And historians have become more attentive to the ‘entangled worlds’ in which people lived in the Americas where borderlands bypassed and sometimes subverted official sovereignties. Within this context, the Shore seems a fitting site of exploration. For if the Mosquito Coast was not central to the plantation complex, it was very much a part of the maritime Atlantic.