ABSTRACT
In the latter years of the Latin American Wars of Independence, as it became clear that Lisbon and Madrid would not be able to win back their erstwhile colonies by military force alone, a different kind of battle played out over international recognition. The theater in which claims to sovereignty were made and battles over independence were fought was not just Western Europe or the Atlantic world, but also the greater Caribbean region. Here agents of the Latin American republics operated in a complex space of intercolonial politics and overlapping sovereignties, in which regional actors and networks were more than willing to engage with and profit from the continued struggles for recognition. Key military and political tools used by these republican revolutionaries were privateering and letters of marque. This chapter examines early nineteenth-century privateering as a legal-political practice and its relationship to regional political order by focusing on a single revealing case – the schooner Las Damas Argentinas and her unfortunate crew. When one crewmember, Jean Jayet de Beaupré, was arrested on the Danish island of St. Thomas a complicated web began to unravel, spanning from Latin American political entrepreneurs to shady Caribbean financiers and local European governors. It is the story of an international struggle for recognition swept up in very local political skirmishes, emphasizing transoceanic connectivity and local specificity simultaneously. It is also the story of a regional political system straining against an emerging global imperial order.
