UCLA

On the night of Sunday, May 10, 1795, hundreds of enslaved and legally free people of African and native American descent took up arms to overthrow colonial rule in Coro, Venezuela. The rebels stated that their new society would be free of Coro’s coercive political and economic systems, particularly slavery and taxes. After three days of fighting, however, Coro’s rebels were ultimately defeated, and at least 125 of them were killed in combat, or brutally executed in the days, weeks, and months that followed. Despite this defeat, the Coro rebellion has created an archive that allows historians to unearth new information on the history of capitalism, as well as the radical ideologies that circulated the Atlantic during the Age of Revolution.

This dissertation bridges the fields of capitalism studies and histories of enslaved people’s resistance movements to examine the role of the Atlantic’s political economy in structuring eighteenth-century Coro, as well as rebel ideology. It argues that Coro’s rebels were inspired, not so much by abstract Enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality, but by their autochthonous political and economic customs, as they were practiced in Coro, and in the Gold and Loango Coasts of West and West Central Africa, from where most rebels descended. This dissertation also intervenes in the history of capitalism, asserting the need to define and periodize capitalism. It begins with a study of textile production in the manufacturing enclaves of Flanders, Brittany, and Devon, and investigates the three joint-stock companies that shaped eighteenth-century Coro: The Dutch West India Company, the South Sea Company, and the Real Compa��a Guipozcoana. Through a study of the political economies of the people indigenous to Coro and the Gold and Loango Coasts, it demonstrates that the precapitalist class structure of eighteenth-century Europe, based on peasant production and merchant capital, was unable to completely destroy autochthonous social systems in Africa and the Americas, as would progressively become more common under capitalism. These communalist mores informed the moral economy of the African and native American communities of Coro, and they were the ones that inspired the 1795 insurrection.