Mobilitätskontrolle und die Ambiguität der Bedrohung in der niederländischen Karibik im Zeitalter der Revolutionen

Abstract

This article examines how the regulation of mobility in the Dutch Caribbean changed during the Age of Revolutions through the lens of security politics. It does so by first outlining Dutch colonial approaches to security threats, both external (e.g. warfare) and internal (e. g. marronage and social unrest) in the period prior to the 1790s, when the Dutch Caribbean was managed by the Dutch West India Company (WIC), and assessing what role mobility and migration played in this. It then compares this pre-revolutionary situation to the process of increasing “securitization” of mobility in the tumultuous period of the French and Haitian Revolutions and the Napoleonic wars. Considering racialized anxieties over non-white mobilities and fears of revolutionary contagion it argues that internal and external security threats became increasingly entangled in the minds of colonial authorities, who introduced increasingly intricate regulatory measures in response to this perceived crisis. In the years following the renewed consolidation of Dutch power in the region after the end of the Napoleonic wars many of these regulations initially presented as emergency security measures would remain enduring fixtures of the colonial administrative apparatus, thus permanently expanding colonial governments’ regulatory grip on colonial populations.