“La dominación inglesa”

Abstract

Chapter 4 focuses on Havana elites during the city’s eleven-month occupation by British forces. Eager to trade for goods and enslaved Africans with their frequent commercial partners, Havana’s elite residents ended up betraying those who had fought so hard to ward off the British attack. During the occupation, they cozied up to the British commander Lord Albemarle and seized commercial opportunities in the hybrid space they so often occupied, where layers of British and Spanish empire overlapped. Ultimately, Albemarle’s army was too weak and his governing practices were too corrupt for the occupation to have a lasting economic impact on Havana, but in the meantime the city’s leading merchants and landowners managed to shape the period of British rule to their own advantage.