Imperialisms, Revolutions, and Resolutions in the Caribbean Amazon - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 85

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Imperialisms, Revolutions, and Resolutions in the Carib-
bean Amazon
Unquiet on the Northern Front
Rio Branco's first foray into Amazonian diplomacy involved a controversy that had been
brewingforclosetofourhundredyears.The“WildCoast” or“LandsoftheCaboNorte,”
later known as the Franco-Brazilian “Território Contestado” or “Contesté”—now known
asthestateofAmapá—hadbeenacomplexscramble.LocatedintheCaribbeanAmazon,
it was a region at the intersection of native, African fugitive, and European colonial
boundaries and New World imperial rivalries. It was also a region of habitual insurgency.
Brazil's adversary, France, was among the most powerful nations on the planet in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, indeed so powerful that it had caused the Portuguese
monarch to flee his own land and set up shop in his unruly tropical colony.
The Caribbean Amazon can be usefully understood as bounded to the north by the
Orinoco, to the south by the Amazon, to the east by the Atlantic, with its currents, eco-
nomies, and imperialisms linking to the Caribbean, the Atlantic beyond, and points north
and east. The ambiguous interior boundary was framed by its runaway slave communit-
ies and native settlements. The Caribbean Amazon was connected by trade and escape to
globalcircuitsofcommodities(includingslaves),insurgencies,andideas.Theintegration
of the Guianas into both Amazon and Caribbean processes has been largely overlooked,
inpartbecausemoststudieshavefollowedNorthernEuropeancolonyoutlinesratherthan
the implications of non-European territorial configurations and how malleable the colo-
nial frontiers actually were. 1 Rio Branco was facing a region rife with failed European
experiments and imperial ambitions, fugitive cultures, and rampant malaria built on the
ruins of one of the New World's great tropical civilizations.
To describe all the complexity of this region is more than this short chapter can aspire
todo.However,thedefiningprocessesthatshapedtheContestadocanusefullybedivided
into several loose periods: its complex pre-Columbian history; the early consolidation of
Portuguese hegemony on the Amazon, the emergence of active European colonies in the
Caribbean Amazon (with their massive and rebellious slave populations); Enlightenment
experiments; the rise of regional revolutions; and the final politics of adjudication. The
region was, if nothing else, a testimony to the limitations of European imperialisms in
peripheries that today seem lost to the world but that figured in European diplomacy and
conflict for four hundred years. Caribbean currents, trans-Atlantic storms, and Amazoni-
an forces shaped this region's ecologies, polities, and utopias.