Borinquen MadePeriod
1700-1799
The entries in this magazine that fall in these years, in the order the events occurred. Freeze 2026-08-22. Not current events in these History essays; News is. Not original historical research.
Sugar, slavery, and the plantation economy
Across the wider Caribbean, sugar built fortunes on enslaved labor on a scale that reconfigured entire islands, and Puerto Rico's own sugar economy was part of that same regional system.
La Perla
One of Old San Juan's most iconic neighborhoods began as a slaughterhouse district built outside the walls.
The asiento and African slavery
Utrecht gave Britain a contract to sell enslaved Africans in Spanish America. Puerto Rico was a smaller market, not a free one.
Coffee country: the rise of the mountainous interior
By the late nineteenth century, small Puerto Rico had risen to be the world's seventh-largest coffee producer, grown not on the coast but in the clouded central mountains.
O'Reilly and O'Daly, 1765-1790
Two Irish officers in Spain's service rebuilt the garrison and the stone after Havana fell.
West-coast smuggling
Mayagüez and Cabo Rojo lived off foreign sloops while San Juan lived off the situado.
The bastion of Santa Bárbara
El Morro's ocean bastion is O'Daly's work. A 1783 cornerstone is not on the park's page, so this journal will not invent one.
Abercromby fails at San Juan, 1797
Sir Ralph Abercromby brought a serious British force and left. O'Daly's finished fort was the reason.