It is not until the late eighteenth century—nearly three hundred years after the Spanish invasion—that Puerto Rico began to experience a “steep growth” in population (Curtis and Scarano 2011, 200). This increase largely stemmed from the Bourbon Reforms (particularly between 1779 and 1802), which sought to integrate Puerto Rico’s economy into European markets and improve the island’s capacity for defense after the British successfully took the port of Havana in 1762. Over the course of the early nineteenth century, Crown land incentives offered to European Catholic immigrants through the 1815 Real Cédula de Gracias, the importation of a greater number of enslaved Africans, and a rise in fertility, coupled with relative low mortality rates, further contributed to the increase of residents. Underscoring the process’s coloniality, however, this gain was not only linked to colonial-capitalist interests but also implicated in the emptying of other world regions, including West Africa (Bowman 2002).