Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 by David Wheat (review)

David Wheat’s richly researched book boldly argues that a profound “Africanization” of the Spanish Caribbean took place during the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns between 1580 and 1640. Under this union, a dynamic Luso-African-Atlantic world connected Upper Guinea and Angola with the Spanish Caribbean and circum-Caribbean port cities and their hinterlands. Africans and Afro-Latin Americans became the demographic majorities in the Caribbean and coasts of the mainlands, and they secured Spanish colonization of the region. In the Caribbean context of a catastrophic collapse of the indigenous population and meager Iberian immigration, forced migrants from Africa carried out the work of colonization and repelled northern Europeans’ attacks, defending “towns that were, in many ways, their own” (4). Africans became “surrogate colonists” (14), sustaining “strategic maritime cities” (16) in the Caribbean.

Wheat demonstrates that neither a “sugar-centered framework” (8–9), nor one focused on major indigenous populations and silver mines, can explain Spanish colonization in the Caribbean during the unification period. Neither the large-scale plantation production of sugar for export that later came to dominate the region, nor the dynamics of labor and mining in mainland Mexico and Peru, explain how Africans became the majority and played significant roles in the settlement of the Caribbean. In fact, the focus on late colonial plantations and tribute and mining colonies renders Africans less visible in the region’s historiography. This book shows convincingly how the Spanish Caribbean evolved as Spain established the transatlantic circuit of shipping and commerce and consolidated imperial structures in the strategic port cities of Havana, Cartagena de Indias, Panama City, Nombre de Dios, Portobelo, and Santo Domingo. Each area developed with rural and semirural supply zones that provisioned the cities, produced export commodities, and supplied regional and intracolonial trade networks.

The first half of the book explains the impact on Spanish Caribbean society of the close connection with Upper Guinea and West Central Africa through commerce, politics, and slave trafficking. These dynamics, along with diplomatic relations, Christianization, and cultural exchange, began in the Luso-African Atlantic world a hundred years before 1580 and were especially pronounced in Angola, which became the “predominant African provenance zone for the entire transatlantic slave trade” during this period (17). Prominent among the fascinating historical actors appearing in Wheat’s work to explain these connections are the Iberian and Capeverdean merchants and crew (tangomãos) and the sailors (grumetes), pilots, and guards who were Africans or of African descent. They extended into the Caribbean the “cross-cultural exchanges and social relations forged in coastal western Africa” (17).

The second half of the book explains how African migrants and their descendants participated as settler-colonists and became key protagonists in commerce and farming and as “cultural brokers and guides for newly arrived forced migrants” (252). “[I]n a context of overlapping African and Iberian worlds” (180), free women of color (morenas horras) in the Caribbean paralleled coastal west African women merchants (naharas) as businesswomen, owners of their own property, and wives and partners of Iberian men. In the rural lands, a rural black peasantry—both free and enslaved—emerged to work, manage, and sometimes own farms and ranches oriented toward local seaport populations, fleets, and regional exchange. Like West African translators (chalonas), Africans living in the Caribbean used their knowledge of Iberian languages, Christian religious practices, and Iberian social and cultural ways to facilitate the acculturation of successive waves of new arrivals as interpreters, godparents, and other less formal roles of social control and survival. Wheat’s book reveals how extensively Africans participated in the social, economic, and cultural creation of the Spanish Caribbean long before sugar and plantations became king and propelled a new transformation of the region and its people.

Wheat builds a substantial documentary foundation for his analysis with unpublished sources drawn from archives in Spain, Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico, as...