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

The historiography of Spanish colonization in the early modern Carib- bean has emphasized the importance of two moments in the region’s history. First, it served as the linchpin for the initial Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas in the years after Christopher Columbus’s voyages. After the conquest of the land empires of mainland America in Mexico and Peru, however, the focus of Spanish colonization shifted west of the Caribbean, drawing with it the attention of modern historians. The late eighteenth-century sugar boom and fast-paced development of plantation economies returned the Caribbean to global significance and to modern historians’ interest, as its commodities and plantations became crucial to the development of European capitalism. As this pattern suggests, historical examination of the Caribbean has been driven by the themes of European expansionism and capitalism. And as a collateral effect, the period intervening between the two moments of concentrated attention has been ignored in most English-language studies of the region or dismissed as a moment of economic crisis and stagnation.¹

David Wheat aims to address this lacuna by shifting focus away from early colonial- and sugar-centered narratives of the Caribbean and toward the understudied period of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Wheat’s beautifully written and thoroughly researched Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean not only alters the perception that the Caribbean was an abandoned periphery of the Spanish Empire during the period but also highlights the importance of transimperial dynamics connecting the Spanish and Portuguese territories in the Atlantic basin for the success of Spanish colonialism. Furthermore, the book reveals the diversity of social agents crossing the Atlantic as enslaved and free migrants. Though Spanish political and military efforts were centered in the mainland Americas, Wheat shows that lively regional economies developed in the Caribbean and that, in the absence of Spanish immigrants, Afro-Caribbean peoples became the empire’s “surrogate colonists” (255), for Africans and their descendants provided the labor force and defensive resources that made possible the colonization of the Spanish Caribbean.

With the decline of the mining, sugar, and pearl-fishing industries that characterized the early Spanish Caribbean, localized industries of farming, ranching, and food production gained centrality as economic activities. But the region remained connected to larger global economic forces, serving as a point of passage for a large number of new Spanish settlers and as a hub within slave trade routes headed for destinations in Peru and Mexico. Though it lacked the mining and plantation economies most associated with enslaved labor in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a significant percentage of the almost half million enslaved Africans brought to the Americas during this period via Caribbean routes stayed in the region. Wheat demonstrates that Africans and their descendants soon became vital to urban and rural societies. By the last decades of the sixteenth century, Spanish settlements throughout the region were dependent on the Afro-Caribbean population to perform the labor of ordinary peasants and townspeople. They labored as ranchers, agricultural workers, stevedores, domestic servants, artisans, and musicians; they were even armed for employment as guardsmen and enjoyed relative autonomy to work on boats as fishermen. By the turn of the 1600s, Africans and their descendants comprised roughly two-thirds of the population in cities such as Havana, while in Española and Cartagena they represented more than 70 percent of the populace. Under such conditions, Spanish Caribbean colonies relied on a majority African-descended population to perform tasks that in Spain or other colonial settings were done by Spaniards or indigenous peoples. As Wheat puts it, the Afro-Caribbean population became the de facto “colonists, or settlers” (14) of the empire, inviting the reader to reconsider traditional ideas about the relationship between racial categories and the juridical status of the migrants usually associated with Iberian immigrants in the...