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Reviewed by:
  • Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 by David Wheat
  • Gérard Chouin
Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 David Wheat Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 2016 xix + 285 pp., $29.95 (paper), $19.99 (ebook)

This provocative volume thoughtfully resituates the late sixteenth-to mid-seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean world as part of the expanding Luso-African black Atlantic. African agency is the operative concept driving the argument that this world received as many influences from Atlantic Africa as it did "from early modern Spain" (4). Because they formed a demographic majority and provided the bulk of the labor that established and sustained Spanish imperial ambitions, sub-Saharan Africans, David Wheat tells us, became de facto colonists of the Spanish Caribbean.

The introduction deserves a careful reading to clearly apprehend Wheat's agenda: to complicate the notion of European colonization of the Americas by reinstating the Caribbean region in the historiography of Spanish America as a dynamic periphery and by addressing the hitherto invisibility of Africans in historical narratives before the second half of the seventeenth century; and to challenge assumptions about obligatory connections between slavery and sugar exploitation in the Caribbean and show that in the period under study, Africans were employed in a very broad range of occupations—which, although primarily subservient in nature, were essential and even organically interwoven with the process of colonization. Africans were not only enslaved, freed, or free workers; they were also settlers. From here, the book is divided into two parts of three chapters each. The first part explores the African and Luso-African antecedents to the American stage of the story. The second part provides evidence for the transformation of Africans in the Spanish Caribbean from forced migrants to settlers. The book also includes two maps and nineteen tables collating quantitative data derived from Wheat's analysis of a corpus of very rich and largely unexplored archival material from Seville, Bogotá, and Havana.

Questions relative to the identity of enslaved Africans brought from Upper Guinea and western Central Africa form a third of the book. Contrary to later European sources that rarely recorded the specific political/linguistic area of origin and the self-defined identities of slaves, Spanish records from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century—including slave ship rosters, censuses, and slave bills of sale—provide important evidence about the retention and use of these identities in the Caribbean world. This is particularly useful not only for rethinking the human and multiscalar political landscapes of western Africa in all their dynamic complexity, but also for attempting a reconstruction of the multiple processes that led to the enslavement of representatives of the different populations. A study of a detailed census of resettled, ex-Maroon communities illustrates how Upper Guineans in the Americas chose to regroup when they had the freedom to do so. Patterns of "national" identity appear among male members and among alliances between different identities that probably mirrored dynamics that had [End Page 170] unfolded in Africa. Very striking is the fact that the distribution of women across Maroon groups did not follow the same patterns, suggesting the reproduction of African-based matrimonial strategies in which the circulation of women was a means to extend cooperation to groups located beyond usual, tested, and sociopolitically stable alliances.

From the last decade of the sixteenth century to the 1640s, many forced migrants from Central Africa entered into the Spanish Caribbean slave labor market (the Angola wave). Wheat focuses on three issues: the procurement of these slaves via the purposeful extension by the colonial Angolan authorities of regional warfare and networks of African communities paying tributes to their Portuguese overlord in slaves; the direct involvement of the Luanda upper elite, short-term and long-term residents alike, including government officials, ecclesiastics, military officers, and merchants in the slave trade with the Caribbean and its mechanisms; and the demographic profile of enslaved Africans from Angola. The latter question is particularly interesting, as the large number of children and women from Angola attested from surviving records contrasts with the overwhelmingly adult male slaves previously arriving...

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