| Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 Contributor(s): Wheat, David (Author) |
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ISBN: 1469647656 ISBN-13: 9781469647654 Publisher: Omohundro Institute and University of North C OUR PRICE: $37.95 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: August 2018 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Caribbean & West Indies - General - History | Europe - Spain & Portugal - History | Africa - General |
| Dewey: 966.02 |
| LCCN: 2015041271 |
| Series: Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo |
| Physical Information: 0.87" H x 7.76" W x 9.47" (1.14 lbs) 352 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 16th Century - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Cultural Region - African - Cultural Region - Caribbean & West Indies - Cultural Region - Spanish |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: This work resituates the Spanish Caribbean as an extension of the Luso-African Atlantic world from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, when the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns facilitated a surge in the transatlantic slave trade. After the catastrophic decline of Amerindian populations on the islands, two major African provenance zones, first Upper Guinea and then Angola, contributed forced migrant populations with distinct experiences to the Caribbean. They played a dynamic role in the social formation of early Spanish colonial society in the fortified port cities of Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Panama City and their semirural hinterlands. David Wheat is the first scholar to establish this early phase of the Africanization of the Spanish Caribbean two centuries before the rise of large-scale sugar plantations. With African migrants and their descendants comprising demographic majorities in core areas of Spanish settlement, Luso-Africans, Afro-Iberians, Latinized Africans, and free people of color acted more as colonists or settlers than as plantation slaves. These ethnically mixed and economically diversified societies constituted a region of overlapping Iberian and African worlds, while they made possible Spain's colonization of the Caribbean. |
Contributor Bio(s): Wheat, David: - David Wheat is associate professor of history at Michigan State University. |