Will I love Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640?

A multiple award-winning book that has given new wings to the field of early Caribbean history. Wheat’s insightful book forces to reckon with the extraordinarily close links between the Spanish Caribbean and the African slave trade in which Portuguese merchants played a crucial role. Even though local and peninsular Spaniards ruled, Afrodescendant men and women did most of the labor, cultivated most of the land, defended the colonies against other European powers, and constituted an overwhelming majority of the population, both enslaved and free. The early Spanish colonization of the region started a pattern of profound African cultural influence in… show more.

David Wheat integrates Africa and Africans into the history of the Spanish Caribbean. Before I read this book, I knew that the Spanish relied more on native laborers than on Africans initially, and that their policies limited migration from Spain to Castilians of Roman Catholic heritage. Yet Wheat reveals how diverse and complex the early Spanish islands became, with Spanish from other regions not to mention Portuguese, Africans, and conversos (Catholics of Jewish heritage) intermixed with the approved migrants and the long-time indigenous residents.