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The Spanish Caribbean in the Colonial Period

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. From the late 15th to the late 19th centuries, Spain controlled extensive territories in and around the Caribbean Sea, including the Greater Antilles, the mainland and islands along the Caribbean’s southern littoral, and the entire Gulf of Mexico. However, unlike the British West Indies, the French Caribbean, or the Dutch Antilles, Spain’s circum-Caribbean colonies have rarely been analyzed as a geographical unit. Jamaica, Trinidad, Saint-Domingue, Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire are generally thought of as English, French, and Dutch colonies, though each was previously colonized by Spain for a century or longer. Although the modern nations of Colombia and Venezuela may be justifiably viewed as Andean, each also contains vast stretches of low-lying, coastal areas that were historically and culturally very much part of the Caribbean. Many historians make a similar argument for former Spanish territories along the Gulf Coast regions of present-day Mexico and the United States. If subsequent European claims in the region and modern national boundaries make the Spanish Caribbean’s geographical expanse somewhat difficult to discern, its chronological parameters are quite clear. Spain’s American empire began and ended in the Caribbean, with the settlement of Española during the 1490s, and the final loss of Cuba and Puerto Rico, four centuries later, in 1898. Relatively few monographs are devoted to the first 250 years of colonial Spanish Caribbean history; while older studies of this period describe Crown policy, imperial rivalries, and the evolution of colonial institutions, recent works emphasize maritime economies and social formations within the region’s major port cities. The vast majority of scholarship on the colonial Spanish Caribbean focuses on the late 18th and 19th centuries, addressing core themes such as the growth of the sugar plantation complex, slave resistance, and abolition, primarily in Cuba. Other studies of the late colonial period examine the end of Spanish colonial rule, the growing influence of the United States, and the rise of national identities, particularly in relation to ideologies of race.
  4.  
  5. General Overviews
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  7. There is no book-length monograph devoted to the history of the Spanish Caribbean during the entire colonial period. A number of studies of present-day nations, or regions within present-day nations, focus on the centuries prior to independence (e.g., del Castillo Mathieu 1981). Scarano 2006 offers a survey of scholarship on 19th-century Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Marrero 1975–1992 provides a unique overview of colonial Cuban history spanning no less than fifteen volumes. The colonial Spanish Caribbean is also well represented in a multivolume collection of scholarly essays addressing the region from the pre-Hispanic era to the 20th century (General History of the Caribbean), and in two textbooks of similar chronological and geographical scope (Knight 2012, Moya Pons 2007).
  8.  
  9. del Castillo Mathieu, Nicolás. La llave de las Indias. Bogotá, Colombia: Ediciones El Tiempo, 1981.
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  11. A classic synthesis of the colonial history of Cartagena de Indias from 1533 to 1810. Emphasizes the port city’s role as a Caribbean hub for maritime transportation and commerce, with special attention to the transatlantic slave trade. Based on published primary and secondary sources.
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  13. General History of the Caribbean. 6 vols. London Macmillan Caribbean, 1997–2012.
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  15. A number of essays in this collection specifically address the colonial Spanish Caribbean. Includes contributions by Alfredo Castillero-Calvo, Franklin W. Knight, Francisco Moscoso, Frank Moya Pons, Jalil Sued-Badillo, and Enriqueta Vila Vilar. Volumes 1–4 focus on autochthonous societies, the 16th century, slave societies, and the 19th century, respectively.
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  17. Knight, Franklin W. The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism. 3d ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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  19. A holistic survey of Caribbean history. First published in 1978. Spanish Caribbean colonies play an important part within the broader narrative, and are well represented in six chapters devoted to the colonial period. Each chapter provides a list of suggested readings, rather than footnotes. Accessible for undergraduates and general audiences.
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  21. Marrero, Leví. Cuba: Economía y sociedad. 15 vols. Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1975–1992.
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  23. This monumental historical geography provides a comprehensive overview of colonial Cuban history. Also valuable as a guide to archival sources. Volumes 1–5 focus on the 16th and 17th centuries. Volumes 6–8 cover the years 1701–1763, and the remaining volumes address the period from 1763 to 1868.
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  25. Moya Pons, Frank. History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2007.
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  27. A synthetical survey of Caribbean history emphasizing the formative role played by sugar plantations up through the early 20th century. Discusses all the major European powers in the Caribbean, but the Spanish Caribbean is foregrounded throughout. Includes a bibliographical guide for each chapter in lieu of footnotes; appropriate for undergraduates.
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  29. Scarano, Francisco A. “Slavery, Race, and Power: A Half-Century of Spanish Caribbean Scholarship.” In Beyond Fragmentation: Perspectives on Caribbean History. Edited by Juanita De Barros, Audra Diptee, and David V. Trotman, 35–67. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2006.
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  31. A concise overview of influential scholarly works that laid the foundations for historical interpretations of 19th-century Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, with emphasis on slavery and race.
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  33. Edited Collections
  34.  
  35. The only collection of scholarly essays devoted to the Spanish Caribbean prior to the late colonial period focuses on Spain’s imperial policies (Acosta Rodríguez and Marchena Fernández 1983). Other edited volumes are extensions of modern national histories, addressing the colonial pasts of the Dominican Republic (Vega 2007) and Caribbean Colombia (Abello Vives 2006). Scholarship on Spanish Caribbean ports, particularly during the 18th and 19th centuries, may also be found in collections that address the region more broadly (Brown 2007, Elías Caro and Vidal Ortega 2010, Grafenstein Gareis 2006, Knight and Liss 1991). Another volume focuses on the Spanish Caribbean during the 19th and 20th centuries, with chapters on Cuba and Puerto Rico at the end of the colonial era (Moreno Fraginals, et al. 1985).
  36.  
  37. Abello Vives, Alberto, ed. Un Caribe sin plantación. San Andrés: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2006.
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  39. A collection of seven concise essays explaining why sugarcane monoculture failed to develop in Caribbean Colombia during the 18th century. Explicitly critiques historical models that equate the Caribbean past with large-scale sugar production and plantation slavery.
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  41. Acosta Rodríguez, Antonio, and Juan Marchena Fernández, eds. La influencia de España en el Caribe, la Florida y la Luisiana, 1500–1800. Madrid: Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1983.
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  43. In addition to several studies of Spanish Caribbean defenses, includes an overview of slave trafficking in the Spanish Americas, and a notable essay by John J. Tepaske evaluating Spanish economic policy and geopolitical strategy in the region during the 17th and 18th centuries.
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  45. Brown, Richmond F., ed. Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007.
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  47. Introduction, afterword, and several chapters address the Spanish Floridas, Spanish Louisiana, and Nuevo Santander. Topics covered include interactions among Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians; free women of color; ranching; tobacco production; and political loyalties.
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  49. Elías Caro, Jorge Enrique, and Antonino Vidal Ortega, eds. Ciudades portuarias en la Gran Cuenca del Caribe: Visión histórica. Barranquilla, Colombia: Ediciones Uninorte, 2010.
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  51. Seventeen essays discussing commerce, demography, urban growth, and other topics associated with the development of Spanish Caribbean port cities. Provides strong coverage of Veracruz, Havana, and Caribbean ports in present-day Colombia, especially during the late 18th and 19th centuries.
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  53. Grafenstein Gareis, Johanna von, ed. El Golfo-Caribe y sus puertos. 2 vols. Mexico City: Instituto Mora, 2006.
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  55. Roughly half of this collection’s twenty-five essays are historical studies of colonial Spanish Caribbean seaports. Includes chapters on Veracruz, the Isla de Carmen, Cartagena, Maracaibo, and various ports in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Most focus on the late 18th and 19th centuries.
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  57. Knight, Franklin W., and Peggy K. Liss, eds. Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.
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  59. Includes essays on Havana, Cartagena, and Veracruz during the 18th and early 19th centuries.
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  61. Moreno Fraginals, Manuel, Frank Moya Pons, and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century. Based on papers presented at the Conference on Problems of Transition from Slavery to Free Labor in the Caribbean, held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 11–13 June 1981. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
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  63. An important collection addressing the plantation economies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with contributions by a number of prominent scholars. The preface lists several factors that set the Spanish Caribbean apart from French and English colonies in the region.
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  65. Vega, Bernardo, ed. Dominican Cultures: The Making of a Caribbean Society. Translated by Christine Ayorinde. Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener, 2007.
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  67. Essays originally published in Spanish in 1981. Initial chapters evoke Amerindian, Iberian, and African influences in the formations of the modern Dominican Republic; a fourth chapter describes colonial-era ranching and agriculture. Easily accessible for undergraduates.
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  69. Journals
  70.  
  71. Though no scholarly journal focuses exclusively on the Spanish Caribbean, several historical and multidisciplinary publications regularly feature articles addressing the region’s colonial past. Most are devoted to scholarship on either the Caribbean (Caribbean Studies, Journal of Caribbean History) or Latin America (The Americas, Anuario de Estudios Americanos, Colonial Latin American Historical Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, Revista de Indias). In addition to area studies journals, the thematically focused journal Slavery and Abolition often includes articles on the colonial Spanish Caribbean.
  72.  
  73. The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History.
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  75. A journal of Latin American history published by the Academy of American Franciscan History. Includes very good coverage of the colonial period, with occasional articles on the colonial Spanish Caribbean.
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  77. Anuario de Estudios Americanos.
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  79. Published by the Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos (Seville, Spain). Devoted to studies of Latin America, including the Spanish Caribbean. Interdisciplinary with a historical focus; good coverage of the colonial era. Website provides open access to all volumes published since 1994.
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  81. Caribbean Studies.
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  83. Interdisciplinary journal published by the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Regularly features articles on modern and colonial Spanish Caribbean history.
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  85. Colonial Latin American Historical Review.
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  87. Published by the University of New Mexico’s Spanish Colonial Research Center. Limited library circulation and a rudimentary website make these articles difficult to access, but the colonial Spanish Caribbean is very well represented. Includes special issues on Cuba in 2001 and 2006.
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  89. Hispanic American Historical Review.
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  91. Published by Duke University Press. A leading journal of modern and colonial Latin American history since 1919. Many significant articles on the colonial Spanish Caribbean have appeared here, though only rarely since the late 1990s. Regularly features excellent book reviews.
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  93. Journal of Caribbean History.
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  95. Published by the Departments of History, University of the West Indies. Largely focuses on the English-speaking Caribbean, with occasional articles on the colonial Spanish Caribbean.
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  97. Revista de Indias.
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  99. Published by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid). Features articles on the history of colonial and modern Latin America, especially the Spanish Americas, including the Caribbean. Journal website provides free access to volumes published since 1996.
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  101. Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies.
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  103. Published by Taylor & Francis. Global in scope. Articles often address slavery, slave trafficking, race relations, resistance, and abolition in Caribbean contexts, including the colonial Spanish Caribbean.
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  105. Primary Sources
  106.  
  107. Primary sources for the Spanish Caribbean during the colonial period are abundant and diverse. Although the preservation of extant archival materials remains a critically important issue, and gaining access to repositories in Spain and around the circum-Caribbean can be logistically and financially challenging, a substantial body of primary sources is available in print and digital formats. Several important digital collections currently provide online access to materials located in Spanish, Colombian, and Cuban archives. A number of published document collections contain transcriptions of colonial-era primary sources as well. The Spanish Caribbean’s colonial past is also illuminated in great detail in published travel accounts, reports, and treatises, including several that are available in English translation.
  108.  
  109. Digital Collections
  110.  
  111. In the past decade, a handful of archives and libraries have begun to provide direct online access to primary sources generated in the colonial Spanish Caribbean. Though only a fraction of its archives’ holdings are presently digitized, the Portal de Archivos Española site operated by Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport is the most important, providing high-quality digital images of a vast range of documents from the Archive of the Indies and other major Spanish archives. Other digital collections are specifically designed to provide ground-level information on Africans and people of African descent, slavery, and plantation societies; these collections include sources that typically are not found in metropolitan archives, such as sacramental records, notarial records, and criminal records (Endangered Archives Programme, Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies, Fondo Negros y Esclavos).
  112.  
  113. Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies. Vanderbilt University.
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  115. Digital collection maintained by Vanderbilt University’s Jean and Alexander Heard Library. Consists of sacramental and notarial records digitized in Cuba, Colombia, and Brazil. Contains approximately 300,000 documents, dating from the late 16th century to the 19th century.
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  117. Endangered Archives Programme. British Library.
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  119. A digital collection of at-risk archival materials from around the world. Includes an excellent collection of primary sources digitized in provincial archives in Matanzas, Cuba. Other recently funded projects include the digital preservation of materials in the Colombian departments of the Chocó and La Guajira.
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  121. Fondo Negros y Esclavos. Archivo General de la Nación (Colombia).
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  123. A digital collection of colonial-era documents housed in Colombia’s National Archive. Consists of more than 150,000 images. Includes legal disputes, criminal records, wills, reports, and other sources with information on free and enslaved Africans and people of African descent in the New Kingdom of Granada, Venezuela, and Panamá.
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  125. Portal de Archivos Española. Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (Spain).
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  127. Provides access to digital collections in multiple Spanish archives with colonial-era Caribbean holdings, including the Archive of Simancas, the Archivo Histórico Nacional, and most importantly the Archivo General de Indias. In addition to selected, digitized archival materials, the site provides helpful inventories of each archive.
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  129. Printed Document Collections
  130.  
  131. Rather than an exhaustive list of primary sources for colonial Spanish Caribbean history available in print, the works below represent diverse types of published archival materials. A number of extremely useful collections contain full or partial transcriptions of documents housed in the Archive of the Indies in Seville (Alegría 2009, Jopling 1994, Martínez Reyes 1986). Other valuable collections feature documents drawn from important national and regional archives within the Caribbean, including abstracts of notarial records (Rojas 1947–1957) and transcriptions of town council records (Briceño Iragorry 1943–1982). Although each of these collections is regional in focus, others address specific themes that encompass multiple geographical locations, for example Columbus’s voyages to the Caribbean (Gil and Varela 1984).
  132.  
  133. Alegría, Ricardo E., ed. Documentos históricos de Puerto Rico (1493–1599). 5 vols. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, 2009.
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  135. Transcriptions of approximately seven hundred documents held in the Archive of the Indies. Primarily includes royal decrees and official correspondence from 16th-century Puerto Rico addressing topics such as warfare with hostile Caribs, corsairs, defenses, sugar cultivation, the slave trade, and contraband. Indices are helpful, though the print quality is poor.
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  137. Briceño Iragorry, Mario, ed. Actas del Cabildo de Caracas. 13 vols. Caracas, Venezuela: Editorial Elite, 1943–1982.
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  139. Transcriptions of Caracas city council legislation issued between 1573 and 1672, including land grants, municipal regulations, and proclamations regarding local events, festivals, and public disturbances.
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  141. Gil, Juan, and Consuelo Varela, eds. Cartas de particulares a Colón y relaciones coetáneas. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1984.
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  143. Annotated transcriptions of several dozen letters and reports relating to each of Columbus’s voyages to the Caribbean, and to relevant contemporary events. Drawn from various archives. Includes a number of lesser-known sources for the period.
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  145. Jopling, Carol F., ed. Indios y negros en Panamá en los siglos XVI y XVII: Selecciones de los documentos del Archivo General de Indias. South Woodstock, VT: Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies, 1994.
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  147. Consists of more than three hundred transcribed documents, or excerpts of documents, referring to Indians and blacks in Panama during the 16th and 17th centuries. Includes reports with detailed rosters of Amerindians and free people of color. Excellent index.
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  149. Martínez Reyes, Gabriel. Cartas de los obispos de Cartagena de Indias durante el período hispánico, 1534–1820. Medellín, Colombia: Editorial Zuluaga, 1986.
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  151. Transcribed correspondence of several dozen bishops and important ecclesiastical figures who served the church in Cartagena de Indias. Includes selected letters and reports drawn from the Archive of the Indies, interspersed with brief biographies and related materials. Covers the entire colonial period.
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  153. Rojas, María Teresa de, ed. Índice y Extractos del Archivo de Protocolos de la Habana, 1578–1588. 3 vols. Havana, Cuba: Ediciones C. R., 1947–1957.
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  155. Abstracts and partial transcriptions of notarial records drawn up in late-16th-century Havana. Contains references to numerous individuals described by legal status, race, occupation, and familial relationships. Documents include last wills, apprenticeship contracts, and transactions involving slaves, land, livestock, boats, buildings, and other properties. Each volume includes a detailed index.
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  157. Published Reports, Treatises, Accounts
  158.  
  159. Official reports, ecclesiastical treatises, and travel accounts remain among the best-known and most accessible published primary sources for colonial Spanish Caribbean history. Some of the writings that fit within this broad category are most notable for their political impact; others’ value lies in their detailed observations of daily life in Spanish Caribbean societies. In addition to displaying one or both of these characteristics, the five works listed below stand out for their sympathetic portrayals of Amerindians (Las Casas 2003), enslaved Africans and people of African descent (Sandoval 2008, Humboldt 2011, Splendiani and Aristizábal Giraldo 2002), and Chinese indentured workers (Cuba Commission Report).
  160.  
  161. The Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba; The Original English-Language Text of 1876. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
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  163. Report documenting the extremely difficult living conditions of thousands of Chinese contract workers in Cuba in 1874. Compiles evidence gleaned from eighty-five written petitions and more than one thousand oral testimonies provided by indentured Chinese. Includes extensive, direct quotations. Introduction by Denise Helly. Originally published in 1876.
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  165. Humboldt, Alexander von. Political Essay on the Island of Cuba: A Critical Edition. Edited by Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette. Translated by J. Bradford Anderson, Vera M. Kutzinski, and Anja Becker. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
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  167. Remarkable essay written in the 1820s by the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, following visits to Cuba in 1801 and 1804. Contains extensive discussion of Cuban agriculture, commerce, and racial demographics, with strong condemnations of slavery. Cuba, and the Caribbean more broadly, is portrayed in comparative, hemispheric perspective. First published in 1856. Includes an introduction by the editors and annotations by Tobias Kraft, Anja Becker, and Giorleny D. Altamirano Rayo.
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  169. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies, with Related Texts. Edited by Franklin W. Knight. Translated by Andrew Hurley. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003.
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  171. A famous and highly influential condemnation of Spanish brutality toward Amerindians. Written by the Dominican friar and former encomendero Bartolomé de las Casas in the early 1540s. Offers rough estimates of native populations throughout the Americas before and after Spanish colonization, with vivid descriptions of forced labor, rape, torture, and murder. Includes an introduction by Franklin W. Knight.
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  173. Sandoval, Alonso de. Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De instaurada Aethiopum salute. Edited and translated by Nicole von Germeten. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2008.
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  175. Translated excerpts from a 1627 treatise by the Jesuit missionary Alonso de Sandoval, advocate of the good treatment and evangelization of enslaved Africans. Contains ample information on Africans, slave trafficking, and slavery in early 17th-century Cartagena de Indias. Excellent for undergraduate audiences; researchers may prefer one of the unabridged Spanish-language editions.
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  177. Splendiani, Anna María, and Túlio Aristizábal Giraldo. Proceso de beatificación y canonización de San Pedro Claver, edición de 1696. Bogotá, Colombia: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2002.
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  179. A collection of testimonies regarding the life of Jesuit missionary Pedro Claver, who died in Cartagena de Indias in 1654. Testimonies provided by 154 witnesses of all socioeconomic backgrounds, including free people of color and African interpreters. A unique glimpse of daily life in 17th-century Cartagena.
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  181. Early Colonization
  182.  
  183. In the decades following Columbus’s 1492–1493 voyage, Spanish colonists established settlements throughout the Caribbean, with disastrous consequences for the region’s Amerindian peoples. As the site of the first Spanish American towns and transplanted Iberian institutions, Española looms large in narratives depicting the birth of a new colonial order based on discovery, exchange, destruction, and catastrophic depopulation. Earlier studies portray Spanish colonization as a series of struggles between Spanish elites over how the new colonies would be governed, and who would benefit. Recent advances in historical archaeology and ethnohistory instead analyze Spanish colonization in relation to local Amerindian groups, and explore Amerindian influences on the formations of Spanish Caribbean society.
  184.  
  185. Spanish Expansion and Early Colonial Society
  186.  
  187. The major studies of early Spanish efforts to colonize the Caribbean were first written during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s (Floyd 1973, Morales Padrón 2003, Moya Pons 1987, Sauer 1966). Although not unsympathetic to the region’s indigenous populations, these works generally privilege the viewpoints of explorers, metropolitan authorities, and colonial officials. Recent advances in historical archaeology provide additional evidence with important ramifications for the social and cultural history of the early Spanish Caribbean (Deagan and Cruxent 2002). The discovery of further archival materials likewise sheds new light on Española’s political and social history during the 1490s (Varela 2006).
  188.  
  189. Deagan, Kathleen A., and José María Cruxent. Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002.
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  191. A pathbreaking study of La Isabela, the first European colony in the Americas, on the island of Española. Offers a concise historical narrative of the settlement’s foundation and rapid abandonment, and explores material culture and daily life in La Isabela based on extensive archaeological research.
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  193. Floyd, Troy S. The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean, 1492–1526. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973.
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  195. A study of disunity characterizing early Spanish efforts to colonize the Caribbean. Includes extensive discussion of major political figures and factions, with particular attention to Columbus’s son Diego, governor and later viceroy of Española.
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  197. Morales Padrón, Francisco. Spanish Jamaica. Translated by Patrick E. Bryan. Kingston, Jamaica, and Miami, FL: Ian Randle, 2003.
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  199. The only book-length history of Spanish Jamaica. Contains extensive biographical information on the island’s successive governmental and ecclesiastical authorities, with discussion of Columbus’s voyages to Jamaica and its cession to his heirs in 1536. Includes eleven documentary appendices. Translated in collaboration with Michael J. Gronow and Felix Oviedo Moral. Originally published in 1952 as Jamaica Española.
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  201. Moya Pons, Frank. Después de Colón: Trabajo, sociedad y política en la economía del oro. Madrid: Alianza America, 1987.
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  203. A concise study of political rivalries and competing strategies for governance in early colonial Española, with significant discussion of indigenous labor and demography. Draws on a range of published but rarely utilized primary sources. Originally published in 1971 as La Española en el siglo XVI, 1493–1520.
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  205. Sauer, Carl O. The Early Spanish Main. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966.
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  207. Despite its focus on explorers and conquistadors, this book remains valuable for its depiction of the geographical advance of Spanish colonization in the Caribbean from 1492 to 1520. Main topics addressed include Columbus’s voyages, the colonization of Española, and Spanish expansion throughout the region, especially along the Caribbean’s southern littoral.
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  209. Varela, Consuelo. La caída de Cristóbal Colón: El juicio de Bobadilla. Edited by Isabel Aguirre. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2006.
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  211. Examines Columbus’s governance of Española, with attention to political conflict, and the various religious and judicial policies he enacted. Focuses on the extensive investigation of Columbus’s activities conducted by the royally appointed official Francisco de Bobadilla. Includes editor’s detailed transcription of Bobadilla’s report, which historians long assumed had been lost.
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  213. Amerindian-Spanish Interactions
  214.  
  215. In addition to describing the societies of the pre-Hispanic Caribbean up through the 1490s (Reid 2009, Wilson 1990) and their collapse during the initial decades of Spanish colonization (Livi-Bacci 2003), scholarship on the early Spanish Caribbean seeks to discern patterns in Amerindian-Spanish interaction that would be replicated later elsewhere in the Americas. Prominent studies of this period focus on indigenous slavery, encomienda labor, and native resistance to Spanish rule (Jiménez Graziani 1986, Mira Caballos 1997). Recent, nuanced works also examine Taíno roles within Spanish Caribbean society (Altman 2007, Guitar 1998).
  216.  
  217. Altman, Ida. “The Revolt of Enriquillo and the Historiography of Early Spanish America.” The Americas 63.4 (April 2007): 587–614.
  218. DOI: 10.1353/tam.2007.0052Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  219. Adroitly reframes the 1519–1533 insurrection led by the Española cacique Enriquillo, identifying the uprising as a precursor for Spanish policy toward intractable maroon groups throughout the Americas. Provides a concise overview of Enriquillo’s background, the revolt, his diverse allies, and negotiations for peace.
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  221. Guitar, Lynne A. “Willing It So: Intimate Glimpses of Encomienda Life in Early-Sixteenth-Century Hispaniola.” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 7.3 (Summer 1998): 245–263.
  222. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  223. A study of fluid relationships, marriage, and family ties linking Taínos to Spanish encomenderos in Española and Puerto Rico. Demonstrates that Taíno-Spanish interactions were far more complex than simply oppression and victimization. Based on analysis of wills and legal suits.
  224. Find this resource:
  225. Jiménez Graziani, Morella A. La esclavitud indígena en Venezuela (siglo XVI). Caracas, Venezuela: Academica Nacional de la Historia, 1986.
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  227. A solid overview of colonization’s impact on diverse Amerindian societies in and around the province of Venezuela. Includes discussion of slave raids and pearling expeditions launched from Española and Puerto Rico, and thorough analysis of royal legislation regulating the enslavement of indigenous peoples.
  228. Find this resource:
  229. Livi-Bacci, Massimo. “Return to Hispaniola: Reassessing a Demographic Catastrophe.” Hispanic American Historical Review 83.1 (2003): 3–51.
  230. DOI: 10.1215/00182168-83-1-3Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  231. Reassesses Española’s indigenous population at the time of contact, suggesting a likely figure of 200,000 to 300,000 people. Rather than attributing demographic decline to Spanish cruelty or Old World disease, argues that mining, agricultural labor, concubinage, and other demands imposed by colonists were sufficient to drastically destabilize Taíno society.
  232. Find this resource:
  233. Mira Caballos, Esteban. El indio antillano: Repartimiento, encomienda, y esclavitud (1492–1542). Seville, Spain: Muñoz Moya Editor, 1997.
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  235. An extensively researched study of coerced Amerindian labor in the early colonial Spanish Caribbean. Chapters describe encomiendas in Española, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Also addresses Caribbean demography, the enslavement of hostile native groups, and legislation designed to regulate indigenous slavery. Includes excellent appendices.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. Reid, Basil A. Myths and Realities of Caribbean History. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.
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  239. A brief introduction to Caribbean historical archaeology. Uses archaeological evidence to correct several long-standing assumptions about Caribbean history before and during the European contact era. Easily accessible for undergraduate students and nonspecialists.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Wilson, Samuel M. Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990.
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  243. An anthropological and historical study of Taíno society in Española during the 1490s, with emphasis on Taíno social hierarchies and political structures. Draws on an impressive array of archaeological studies to interpret ethnohistorical data found in contemporary documentary sources.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
  246.  
  247. For some scholars, the history of the Spanish Caribbean during the 16th and 17th centuries is one of imperial rivalry, with non-Hispanic corsairs and smugglers pitted against Spain’s imperial defenses. Rather than depicting colonial Spanish Caribbean history as an extension of European politics and policies, a number of studies analyze the economic development of specific ports or colonies, with close attention to regional trade, transatlantic maritime networks, and locally produced export commodities. Others focus on Spanish Caribbean port cities’ inhabitants, exploring aspects of daily life, demographic issues, and the extent of social stratification, particularly in terms of race and status.
  248.  
  249. Imperial Rivalries and Defense
  250.  
  251. Several studies written in the 1970s and 1980s depict the 16th- and 17th-century Spanish Caribbean as a major theater of military and economic competition between rival European empires. Two pioneering works that address the Spanish Caribbean region as a whole focus on either non-Hispanic incursions (Andrews 1978) or Spanish Caribbean defenses (Hoffman 1980). These themes are also explored in the biography of one major figure in Spain’s defense of the Caribbean (Lyon 1974), and in a detailed study of defensive strategies implemented on the island of Cuba (Castillo Meléndez 1986).
  252.  
  253. Andrews, Kenneth R. The Spanish Caribbean: Trade and Plunder, 1530–1630. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1978.
  254. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  255. A classic maritime history of non-Hispanic commerce in the colonial Spanish Caribbean. Opens with useful overviews of Spanish Caribbean society, trade networks, and defenses. Main focus lies on the activities of English, French, and Dutch interlopers and entrepreneurs, and Spanish responses to their continued presence in the region.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Castillo Meléndez, Francisco. La defensa de la isla de Cuba en la segunda mitad del siglo XVII. Seville, Spain: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1986.
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  259. Archivally based study with extensive analysis of Cuba’s fortifications, infantry, and militia units during the late 17th century. Contains interesting discussion of corsairs based on the island.
  260. Find this resource:
  261. Hoffman, Paul. The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Spanish Caribbean, 1535–1585: Precedent, Patrimonialism, and Royal Parsimony. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
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  263. Based on meticulous archival research, argues that Spanish Caribbean defenses were largely successful in fending off French and English incursions up to the mid-1580s. Provides detailed analysis of the costs and effectiveness of Caribbean fortifications, convoys, artillery, garrisons, militias, and galley squadrons.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Lyon, Eugene. The Enterprise of Florida: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Spanish Conquest of 1565–1568. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1974.
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  267. Biography of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, an Asturian of minor nobility who personally implemented Spain’s defensive strategies in the mid-16th-century Caribbean. Focuses on Menéndez’s expedition to Florida: the founding of St. Augustine, the massacre of French colonists at nearby Fort Caroline, and diplomatic relations with Amerindian societies.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Maritime Economies and Export Commodities
  270.  
  271. Some of the strongest scholarship on the 16th- and 17th-century Spanish Caribbean analyzes economic production, transatlantic commerce, and regional exchange. This emphasis on dynamic Spanish Caribbean economies represents a major challenge to the assumption that the region was an isolated backwater for most of the colonial period. Such scholarship tends to focus on specific industries or export commodities, such as gold (Sued Badillo 2001), pearls (Otte 1977), hides (Gil-Bermejo García 1983), and, most commonly, sugar (la Fuente, et al. 2008; Gelpí Baíz 2000; Rodríguez Morel 2004). By tracking imports and exports, some of these works also provide important overviews of maritime traffic to and from the colony in question. Though fewer in number, studies of ports such as Cartagena and La Guaira likewise analyze patterns in maritime commerce, indicating that the Caribbean’s southern littoral played a crucial role in regional and transatlantic trade (Arcila Farias 1986, Vidal Ortega 2002).
  272.  
  273. Arcila Farias, Eduardo, dir. Hacienda y comercio de Venezuela en el siglo XVII: 1601–1650. Serie Proyecto Hacienda Publica Colonial Venezuela 5. Caracas, Venezuela: Banco Central de Venezuela, 1986.
  274. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  275. Quantitative analysis of Venezuela’s royal treasury records for the first half of the 17th century. Discusses various Venezuelan exports, most notably cacao, tobacco, wheat flour, and hides, at length. Also positions Caracas within regional and transatlantic maritime networks. Appendix lists more than one thousand voyages entering or departing Venezuelan ports.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Gelpí Baíz, Elsa. Siglo en Blanco: Estudio de la economía azucarera en Puerto Rico, siglo XVI. San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2000.
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  279. Ostensibly focuses on sugar’s central role in 16th-century Puerto Rico, but actually addresses multiple aspects of the island’s economy and social order, including demography, land use, export crops and commodities, and maritime traffic. Two hundred pages of appendices summarize documentary sources consulted.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Gil-Bermejo García, Juana. La Española: Anotaciones históricas (1600–1650). Seville, Spain: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1983.
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  283. Classic survey of Española’s economy during the first half of the 17th century. Includes thorough discussion of ranching, agriculture, and the island’s major exports at the time: hides, ginger, sugar, tobacco, and, to a lesser extent, cacao.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. la Fuente, Alejandro de, César García del Pino, and Bernardo Iglesias Delgado. Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
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  287. Arguing that Spain’s Indies fleets fueled Havana’s growth in the late 16th century, this study examines the city’s imports and exports, service economy, and defenses, with emphasis on transatlantic connections. Also describes local elites’ efforts to divert resources toward sugar cultivation. Employs a wide range of archival sources, especially notarial records.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Otte, Enrique. Las perlas del Caribe: Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua. Caracas, Venezuela: Fundación John Boulton, 1977.
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  291. An economic and political history of the short-lived pearling colony of Cubagua, its political elites, and its position within the early 16th-century pearling industry. Also addresses Cubagua’s links to Española, La Margarita, and Venezuela. Extensively researched, with more than 150 pages of documentary appendices.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Rodríguez Morel, Genaro. “The Sugar Economy of Española in the Sixteenth Century.” In Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680. Edited by Stuart B. Schwartz, 85–114. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
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  295. Concise overview of the rise and fall of sugar cultivation as the primary engine of Española’s economic growth from the 1510s through the 1560s. Analyzes loans, tax breaks, and various other forms of royal support for the sugar industry, and their implications for political rivalries on the island.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Sued Badillo, Jalil. El Dorado borincano: La economía de la conquista 1510–1550. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Puerto, 2001.
  298. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  299. An exhaustive, deeply researched study of gold mining in Puerto Rico during the first half of the 16th century. Addresses all aspects of the gold mining economy, including production and labor.
  300. Find this resource:
  301. Vidal Ortega, Antonino. Cartagena de Indias y la región histórica del Caribe, 1580–1640. Seville, Spain: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 2002.
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  303. A well-researched study portraying Cartagena de Indias as the Spanish Caribbean’s preeminent commercial hub and a major node for global exchange during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Addresses topics including the arrival of Indies fleets, the transatlantic slave trade, regional commerce, contraband, and the circulation of precious metals.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Urban Society
  306.  
  307. In the 1980s, scholars working in Spain produced major social histories of Spanish Caribbean ports and their hinterlands during the 16th and 17th centuries (Borrego Plá 1983, Mena García 1984). Although such works addressed other topics as well, they invariably divided Caribbean societies into categories of status and race, with descriptions of each caste or class and its members, their demographic presence, and economic activities. Castillero-Calvo 2006 represents a sophisticated example of this model, though more ambitious in chronological scope and multidisciplinary perspective. Recent studies challenge this traditional understanding of colonial Spanish Caribbean social orders, portraying complex and dynamic societies that featured substantial interaction between diverse racial groups (Stark 2008; Tiesler, et al. 2010; Wheat 2010). In addition to works that focus on slaves, soldiers, and free people of color, other studies closely examine colonial elites’ roles in shaping early colonial Spanish Caribbean societies (Bushnell 1981, Ponce Vázquez 2011).
  308.  
  309. Borrego Plá, María del Carmen. Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVI. Seville, Spain: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1983.
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  311. Contains useful analysis of 16th-century Cartagena’s inhabitants, classified by status and occupation, though discussion of slavery is dated and free people of color are ignored. Otherwise focuses mainly on Amerindian labor and colonial administration. Appendices include a series of city council ordinances.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Bushnell, Amy. The King’s Coffer: Proprietors of the Spanish Florida Treasury, 1565–1702. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1981.
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  315. An innovative and well-researched study of Spanish Florida’s treasury and the royal officials who managed it. Depicts the royal treasury as both a mechanism for imperial governance and a resource exploited by local elites in order to maintain their socioeconomic status.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. Castillero-Calvo, Alfredo. Sociedad, economía y cultura material: Historia urbana de Panamá la Vieja. Panama City, Panama: Patronato Panamá Viejo/Imprenta Alloni, 2006.
  318. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  319. A monumental and deeply researched study of Old Panama from 1519 to 1671. Covers a host of topics including archaeological evidence, architecture, commerce, transportation, male and female merchants, elite power struggles, clergy and religious entities, free people of color, and the city’s foundation and destruction. More than one thousand pages in length.
  320. Find this resource:
  321. Mena García, María del Carmen. La sociedad de Panamá en el siglo XVI. Seville, Spain: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1984.
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  323. An important social history of the province of Panama during the 16th and early 17th centuries, based on Spanish archival sources. Addresses demography and commerce, then analyzes each major racial group in turn: the Spanish population, Amerindians, free people of color, and slaves.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Ponce Vázquez, Juan José. “Social and Political Survival at the Edge of Empire: Spanish Local Elites in Hispaniola, 1580–1697.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2011.
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  327. Views Santo Domingo’s elites, rather than metropolitan authorities or foreign intruders, as primary agents of political and social change in 17th-century Española. Based on extensive archival work. Offers fresh perspectives on contraband, forced depopulations, and piracy, and argues that local collaboration facilitated French colonization of Saint-Domingue.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Stark, David M. “‘There Is No City Here, but a Desert’: The Contours of City Life in 1673 San Juan.” Journal of Caribbean History 42.2 (2008): 255–289.
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  331. Detailed analysis of a 1673 census. Argues that San Juan was larger and more vibrant at the time than historians have assumed. Addresses aspects of the city’s demographic composition, including household size and racial composition, slave ownership, troop strength, and free people of color.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Tiesler, Vera, Pilar Zabala, and Andrea Cucina, eds. Natives, Europeans, and Africans in Colonial Campeche: History and Archaeology. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010.
  334. DOI: 10.5744/florida/9780813034928.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  335. Essays in this collection analyze data gathered in 2000 during the excavation of Campeche’s original parish church. Interestingly, its burial ground was not racially segregated. Funerary practices, body modifications, dental wear, and other forms of archaeological evidence enable contributors to address themes such as social inequality, integration, diet, and African origins.
  336. Find this resource:
  337. Wheat, David. “Nharas and Morenas Horras: A Luso-African Model for the Social History of the Spanish Caribbean, c. 1570–1640.” Journal of Early Modern History 14.1–2 (2010): 119–150.
  338. DOI: 10.1163/138537810X12632734397061Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. Examines African and African-descended women’s prominent social roles in ports such as Havana, Cartagena, and Panama, with emphasis on historical precedents in western Africa. Includes analysis of church-sanctioned marriages between free women of color and Iberian men in Havana’s cathedral.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Contraband
  342.  
  343. Contraband trade with the non-Hispanic world represents a major theme in colonial Spanish Caribbean history, with clear implications for understanding the extent or limits of Spain’s imperial reach, and the growth of local identities based on economic interest. Several classic studies of Caribbean contraband focus on one or more groups of non-Hispanic trespassers, with extended discussion of Spanish policies intended to curtail foreigners’ economic influence (Araúz Monfante 1984, Morales-Carrión 1952, Wright 1920). A surge of studies in the 1990s gave equal or greater weight to the Spanish Caribbean colonists who benefited from smuggling, and to the social and economic dynamics within Spanish colonies that favored contraband (Aizpurua 1993, Deive 1996, Feliciano Ramos 1990, Grahn 1997).
  344.  
  345. Aizpurua, Ramón. Curazao y la costa de Caracas: Introducción al estudio del contrabando de la provincia de Venezuela en tiempos de la Compañía Guipuzcoana, 1730–1780. Caracas, Venezuela: Academia Nacional de Historia, 1993.
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  347. Comprehensive study of clandestine trade between Dutch Curaçao and Venezuela during the 18th century. Thorough analysis of economic factors that favored contraband, despite Spanish attempts to repress it; the types and quantities of goods exchanged; and the networks that brought European manufactures to Caracas shops.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Araúz Monfante, Celestino Andrés. El contrabando holandés en el Caribe durante la primera mitad del siglo XVIII. 2 vols. Caracas, Venezuela: Academia Nacional de Historia, 1984.
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  351. Narrates successive attempts by the Spanish Crown and colonial authorities to curtail the economic influence of Dutch smugglers along the Caribbean’s southern littoral during the first half of the 18th century. Makes extensive use of Spanish archival sources, including shipping records and reports describing the prevalence of contraband.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Deive, Carlos Esteban. Tangomangos: Contrabando y piratería en Santo Domingo, 1522–1606. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1996.
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  355. Examines contraband in 16th-century Española, where Spanish Caribbean officials and colonists were deeply implicated in clandestine trade with non-Hispanic merchants. Discusses various measures adopted by the Spanish Crown in response, culminating in the forced depopulation of towns in northern and western Española in 1605–1606.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Feliciano Ramos, Hector R. El contrabando inglés en el Caribe y el Golfo de México (1748–1778). Seville, Spain: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1990.
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  359. A panoramic view of Anglo-Spanish contraband throughout the circum-Caribbean, including Central America and the Gulf of Mexico, prior to Spain’s declaration of free trade in 1778. Addresses Spanish subjects who traveled to British territories, English smugglers’ relations with Amerindians in Spanish colonies, and Jamaica’s premier role as a contraband hub.
  360. Find this resource:
  361. Grahn, Lance R. The Political Economy of Smuggling: Regional Informal Economies in Early Bourbon New Granada. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997.
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  363. Well-researched account of contraband networks in Riohacha, Santa Marta, and Cartagena de Indias during the 18th century (up to c. 1765). Documents the pervasive nature and socioeconomic functions of illicit commerce within these provinces. The principal smugglers discussed here are Amerindians, crown officials, soldiers, merchants, and clerics, rather than foreign interlopers.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Morales-Carrión, Arturo. Puerto Rico and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean: A Study in the Decline of Spanish Exclusivism. Río Piedras: University of Puerto Rico Press, 1952.
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  367. An overview of clandestine, international commerce in Puerto Rico in the context of Spanish imperial policy and broader geopolitical rivalries. Covers the entire colonial period, with special attention to the 18th century. Based mainly on published primary and secondary sources.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Wright, Irene A. “Rescates: With Special Reference to Cuba, 1599–1610.” Hispanic American Historical Review 3.3 (1920): 333–361.
  370. DOI: 10.2307/2505702Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  371. A classic account of enduring commercial and social relations between foreign merchants and Spanish colonists in eastern Cuba, despite the mercantilistic policies mandated by the Spanish Crown. Discusses various measures authorities took to deter contraband, each of which invariably failed. Draws comparisons with contemporary circumstances in Española and Venezuela.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. The Slave Trade
  374.  
  375. With the exception of Buenos Aires, Spanish America’s major slaving ports were all located in the circum-Caribbean. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the transatlantic and intra-Caribbean slave trades are becoming increasingly important topics in colonial Spanish Caribbean history. Most scholarship on the subject addresses the overall organization and structure of the trade, with attention to volume, direction, major ports involved, and a variety of related issues. A smaller body of recent work attempts to determine the origins of African captives transported to the Spanish Americas during the colonial era.
  376.  
  377. Organization, Structure, and Volume
  378.  
  379. Historians have traditionally viewed the slave trade to the Spanish Americas as a series of asientos, contracts the Spanish Crown awarded to other nations that were willing to deliver slaves to Spain’s colonies. Thus classic works that discuss the organization, administration, direction, and volume of the transatlantic slave trade to the Spanish Americas usually do so within the context of a particular asiento, or series of asientos, assigned to merchants of a certain nationality (Palmer 1981, Vila Vilar 1977). Recent studies of slave trafficking during the late 18th and 19th centuries are less constrained by national or imperial boundaries, and tend to focus more closely on regional, intra-Caribbean slaving networks that largely functioned as extensions of the transatlantic trade (Dorsey 2003, Leglaunec 2005). Newson and Minchin 2007 is unusual in that it addresses transatlantic and intra-American slaving networks, retracing the itinerary of captives taken from Upper Guinea to Peru via the Caribbean.
  380.  
  381. Dorsey, Joseph C. Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition: Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815–1859. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
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  383. An ambitious study of legally sanctioned and contraband slave trafficking to 19th-century Puerto Rico. Addresses direct traffic from African ports as well as inter-Caribbean trade, including captives arriving from British colonies in the 1830s, just prior to British emancipation.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Leglaunec, Jean-Pierre. “Slave Migrations in Spanish and Early American Louisiana: New Sources and New Estimates.” Louisiana History 46.2 (2005): 185–209.
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  387. An important analysis of the slave trade to Spanish Louisiana. Estimates 12,000 to 15,000 captives, primarily Africans, re-exported to Louisiana from ports including Jamaica, Dominica, Havana, and Charleston. Excellent discussion of sources. In the same issue, see the author’s article “A Directory of Ships with Slave Cargoes, Louisiana, 1772–1808,” listing more than 350 slaving voyages.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Newson, Linda A., and Susie Minchin. From Capture to Sale: The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2007.
  390. DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004156791.i-373Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  391. Tracks an extraordinarily well-documented, multistage slaving voyage from Lisbon all the way to Lima. Includes substantial discussion of slaving ports in between, especially Cartagena. Explores several key aspects of the early-17th-century slave trade, including voyage organization, the acquisition of captives, diets, mortality rates, and medical practitioners who treated captives.
  392. Find this resource:
  393. Palmer, Colin A. Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.
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  395. Analyzes the structure and organization of Britain’s slave trade to 18th-century Spanish America, with the South Sea Company landing an estimated seventy-five thousand captives between 1714 and 1739. Addresses topics including contraband, shipboard mortality rates, slave trade factors, and ports of disembarkation, most notably Portobelo, Buenos Aires, Cartagena, Havana, and Caracas.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Vila Vilar, Enriqueta. Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos: Los asientos portugueses. Seville, Spain: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1977.
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  399. Foundational study of the transatlantic slave trade to the early colonial Spanish Americas. Discusses the trade’s organization and administration, voyage itineraries, and contraband. Estimates 250,000 to 300,000 captives landed in Cartagena, Veracruz, Buenos Aires, and various circum-Caribbean ports between 1595 and 1640. Appendices provide detailed information for approximately five hundred voyages.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. African Origins
  402.  
  403. Modern historians have only begun to seriously examine the origins of African captives transported to the Spanish Caribbean; at present, some of the best scholarship on this topic is to be found in articles rather than book-length monographs. These studies draw on a variety of sources, employing two main methodologies. Some analyze ethnonyms assigned to individual Africans listed in Spanish Caribbean notarial records (la Fuente 1990), criminal records (Lohse 2002), or sacramental records (Stark 2009). Others use slave trade voyage data to identify and compare African ports of embarkation (Grandío Moráguez 2008, Wheat 2011).
  404.  
  405. Grandío Moráguez, Oscar. “The African Origins of Slaves Arriving in Cuba, 1789–1865.” In Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Edited by David Eltis and David Richardson, 176–201. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
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  407. Uses shipping records to identify African ports of embarkation for an estimated 225,000 captives arriving in late colonial Cuba, linking African ports to probable ethnolinguistic origins. Finds considerable diversity among African forced migrants during the peak years of the island’s slave trade, though West Central Africans figured prominently.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. la Fuente, Alejandro de. “Esclavos africanos en La Habana: Zonas de procedencia y denominaciones étnicas, 1570–1699.” Revista Española de Antropología Americana 20 (1990): 135–160.
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  411. This pioneering study of Havana’s notarial and sacramental records uncovered more than four thousand references to individuals who were assigned African ethnonyms. Dividing more than forty different ethnolinguistic designations into six geographical zones, measures the overall importance of forced migration from each zone within three broad chronological periods (1570–1594, 1595–1640, 1650–1699).
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Lohse, Russell. “Slave Trade Nomenclature and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Evidence from Early Eighteenth-Century Costa Rica.” Slavery and Abolition 23.3 (2002): 73–92.
  414. DOI: 10.1080/714005250Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  415. Examines the origins of captives from Lower Guinea—that is, “the Slave Coast”—on two Danish slave ships arriving in Costa Rica. Uses criminal records to highlight discrepancies in ethnonyms forced migrants used to identify themselves, as opposed to those ascribed to them by slave merchants and slaveowners.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Stark, David M. “A New Look at the African Slave Trade in Puerto Rico through the Use of Parish Registers: 1660–1815.” Slavery and Abolition 30.4 (2009): 491–520.
  418. DOI: 10.1080/01440390903245083Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  419. Positions Puerto Rico within broader narratives of the transatlantic slave trade, with particular attention to volume estimates; also provides information on forced migrants’ diverse African and Afro-Caribbean origins. Based on extensive research in sacramental records.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Wheat, David. “The First Great Waves: African Provenance Zones for the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Cartagena de Indias, 1570–1640.” Journal of African History 52.1 (2011): 1–22.
  422. DOI: 10.1017/S0021853711000119Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  423. Tracks change over time in the relative importance of Upper Guinea and Angola as provenance zones in the transatlantic slave trade to Cartagena de Indias. Based on analysis of port entry records for nearly five hundred slave ships. Findings are contrasted with patterns in the slave trade to Veracruz.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Environmental History
  426.  
  427. Attention to environmental change over time, and to ecological factors’ influence on human affairs, are both relatively new trends in Spanish Caribbean historiography. Recent works demonstrate that Spanish exploitation of the Caribbean’s forests, oyster beds, and other natural resources was fundamentally opportunistic and short-sighted (Funes Monzote 2008, Perri 2009). Other studies take a different approach, portraying hurricanes, droughts, and disease environments as major catalysts for social and economic change, or as factors that helped determine the outcome of military conflict within the region (Johnson 2011, McNeil 2010, Pérez 2001).
  428.  
  429. Funes Monzote, Reinaldo. From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492. Translated by Alex Martin. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
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  431. Chronicles the sugar industry’s effects on Cuba’s once-extensive forests from the 1770s to the early 20th century. Describes the uses of timber in the sugar industry, and examines large estate owners’ competition with the Spanish Crown and navy over access to woodlands. Originally published as De bosque a sabana: Azúcar, deforestación y medio ambiente en Cuba (1492–1926) (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2004).
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Johnson, Sherry. Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
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  435. Provocatively foregrounds environmental crises as driving forces behind major historical events in the late colonial Caribbean, including the British capture of Havana, and Spain’s shift to free trade. Thorough analysis of hurricanes and droughts in Cuba between 1750 and 1800.
  436. Find this resource:
  437. McNeil, J. R. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
  438. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511811623Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439. Superbly written study of yellow fever and malaria’s geopolitical influence as adversaries for French, English, and Dutch forces invading the circum-Caribbean, and powerful allies for Spanish colonists (and later, revolutionary armies) who were largely immune or resistant. Argues that plantation societies wrought ecological changes that facilitated the spread of both diseases.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Pérez, Louis A., Jr. Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth Century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
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  443. A study of three hurricanes that ravaged Cuba in the 1840s, crippling coffee production and ultimately contributing to the rise of sugarcane monoculture. Explores hardships that hurricanes inflicted on the island’s urban poor, rural populations, and slaves. Contains extensive quotations from contemporary observers; accessible for undergraduate audiences.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Perri, Michael. “‘Ruined and Lost’: Spanish Destruction of the Pearl Coast in the Early Sixteenth Century.” Environment and History 15 (2009): 129–161.
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  447. An overview of Spanish pearl fishing and slave raiding in eastern Venezuela and nearby islands during the 1520s and 1530s, with special attention to Cubagua. Detailed description of indigenous societies along the eastern Caribbean’s southern littoral. Excellent maps.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Eighteenth-Century Transformations
  450.  
  451. The 18th century marks a major shift in the historiography of the colonial Spanish Caribbean. Rather than examining the formations, institutions, and consequences of colonial rule, scholarship on the 18th century—especially the decades after 1760—focuses on explaining why Cuba and Puerto Rico remained loyal to the Spanish Crown, even as a series of independence movements elsewhere led to the virtual collapse of Spain’s American empire. Several works address the Bourbon-era reforms and their effects in the insular Caribbean. Other histories illuminate factors driving the expansion of sugar cultivation and plantation slavery, a brutal system that would dominate Cuba’s economy by the early 19th century. Free people of color were acutely involved in both processes, as colonists and militia members with political agendas of their own, and as threats to the establishment of clear-cut racial hierarchies; additional studies address their individual and collective experiences and historical impact during this period.
  452.  
  453. Bourbon Reforms
  454.  
  455. A number of historians have analyzed the impact of diverse reforms enacted by Bourbon monarchs and their representatives in the 18th-century Spanish Caribbean. Studies of Puerto Rico and Trinidad indicate that Bourbon reforms fostered rapid population growth through immigration and the increased production of export commodities such as tobacco, cotton, and sugar (Ortiz 1983, Sevilla Soler 1988). Other works focus primarily on military reforms. In colonies such as Santo Domingo, the overhaul of Spain’s Caribbean defenses may have simply reinforced long-established social hierarchies (Gascón 1993). Conversely, studies of Cuba during the second half of the 18th century suggest that Bourbon-era military reforms fundamentally reshaped the contours of life on the island, serving as an engine for political developments (Kuethe 1986) and broad social and demographic changes (Johnson 2001).
  456.  
  457. Gascón, Margarita. “The Military of Santo Domingo, 1720–1764.” Hispanic American Historical Review 73.3 (August 1993): 431–452.
  458. DOI: 10.2307/2517697Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  459. Warns against overestimating the impact of Bourbon-era reforms on Spanish-American societies. Demonstrates that reforms enacted in Santo Domingo during the 1760s merely confirmed privileges already enjoyed by the colony’s elites since at least the 1720s.
  460. Find this resource:
  461. Johnson, Sherry. The Social Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Cuba. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.
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  463. Focuses on social developments triggered by Cuba’s militarization in the late 18th century. Argues that Spanish-born soldiers and sailors were primarily responsible for Cuba’s population growth during the period, and came to represent an influential segment of Cuban society as small-scale landholders and husbands to Creole women.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Kuethe, Allan J. Cuba, 1753–1815: Crown, Military, and Society. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986.
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  467. Foundational study of military reforms enacted in late-18th-century Cuba, including increased reliance on local militias and the transfer of leadership roles to Creole elites. Argues that these reforms, coupled with economic concessions, reinforced preexisting hierarchies and helped ensure the political loyalty of Cuban elites during an age of revolutions.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Ortiz, Altagracia. Eighteenth-Century Reforms in the Caribbean: Miguel de Muesas, Governor of Puerto Rico, 1769–76. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983.
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  471. Praises the efficiency of Puerto Rico’s governor during the 1770s, and explains the rationales behind reforms enacted by his administration. These included improvements in the island’s defenses, attempts to curtail contraband, efforts to stimulate tobacco cultivation, and the establishment of several new towns.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Sevilla Soler, Rosario. Inmigración y cambio socio-económico en Trinidad (1783–1797). Seville, Spain: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1988.
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  475. Discusses Spanish Trinidad’s transformation in the late 18th century from a marginal outpost to a booming plantation society based on cotton and sugar cultivation. Attributes this shift to the immigration of several thousand French and Irish Catholics recruited from nearby British colonies, accompanied by even larger numbers of slaves.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. The Rise of Sugar in Cuba
  478.  
  479. Historians of Cuba have been particularly concerned with explaining the island’s rapid shift to sugar cultivation and the rise of large-scale plantation slavery on the island during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Foundational studies of this process link the expansion of sugar production to a major surge in the slave trade, increased reliance on slave labor, technological development, and the rise of a Creole oligarchy (Moreno Fraginals 1976, Tornero Tinajero 1996). Recent scholarship has further improved our knowledge of Havana’s aristocracy and its consolidation of power during this period (Goncalvès 2008); studies of coerced labor in the 19th-century Spanish Caribbean are discussed in greater detail below.
  480.  
  481. Goncalvès, Dominique. Le planteur et le Roi: L’aristocratie havanaise et la couronne d’Espagne (1763–1838). Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2008.
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  483. A detailed study of forty Havana families whose wealth was backed by sugar plantations. Emphasizes their networks in Madrid and the evolution of their close political ties to the Spanish Crown. Tracks their consolidation of power through appointments to positions of local authority, acquisition of royal titles, and endogamous marriages.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. The Sugarmill: The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba, 1760–1860. Translated by Cedric Belfrage. New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1976.
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  487. A classic, influential, Marxist history of the rise of Cuba’s sugar economy. Argues that traditional protections afforded to slaves were rendered unenforceable by the speed and scale of the sugar industry’s expansion. Suggests that abolition ultimately resulted from slavery’s incompatibility with increased mechanization and technological innovation.
  488. Find this resource:
  489. Tornero Tinajero, Pablo. Crecimiento económico y transformaciones sociales: Esclavos, hacendados y comerciantes en la Cuba colonial (1760–1840). Madrid: Ministerio de Trabajo y Seguridad Social, 1996.
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  491. Comprehensive analysis of the development of Cuba’s sugar economy, its entry into global markets, and the empowerment of a Creole oligarchy––all based on large-scale slave labor. Addresses the slave trade’s organization and volume, captives’ age and sex ratios, and the demographic growth and geographical distribution of Cuba’s slave population.
  492. Find this resource:
  493. Free People of Color
  494.  
  495. Scholarship on free people of color in the Spanish Caribbean focuses on the late 18th and 19th centuries, in general terms a period of demographic growth and expanded rights for free people of color under the aegis of the Bourbon reforms. Scholars seeking to understand free people of color’s basic socioeconomic position in 19th-century Cuba and Puerto Rico have focused on occupational status (Deschamps Chapeaux 1971) and the extent of racial prejudice (Kinsbruner 1996). Based on extensive archival research, other studies ambitiously explore free people of color’s opportunities for social mobility within Spanish circum-Caribbean societies, emphasizing the leverage afforded by militia service despite colonial racial hierarchies (Hanger 1997, Vinson 2001). The latest scholarship on free people of color in the Spanish Caribbean explicitly calls attention to their geographical mobility and political loyalties during an era of imperial conflicts, burgeoning independence movements, and large-scale slave revolts (Landers 2010, Reid-Vazquez 2011).
  496.  
  497. Deschamps Chapeaux, Pedro. El negro en la economía habanera del siglo XIX. Havana, Cuba: Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, 1971.
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  499. A survey of social and economic roles played by free people of color in 19th-century Havana. Primarily addresses free people of color’s occupational activities as militia members, work crew captains, musicians, tailors, bloodletters, dentists, and midwives.
  500. Find this resource:
  501. Hanger, Kimberly S. Bounded Lives, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
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  503. A well-researched social history of free people of color in Spanish New Orleans. Analyzes the free black population’s growth through manumission and natural increase; marriage patterns, consensual unions, and family networks; and opportunities provided by their service in free pardo and moreno militias, and in more than twenty different occupations.
  504. Find this resource:
  505. Kinsbruner, Jay. Not of Pure Blood: The Free People of Color and Racial Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.
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  507. A brief sociological study of racial prejudice against free people of color in 19th-century Puerto Rico. Examines topics including residential patterns, marriages, household size, and occupation.
  508. Find this resource:
  509. Landers, Jane G. Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
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  511. Chronicles the experiences of several free men of color who actively participated in the geopolitical conflicts that rocked Saint-Domingue, Cuba, the Spanish Floridas, and South Carolina during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Emphasizes protagonists’ mobility, access to information, and calculated political decisions. Accessible for undergraduates.
  512. Find this resource:
  513. Reid-Vazquez, Michele. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011.
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  515. Focuses on free people of color in Cuba from 1844 to 1868, especially their responses to violence, expulsion, and repressive policies designed to curtail their traditional privileges. Includes discussion of free-colored exiles in Mexico and the United States, shifting attitudes toward militia service, and major changes in Spanish immigration policy.
  516. Find this resource:
  517. Vinson, Ben, III. Bearing Arms for His Majesty: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.
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  519. A systematic study of free-colored militias in 18th-century Mexico’s cities and coastal provinces. Discusses members’ occupations, backgrounds, and marital patterns. Argues that although tribute exemption, legal privileges, and increased status associated with militia service represented avenues for social mobility, segregated militias also played a major role in forging racial identities.
  520. Find this resource:
  521. Late Colonial Labor Regimes
  522.  
  523. A substantial body of scholarship on the history of the Spanish Caribbean concentrates on labor regimes during the late colonial period, primarily in 19th-century Cuba and Puerto Rico. Several foundational studies trace the rise of sugar economies based on plantation slavery and the slave trade. Others analyze change over time in legal frameworks supporting Spanish Caribbean slavery during the 18th and 19th centuries, emphasizing enslaved persons’ use of the law to attain greater autonomy. A third group of studies addresses additional forms of coerced labor that complemented and overlapped with plantation slavery, with most focusing on Chinese indentured workers in 19th-century Cuba.
  524.  
  525. Plantation Economies (Sugar and Slavery)
  526.  
  527. The expansion of sugar cultivation and large-scale plantation slavery has long been a central narrative—arguably the central narrative—in the historiography of the colonial Spanish Caribbean. Although some noteworthy studies of this topic center on 19th-century Cuba (Bergad 1990, Knight 1970), others address sugar cultivation and plantation slavery in Puerto Rico (Scarano 1984) and along Mexico’s Gulf Coast (Naveda Chávez-Hita 2008) during the 18th and early 19th centuries.
  528.  
  529. Bergad, Laird W. Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
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  531. An economic and social history of sugar cultivation in Mantazas, Cuba’s principal sugar-producing region in the mid-19th century. Includes discussion of slave demography, slave sales and prices, manumission, and labor conditions. Also contains information on Creole planters, merchant groups, and railroads.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Knight, Franklin W. Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970.
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  535. A classic, sweeping study of slavery on sugar plantations in 19th-century Cuba, with attention to the slave trade, demography, legislation regulating slavery, and abolition. Also discusses urban slavery and other forms of rural labor. Argues against the notion that Cuban slavery was somehow less oppressive than slavery elsewhere.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Naveda Chávez-Hita, Adriana. Esclavos negros en las haciendas azucareras de Córdoba, Veracruz, 1690–1830. 2d ed. Xalapa, Mexico: Universidad Veracruzana, 2008.
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  539. A concise study of slavery on sugar plantations in the state of Veracruz, based on extensive research in municipal and notarial records. Includes discussion of slave trafficking and slave resistance. Spans the entire 18th century and first three decades of the 19th century. First published in 1987.
  540. Find this resource:
  541. Scarano, Francisco A. Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800–1850. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.
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  543. An economic history of sugar cultivation in Ponce, Puerto Rico, during the first half of the 19th century. Includes discussion of the slave trade, slave demography, and foreign merchants and capital. Shows that slave labor was far more important to 19th-century Puerto Rico’s sugar economy than previously believed.
  544. Find this resource:
  545. Slavery and the Law
  546.  
  547. Several important works address the legal systems that regulated slavery in the Spanish Caribbean, particularly in Cuba, during the 18th and 19th centuries. Initial scholarship in this area sought to demonstrate the relative openness of Iberian slavery, as opposed to Anglo-American and other European systems of slavery (Tannenbaum 1963). Other works compare and contrast the regulation of slavery in Spanish and French regimes (Din 1999). Although a number of subsequent studies have challenged or modified “the Tannenbaum thesis,” the most significant development in scholarship on slavery and the law in the Spanish Caribbean has been a strong emphasis on slaves’ voice and agency. Despite exploitation by slaveowners, Creole elites, and metropolitan authorities, enslaved people in late colonial Cuba successfully maneuvered within existing legal systems in pursuit of greater autonomy and freedom (la Fuente 2007, Díaz 2001, Scott 1985).
  548.  
  549. Díaz, María Elena. The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.
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  551. Examines royal slaves in El Cobre, a mining village in eastern Cuba and home of the cult of the Virgin of Charity. Shows how Crown slaves and their descendents exploited their status within the Spanish legal system, achieving autonomy and, over time, recognition as villagers rather than slaves.
  552. Find this resource:
  553. Din, Gilbert C. Spaniards, Planters, and Slaves: The Spanish Regulation of Slavery in Louisiana, 1763–1803. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999.
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  555. Compares Spanish and French legal traditions regulating slavery in 18th-century Louisiana. Discusses Spanish governors’ efforts to control marronage and limit slaveowners’ brutality.
  556. Find this resource:
  557. la Fuente, Alejandro de. “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel.” Hispanic American Historical Review 87.4 (2007): 659–692.
  558. DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2007-039Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  559. An overview of slaves’ most important legal rights—the right to gradual self-purchase (coartación) and the right to seek a new owner (pedir papel)—and their evolution from customary practice to codified law in 19th-century Cuba. Includes discussion of earlier legal precedents.
  560. Find this resource:
  561. Scott, Rebecca J. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
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  563. A pathbreaking study of the gradual dismantling of slavery in Cuba. Explains how Cuban and Spanish authorities passed emancipation laws as acts of political expediency during an era of contested colonial rule. Emphasizes former slaves’ actions (rather than abstract economic forces) as a major factor pushing toward abolition.
  564. Find this resource:
  565. Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas. New York: Vintage, 1963.
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  567. A pioneering comparison of slavery in 19th-century Anglo-American and Iberian colonies, mainly Cuba and Brazil. Argues that Iberian legal traditions, in addition to the church, afforded slaves a personhood that was absent in Anglo-American chattel slavery, providing relatively greater opportunities for manumission. First published in 1946 (New York: Knopf).
  568. Find this resource:
  569. Indentured Labor and Immigrant Workers
  570.  
  571. A small but growing body of scholarship on indentured and immigrant labor provides new perspectives on plantation labor, coercion, resistance, race relations, and cultural exchange in 19th-century Cuba and Puerto Rico. In addition to drawing attention to understudied aspects of late colonial Spanish Caribbean labor regimes, these works complement and inform recent scholarship on slavery, the slave trade, and racial attitudes toward Africans and people of African descent. One study of this nature addresses free people of color and other migrant workers in Puerto Rico during the first half of the 19th century (Chinea 2005); others focus on the approximately 140,000 Chinese contract workers who labored in Cuba from the 1840s to the 1870s (Hu-DeHart 1993, Pérez de la Riva 2000, Yun 2008).
  572.  
  573. Chinea, Jorge Luis. Race and Labor in the Hispanic Caribbean: The West Indian Immigrant Worker Experience in Puerto Rico, 1800–1850. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.
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  575. A well-written study of immigrant labor in Puerto Rico during the early 19th century. Finds that free people of color from the non-Hispanic Caribbean constituted an important share of all known free migration to the island. Discusses Spanish immigration policies, West Indian migrants’ occupations and economic contributions, and racial politics.
  576. Find this resource:
  577. Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labour or Neoslavery?” Slavery and Abolition 14.1 (1993): 38–54.
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  579. A concise overview of Chinese labor in 19th-century Cuba. Discusses indentureship contracts, working and living conditions, and further exploitation of laborers after their contracts expired. Surveys works that situate Chinese contract labor in relation to slavery, debt peonage, and free wage labor.
  580. Find this resource:
  581. Pérez de la Riva, Juan. Los culíes chinos en Cuba (1847–1880): Contribución al estudio de la inmigración contratada en el Caribe. Havana, Cuba: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2000.
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  583. A dated but useful study that situates Chinese migrants to Cuba within larger national narratives, arguing that indentured Chinese workers experienced another form of slavery. Addresses migration, labor conditions, and international diplomacy. Based on published materials and documents located in Havana. Originally submitted for publication in 1967.
  584. Find this resource:
  585. Yun, Lisa. The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.
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  587. Literary and historical analysis of testimonies and written petitions that Chinese workers supplied to Cuba Commission agents in the 1870s. Draws on published and printed materials, including eighteen volumes of testimonies housed in China’s National Library in Beijing. Closes with an intellectual biography of the Afro-Chinese author Antonio Chuffat Latour.
  588. Find this resource:
  589. Slave Resistance
  590.  
  591. Slave resistance is a prominent theme in colonial Spanish Caribbean history, and a rich historiography exists on this topic. Studies of marronage and slave revolts demonstrate enslaved peoples’ agency and resiliency, and their political ideologies and forms of organization beyond the reach of colonial authorities; they analyze the significance of slave rebels’ African backgrounds, and the extent of racial solidarity between free people of color and slaves, Creoles and Africans, and enslaved people in urban and rural areas. Several studies examine the degree to which external factors such as abolitionist activism, news of the Haitian Revolution, and Spanish American independence movements may have influenced slave revolts and conspiracies. These works are reinforced by a relatively new body of work entirely devoted to exploring the Haitian Revolution’s impact in the Spanish Caribbean.
  592.  
  593. Marronage
  594.  
  595. Runaway slave communities known as palenques or cumbes flourished throughout the Spanish circum-Caribbean. Several studies approach marronage from a comprehensive national or regional perspective, surveying evidence of multiple maroon settlements over long periods of time, for example in colonial Venezuela (Acosta Saignes 1967) and eastern Cuba (La Rosa Corzo 2003). Other works reconstruct the histories of specific maroon communities (Borrego Plá 1973, Tardieu 2009), and document maroons’ roles in geopolitical conflicts between rival European empires (Landers 1999).
  596.  
  597. Acosta Saignes, Miguel. Vida de los esclavos negros en Venezuela. Caracas, Venezuela: Hespérides, 1967.
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  599. Pioneering study of black slaves in colonial Venezuela, primarily during the 18th century. Discusses known maroon communities or cumbes, and Spanish authorities’ efforts to repress them. Provides a number of testimonies given by captured maroons. Also discusses other topics, including the slave trade, African origins, slave labor, marriages, and punishments.
  600. Find this resource:
  601. Borrego Plá, María del Carmen. Palenques de negros en Cartagena de Indias a fines del siglo XVII. Seville, Spain: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1973.
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  603. Describes maroon wars near Cartagena during the 1680s and 1690s. Focuses on one maroon community’s pledge of loyalty to the Crown in exchange for liberty. Finds that a royal decree accepting their terms was issued, but revoked after Cartagena authorities refused to comply, accusing maroons of conspiring with urban slaves.
  604. Find this resource:
  605. Landers, Jane G. Black Society in Spanish Florida. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
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  607. Pathbreaking, comprehensive social history of free and enslaved people of color in Spanish East Florida. Reveals that maroons from South Carolina were granted liberty and protection if they adopted Catholicism and helped maintain the outpost of Fort Mose. Includes extensive discussion of black militias, women, religious participation, and slave trafficking.
  608. Find this resource:
  609. La Rosa Corzo, Gabino. Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression. Translated by Mary Todd. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
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  611. An overview of maroon communities in eastern Cuba during the late 18th and 19th centuries. Draws on diaries recorded by members of slavehunting expeditions. Originally published in Spanish in 1988.
  612. Find this resource:
  613. Tardieu, Jean Pierre. Cimarrones de Panamá: La forja de una identidad afroamericana en el siglo XVI. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2009.
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  615. Discusses the maroon stronghold of Bayano in Panama, and its evolution from a “micro-state” in the 1550s to a confederation of towns by the 1570s. Focuses on maroons’ collusion with Francis Drake, peace treaties with Spanish authorities, and Bayano’s depopulation in the early 1580s. Includes transcriptions of original sources.
  616. Find this resource:
  617. Revolts and Conspiracies
  618.  
  619. Much scholarship on slave resistance in the colonial Spanish Caribbean focuses on slave revolts and conspiracies. Some works catalogue known slave insurrections throughout the late colonial period within a given colony, such as Venezuela (Brito Figueroa 1961) or Puerto Rico (Baralt 1989). Others provide close descriptions of specific slave revolts. Focusing on 19th-century Cuba, the best-known studies of this nature examine whether conspiracies actually existed, the ideological influence of the Haitian revolution and abolitionist sentiments, and the extent to which free-colored insurgents showed racial solidarity with plantation slaves (Childs 2006, Paquette 1988). Another recent study of a specific slave revolt in 19th-century Cuba emphasizes the African origins of the revolt’s leaders and participants (Barcía Paz 2012).
  620.  
  621. Baralt, Guillermo A. Esclavos rebeldes: Conspiraciones y sublevaciones de esclavos en Puerto Rico (1795–1873). 3d ed. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Huracán, 1989.
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  623. Concise, archivally based study of slave revolts and conspiracies in Puerto Rico during the early 19th century. Discusses the possible influence of events in Saint-Domingue and Cuba during the same era. First published in 1981.
  624. Find this resource:
  625. Barcía Paz, Manuel. The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012.
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  627. Detailed account of a major slave revolt on plantations near Matanzas, Cuba, in 1825. Argues that whereas earlier uprisings were led by free, colored Creoles and inspired by events elsewhere in the Caribbean, the 1825 revolt marked the beginning of a series of more violent uprisings led by battle-hardened West Africans.
  628. Find this resource:
  629. Brito Figueroa, Federico. Las insurrecciones de los esclavos negros en la sociedad colonial venezolana. Caracas, Venezuela: Editorial Cantaclaro, 1961.
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  631. Brief survey of slave insurrections in colonial Venezuela, particularly during the late 18th century. Focuses most closely on a major slave uprising in Coro in 1795.
  632. Find this resource:
  633. Childs, Matt D. The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
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  635. Analyzes a series of slave revolts and conspiracies in early 1812, known collectively as the Aponte Rebellion. Argues that during an era of increasing racial oppression, free people of color colluded with enslaved Africans in hopes of abolishing slavery and establishing Cuba’s independence from Spain. Based on extensive archival work.
  636. Find this resource:
  637. Paquette, Robert L. Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988.
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  639. Analyzes an alleged 1844 conspiracy involving British abolitionists, free people of color, and plantation slaves in the province of Matanzas. Based on the scale and urgency of colonial officials’ responses to the planned uprising, argues that it was genuine––not merely fabricated to justify the torture and repression that followed.
  640. Find this resource:
  641. Impact of the Haitian Revolution
  642.  
  643. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a wave of new research and growing scholarly consensus acknowledged the Haitian Revolution as a major turning point in the histories of the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Atlantic world. Participating in this broader trend, a number of scholars produced innovative studies of the Haitian Revolution’s impact on Spanish Caribbean societies; these works primarily took the form of essays in edited collections (Gaspar and Geggus 1997; Geggus 2001; González-Ripoll, et al. 2004). Two earlier monographs remain of fundamental importance for this topic. One is a comprehensive study of Spanish Santo Domingo from the mid-18th century up to 1795, when Spanish colonists began to evacuate the island (Sevilla Soler 1980). The other focuses on several thousand migrants who abandoned Spanish Santo Domingo in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, and relocated to Cuba (Deive 1989).
  644.  
  645. Deive, Carlos Esteban. Las emigraciones dominicanas a Cuba (1795–1808). Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1989.
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  647. A brief study of four thousand migrants from Spanish Santo Domingo to Cuba, particularly Havana and Santiago, during and after the Haitian Revolution. Covers the years 1795 to 1808, when France controlled both sides of the island of Española. Includes discussion of French refugees and exiled black auxiliaries.
  648. Find this resource:
  649. Gaspar, David Barry, and David P. Geggus, eds. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
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  651. An edited collection. In one chapter, slave revolts in Cuba and Santo Domingo are viewed in light of contemporary events in Saint-Domingue. Others examine French subversives, black auxiliaries, and free people of color in Spanish East Florida and New Orleans during the 1790s and early 1800s.
  652. Find this resource:
  653. Geggus, David P., ed. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
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  655. Includes chapters on the Haitian Revolution’s influence in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Colombia. Essays discuss planters’ fears of slave revolts, social barriers that made such revolts unlikely, and ways that both local elites and free people of color used news of the Haitian Revolution to further their own agendas.
  656. Find this resource:
  657. González-Ripoll, María Dolores, Consuelo Naranjo, Ada Ferrer, Gloria García, and Josef Opatrný. El rumor de Haití en Cuba: Temor, raza y rebeldía, 1789–1844. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2004.
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  659. An important collection of five well-documented essays addressing the Haitian Revolution’s impact in Cuba, especially in fostering slave resistance, shifts in elite mentalities, and changes in colonial policy. An exceptionally strong chapter by Ada Ferrer tracks the dissemination of news regarding Saint-Domingue, and locates acts of revolt explicitly inspired by events in Haiti.
  660. Find this resource:
  661. Sevilla Soler, María Rosario. Santo Domingo Tierra de Frontera (1750–1800). Seville, Spain: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1980.
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  663. A valuable study of demographic growth, administrative and military organization, agriculture, and economic activity in 18th-century Santo Domingo, Española. Includes substantial discussion of commerce, diplomacy, and warfare with neighboring Saint-Domingue. Closes with the island’s cession to France in 1795 and expulsion of the last remaining Spanish officials in 1801.
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  665. End of the Colonial Period
  666.  
  667. Scholars have also examined the late colonial Spanish Caribbean in order to explain the development of racial identities, class consciousness, and national identities that would influence political ideologies during the era of independence and well into the national period. Several studies address Caribbean Colombia prior to independence in the early 19th century. A larger body of work focuses on 19th-century Cuba and to a lesser extent Puerto Rico, the last bastions of Spain’s American empire, discussing the evolution of the islands’ unique relationship to Spain; the influence of British diplomatic pressure, particularly regarding abolition; and the growing influence of the United States.
  668.  
  669. Geopolitics and Abolition
  670.  
  671. As the last remaining colonies in Spain’s American empire, Puerto Rico and Cuba were also among the final American plantation societies to abolish the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. A number of studies seek to explain why and how the two islands remained anchors of Spanish colonial rule and plantation slavery in the Caribbean well into the late 19th century, despite major political changes taking place elsewhere in the Americas and in Europe. Sevilla Soler 1986 analyzes Puerto Rico and Cuba’s roles in relation to Spanish American independence movements during the first quarter of the 19th century. Martínez-Fernández 1994 discusses the implications of the US Civil War and abolition of slavery for Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Other studies examine events leading to the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico and especially Cuba, focusing on the rise of an abolitionist movement in Spain and the Spanish Caribbean (Schmidt-Nowara 1999), and Britain’s diplomatic efforts to end the slave trade to Cuba (Murray 2002).
  672.  
  673. Martínez-Fernández, Luis. Torn between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840–1878. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994.
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  675. Examines US hegemony and influence in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic before and after the Civil War. Argues that slavery’s abolition in the United States contributed to European powers’ declining geopolitical investment in the Hispanic Caribbean, and reconfigured the political stance of the region’s Creole elites.
  676. Find this resource:
  677. Murray, David R. Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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  679. A detailed study of Anglo-Spanish diplomatic relations during the 19th century, focusing on British efforts to affect the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to Cuba. Includes analysis of the La Escalera conspiracy, and pioneering discussion of emancipados (liberated African “recaptives”) in Cuba. Closes with the trade’s abolition in 1867.
  680. Find this resource:
  681. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.
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  683. Examines the interconnected political contexts that shaped antislavery movements in 19th-century Puerto Rico, Spain, and Cuba. Shows that Puerto Ricans played a prominent role in founding the Spanish Abolitionist Society in Madrid. Discusses Creole elites’ views on abolitionism in relation to contemporary economic debates and notions of racial difference.
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  685. Sevilla Soler, María Rosario. Las Antillas y la independencia de la América española. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1986.
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  687. Describes Cuba and Puerto Rico’s strategic role during the early 19th century as the basis for troops sent to aid loyalist forces in Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico. Addresses international interest in fomenting independence on the islands, the formation of local political parties and conspiracies, and the persistence of absolutist colonial rule.
  688. Find this resource:
  689. Urban Society in Nineteenth-Century Cuba and Puerto Rico
  690.  
  691. Several scholarly works view urban society in 19th-century Cuba and Puerto Rico in terms of race, class, and gender. Analyses of attitudes toward interracial marriage in Cuba (Martinez-Alier 1991), and women’s roles in San Juan, Puerto Rico (Matos Rodríguez 1999), signal the persistence of underlying issues of race and class. These findings are reinforced by studies of mutual aid societies and political organizations in Cuba that empowered nonelite tobacco workers, free people of color, and slaves, fostering new forms of class consciousness and racial identity (Casanovas 1998, Howard 1998).
  692.  
  693. Casanovas, Joan. Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850–1898. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998.
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  695. Examines the development of a strong labor movement among urban tobacco workers in western Cuba during the late 19th century. Discusses the movement’s organization and evolving ideological stance, as well as its social and political impact in a society divided by race and geographical origin, and its influence on Spanish colonial policy.
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  697. Howard, Philip A. Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.
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  699. Analyzes mutual aid societies maintained by Africans and people of African descent in 19th-century Cuba. Addresses both cabildos de nación formed by people of similar ethnic background and similar societies that were ethnically inclusive. Emphasizes mutual aid societies’ political importance and influence in the formations of a broader racial identity.
  700. Find this resource:
  701. Martinez-Alier, Verena. Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.
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  703. A brief study of social and legal constraints regulating interracial marriage in 19th-century Cuba. Locates nearly 250 official requests for permission to contract interracial marriages. Discusses proposed marriages that were blocked by parental opposition, and others that were successfully contracted after the bride and groom had already eloped.
  704. Find this resource:
  705. Matos Rodríguez, Félix V. Women and Urban Change in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1820–1868. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.
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  707. A social history of women in San Juan during the mid-19th century. Discusses women’s demographic presence, occupational roles, and concubinage. Finds that elite women benefited from reforms aimed at modernizing the city, using newly formed beneficence institutions to consolidate their traditional privileges at the expense of working-class and enslaved women.
  708. Find this resource:
  709. Race, Culture, and Emergent Nationalism
  710.  
  711. The late colonial Spanish Caribbean has attracted several scholars interested in the rise of modern nations and national identities. Pérez 1999 discusses the extent of US cultural influence in the formations of a national Cuban identity throughout the 19th century and afterward. Ferrer 1999 and Sartorius 2003 also examine the development of Cuban national identity, focusing on racial ideologies in relation to revolutionary politics, and political strategies adopted by Cubans of African descent at the close of the 19th century. Other studies likewise analyze the political significance of race and regional identities in Caribbean Colombia during the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Helg 2004, Lasso 2007).
  712.  
  713. Ferrer, Ada. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
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  715. Examines racial ideologies among nationalist rebels in late-19th-century Cuba. Shows that revolutionary armies were integrated and multiracial, with Spanish propagandists calling the movement a race war. Reveals that racial conflict within insurgent armies was temporarily suppressed, with discrimination returning in the late 1890s as white officers were suddenly promoted.
  716. Find this resource:
  717. Helg, Aline. Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
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  719. Argues that throughout Caribbean Colombia during the late-18th and early 19th-centuries, local identities and social hierarchies precluded the formation of a regional political consensus, or collective racial identities among people of color. Discusses indigenous and maroon communities, and structures of late colonial society in rural and urban contexts.
  720. Find this resource:
  721. Lasso, Marixa. Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution: Colombia 1795–1831. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007.
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  723. Finds that free people of color participated extensively in early 19th-century Cartagena’s republican political culture, helping shape revolutionary politics in the region, despite Creole elite racism and fears of race war. Focuses on the national period, but the opening chapter addresses late colonial society.
  724. Find this resource:
  725. Pérez, Louis A., Jr. On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
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  727. A pathbreaking history of cultural exchange between the United States and Cuba, with emphasis on US material culture’s role in formulations of Cuban national identity. Mainly focuses on the 20th century, but the first chapter discusses travel and migration between the United States and Cuba throughout the 19th century.
  728. Find this resource:
  729. Sartorius, David. “Limits of Loyalty: Race and the Public Sphere in Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1845–1898.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003.
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  731. Analyzes Afro-Cuban allegiance to colonial rule in late-19th-century Cienfuegos, Cuba. Convincingly argues that loyalty to Spain was one strategy that people of color employed in hopes of attaining more favorable socioeconomic status and political voice.
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