Abstract
Without much doubt the grimmest corner of the early modern Atlantic world was the African slave trade. Much has been written about it, but scholars have yet to exhaust the possibilities. David Wheat’s new book offers an original approach, stressing the impact the commerce in human chattel had at both ends of the circuit. At the African terminus, Wheat’s focus is on Upper Guinea and West Central Africa, each at its given time a major source of slave exports and each affected by its participation in specific ways. On the American end, the author directs our attention to the Spanish Caribbean, a region that we are accustomed to thinking came late to plantation-scale agricultural production and, therefore, to the importation of enslaved peoples in significant numbers. As it turns out, at least according to Wheat, we have not been seeing the entire picture. In places such as Cuba, the plantation system did not, in fact, emerge until the late eighteenth century, but the Africanization of the population dated from the very beginning.
In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries the Portuguese established themselves firmly on the African coast and on offshore positions such as the Cape Verde Islands, the bases from which they began commercial production of sugar cane in their insular possessions, in Portugal itself, and later in Brazil. According to Wheat, seaborne connections linking these sites fostered the growth of a Luso-African cultural complex, which served to unite the centres that produced the slave labour supply with those that employed it. The slave trade certainly introduced African beliefs, practices, and linguistic influences into the Americas, but Wheat reminds us that the process operated in reverse as well, exposing African communities to Iberian ways. Whether from Guinea or Angola, Christianized Africans who spoke some Portuguese could play key intermediary roles not only aboard slaving vessels, but also among New World enslaved populations.
The chronological span of Wheat’s study corresponds to the so-called Iberian Union (1580–1640), during which the same Habsburg monarch occupied the thrones of both Spain and Portugal. While it lasted, the joining of the crowns provided readier access for Portuguese slavers to markets in the Spanish Caribbean, a region defined here more or less as Cuba, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, plus the mainland territories of what are today Colombia, Panama and the Central American republics. Despite the failure of early attempts at gold mining and sugar cane production in the Spanish islands, demand for African slaves persisted, due first to the loss to disease of virtually the entire indigenous population, and second to the fact that Europeans were not much inclined to settle where economic prospects were meagre. Even if they did so they were likely to avoid employment at tasks they associated with low social status.
The islands and mainland coastal zones of the Spanish Caribbean may be characterized as what the Argentine historian Margarita Gascón has called ‘imperial space’, defined as territory that may not be economically productive, but whose value to the metropolis is determined by its strategic location. In the absence of a European or native labour supply, the challenge facing Spanish authorities was how to populate and defend lands that otherwise had little to offer. As David Wheat convincingly argues, the solution to this dilemma was the importation of forced migrants from Africa. These enslaved persons came to accumulate in and around major port cities, specifically Cartagena, Havana, Panama and Santo Domingo, where their role was that of ‘surrogate settlers’. Rather than perform gang labour on sugar cane plantations, as probably would have been the case had they been landed in Brazil or, later on, on one of the non-Spanish islands in the Lesser Antilles, they worked as household help, skilled artisans, small-scale agriculturalists and herdsmen. In many cases, they enjoyed considerable autonomy and they often found paths to freedom, taking advantage of opportunities for social mobility in militia service and coming to enjoy social status roughly equivalent to that of non-elite Europeans.
To fulfil their appointed role in Caribbean society, newly-arrived Africans required rapid assimilation. Using conversion to Christianity as a proxy for cultural assimilation, Wheat makes imaginative use of Havana sacramental records to reveal the often quite brief intervals between the time specific enslaved Africans were baptized and the time that those same persons appeared as godparents to other slaves receiving the same sacrament. As the author argues, the assimilation process may actually have begun aboard ship during the Atlantic crossing and been facilitated there by Luso-African crew members. Such intermediaries may well have been slaves themselves, but they sailed as ship’s company rather than as cargo. Wheat does not employ Stephen Greenblatt’s term ‘go-betweens’, but he provides many examples of African individuals who fulfilled precisely that function in the Spanish Caribbean. Enslaved persons who spoke some Spanish or Portuguese were particularly valued as interpreters, and even more so if they happened to know one or more African languages other than their own. In Cartagena, Jesuit missionaries such as Alonso de Sandoval and St. Peter Claver found multilingual Africans of great utility both as disciples for the new faith and as what we might today call ethnographic informants.
Deeply grounded in the voluminous secondary literature as well as prodigious exploitation of archival materials in Spain, Colombia and Cuba, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640, represents a major contribution in several related fields. It is highly recommended to scholars in Atlantic and Caribbean studies, Africana studies, colonial Spanish American history and many other lines of inquiry. It should be accessible as well not only to postgraduate students, but also to undergraduates.