While recent works in Atlantic world history and related fields have increasingly emphasized the multiplicity of people and ideas that contributed to the production of colonial scientific knowledge, few have adequately addressed Amerindian perspectives of and participation in these cross-cultural exchanges. In her monograph Captives of Conquest: Slavery and the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean, Erin Woodruff Stone seeks to push past the usual dyad of European colonizer and enslaved African to seriously consider how Taíno, Carib, Incan, and other Amerindian groups’ interactions with Spanish colonizers in the first decades after Columbian contact helped shape colonial power dynamics for centuries to come. Contesting the traditional narrative of a simple collapse of Amerindian populations due to the introduction of European diseases and warfare, Stone’s Captives of Conquest argues that the deadly working conditions and forced relocations caused by the Spanish enslavement of New World peoples were more significant factors in the...
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