The sixteenth-century Caribbean is often overshadowed in histories of colonial Spanish America. After Christopher Columbus, Spaniards spilled from the Caribbean into Mexico and Peru. They left behind empty islands that would patiently await plantation slavery, imperial competition, and belated significance a century later. Or so the history of the Caribbean has sometimes been told. In contrast, Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean: The Greater Antilles, 1493–1550 by Ida Altman argues that the region had enduring transatlantic importance as successive generations of European, Black, and Indigenous inhabitants created a distinctively Caribbean society. While threatened by disease and violence, the Spanish cities on the islands were sustained in the first half of the sixteenth century by a diversifying economy, multiethnic households, and the labor of enslaved or coerced men and women.
Joining a recent burst of scholarship on the early Spanish Caribbean by Molly A. Warsh, David Wheat, Erin Woodruff...
