Alejandro de la Fuente’s new book explores a critical but neglected milieu in the formation of the early Atlantic world: sixteenth-century Havana. For too long, scholars have reduced the Caribbean’s Atlantic significance to its plantation spaces and phases. De la Fuente’s wonderfully researched and vividly documented social historical account of early Havana provides an important antidote to this imbalanced perspective. Weaving together notarial, parish, and local government records, de la Fuente offers a textured portrait of daily life, commerce, and society in this port city amid the economic developments and social transformation of the 1550 – 1620 period, 150 years before the colony’s great sugar expansion.
The book charts Havana’s rise from a tiny coastal town with only a few hundred residents in 1550 to one of the more important population centers within Spanish America with a population of nearly ten thousand by the early 1600s. De la Fuente controverts...
