This provocative volume thoughtfully resituates the late sixteenth- to mid-seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean world as part of the expanding Luso-African black Atlantic. African agency is the operative concept driving the argument that this world received as many influences from Atlantic Africa as it did “from early modern Spain” (4). Because they formed a demographic majority and provided the bulk of the labor that established and sustained Spanish imperial ambitions, sub-Saharan Africans, David Wheat tells us, became de facto colonists of the Spanish Caribbean.
The introduction deserves a careful reading to clearly apprehend Wheat’s agenda: to complicate the notion of European colonization of the Americas by reinstating the Caribbean region in the historiography of Spanish America as a dynamic periphery and by addressing the hitherto invisibility of Africans in historical narratives before the second half of the seventeenth century; and to challenge assumptions about obligatory connections between slavery and sugar exploitation in...
