Afterword: Looking backwards in time from the eighteenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic world

Abstract

Collectively, the pieces in this special issue shed light on the transatlantic African trade routes and transimperial networks of exchange that built Spanish Caribbean societies in the seventeenth century. As in later eras of Caribbean history, the African slave trade was the most powerful engine that drove this imperial boundary crossing. These essays demonstrate the lengths that local Spanish elites would go to in order to procure more enslaved African laborers, as well as the key role that that Africans played, along with Indigenous peoples, in shaping Spanish colonialism in the region. Although the issue focuses on the ‘Spanish Caribbean,’ there is nothing exclusively ‘Spanish’ about it. Treating the era of the Union of the two Crowns of Spain and Portugal (1580–1640) and the periods when the asiento slave-trading contract was in Portuguese, Genoese, and Dutch hands, the authors emphasize the role that Angolan, Portuguese, Dutch, Indigenous, and/or Jewish individuals played in building these Caribbean hubs and networks of exchange. Ambitious local elites in Spanish Caribbean ports leveraged relationships with pirates, slave traders, and foreign merchants in order to broker broader trading networks throughout the region. As the contribution of Moreno Álvarez demonstrates, Cartagena merchants also sought out other sources of capital—including ‘a salvage economy’ of shipwreck diving for Spanish pieces of eight —to break into the transatlantic slave trade when they lost state-sanctioned access to it through Portuguese traders in the 1640s. This new scholarship on the seventeenth-century Caribbean makes an important contribution to our greater understanding of the region. As Altman and Wheat have noted, Caribbean historiography before the eighteenth century is exceedingly thin, or at least it was until this generation of scholars, including those in this special issue, began to publish. But why is the historiography so sparse when, as Wheat and Altman note, scholars of the Spanish Caribbean are ‘blessed (or cursed) with an abundance of extant primary sources, many of which are located in peninsular Spanish archives’? Certainly the technical, paleographic challenges of these sources are considerable. Not every historian has the interest, skill set, or patience to mine these early documents, and doing so requires prodigious intellectual and financial resources that are increasingly scarce in the current landscape of higher education and public humanities. Additionally, the vastness of the sources waiting to be tapped poses problems of its own, given that until very recently the Archive of the Indies in Seville forbade photography and made reproduction