The seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean as global crossroads: transimperial and transregional approaches

Abstract

Historical scholarship on the seventeenth-century Caribbean generally has focused on the rise of Dutch, English, and French settlements in the region and commercial export agriculture, especially the cultivation of sugar using enslaved African labor. From the vantage point of the Spanish Caribbean, however, the seventeenth century looks quite different. In theGreaterAntilles, on the Isthmus of Panama, and along theCaribbean’s southern littoral Spanish towns, the majority of them ports, had been established a century or more earlier (Altman 2021; Díaz Ceballos 2020). Initially mostly oriented to serving extractive enterprises such asmining and sugar cultivation (Gelpí Baíz 2000; Sued Badillo 2001; Rodríguez Morel 2012) and shipping livestock and provisions, Caribbean port towns became part of an active, sprawling maritime network serving local, regional, and transatlantic economies. Spanish expansion in theCaribbeanduring the 1490s and early 1500s dependedheavily on the subjugation and incorporation of Indigenous societies, with diverse responses from Amerindian communities, including sustained resistance (Mena García 2011; Farnsworth 2019; Stone 2021). Along with violence and the demands of Spanish colonialism, epidemic disease took a notoriously steep toll on Indigenous populations (Henige 1998; Livi-Bacci 2003), while ostensibly ‘Spanish’ society, particularly outside of urban areas, became increasingly ethnically mixed with a strong Indigenous component (Schwartz 1997; Altman 2013). During the 1560s or 1570s—at least half a century before northern Europeans began to establish permanent footholds in the region—Spanish activities in the Caribbean entered a second phase with the consolidation of the Indies fleets, and Havana and Cartagena de Indias overtook Santo Domingo as leading centers of trade (Vidal Ortega 2002; Fuente et al. 2008). By the late sixteenth century, sugar production inHispaniola and Puerto Rico had declined significantly while ranching, farming, regional commerce, and in some cases mining came to predominate in colonial Spanish Caribbean economies (Abello Vives and Bassi Arévalo 2006; Giusti-Cordero 2009; Cromwell 2014; Stark 2015). Perhaps the most dramatic event separating the sixteenth century from the seventeenth was the forced depopulation of western Hispaniola in 1604–1606, along with other draconian measures designed to stem unregulated trade and enforce Crown control (Ponce Vázquez 2020). In short, while scholarship on areas settled or seized by northern European powers tends to treat the seventeenth century as a natural chronological starting point, historical analysis of the SpanishCaribbean during the 1600s provides an