The reading this week analyzes the state of African slaves in the Caribbean. What caught me off guard was the autonomy that blacks in these islands. Due in part to the lack of Spanish immigration to these islands, African were able to obtain some positions of power in the community. One would wonder had the English not got involved and introduced the sugar plantation system, would they have thrived on their own as they were or were they susceptible to outside influence due to the nature of their status among other European powers?
I think this is a very good point. We should for our discussion really go into detail about the comparisons between Anglophone countries and Latin American countries on the differences between the slavery institutions. Clearly their is a difference between both societies.
I observed the same point; I hypothesize that non-Iberian and Iberian could coexist mutually. Both of them were beneficial from the Caribbean's resources. In fact, one of the Iberian's goals was to establish circum-Caribbean ports, while non-Iberian looked for a place to live and work.
I was also caught off guard by Wheat’s argument. Your question is very fascinating and it’s also one that Wheats suggests in his book. I would like to also hear a discussion on the topic of the English introducing the sugar plantation system and how without them it would have been possible for Africans to “thrive on their own.”
I concur with Yosmiar on the hypothesis that Non-Iberians and and Iberians can coexist, it seems to have worked well in Havana and other port cities. The description of how Havana passed some laws against free people of color, or denied permits, and then these were ultimately either ignored or rejected by the Spanish crown is fascinating. Not just ignored, but to see a reversal in 12 years is astonishing.
This weeks reading was one of my most eye opening when discussing a topic we have previously discussed but, not in great detail. We have discussed Africans in New Spain but we have clearly not gone into as much detail as the David Wheat reading goes into. He goes into great detail about the terms "surrogate colonists" and "Ladino" are discussions I have not heard about before. This complicates the idea of Spanish slavery in comparison to Anglo-based slavery. Free Africans in a lot of cases out numbered whites in certain areas and this clearly complicates what many think was race based slavery by the Spanish, even though its pretty clear that is the case.
“A similar pattern appears to have unfolded in Cartagena, where, by the 1770’s, free people of color constituted more than 60 percent of the province’s inhabitants and almost half of the city’s urban population.” (Wheat 263) The idea of a Latinized African "Ladino" is something that seems to be important as to why some Africans were enslaved and others were not. This should be a big part of our discussion this week.
I agree with everything you stated. I would just like to expand upon it that I found it interesting the weight of names and identifications had in defining a slave or group. Whether an individual was from east or west Africa, what region, whether they were "Latinized" or not, etc. These subgroups have significance that I was not aware of before that I appreciated the detailed explanation that Wheat offers. I think these more specific groups also give us a better understanding of race as it is perceived in the time period we are looking at this week. We have discussed how race does not have a static definition in previous classes, and I think that how larger groups of people differentiate between individuals within them is a contributing factor in the definition of race.
Same here Melanie, I thought it was interesting to see the importance of ethnonyms in order to identify other slaves as well as place them in a hierarchy among each other. This led to the classification of "negro de ley" or "top quality blacks", contributing to this order even further.
Extremely well documented and detailed book. What stood out for me was everyday social interaction and the economic role of free women of color (morenas horras/ mulatas libres) . It was refreshing to read a book about the slave trade that went beyond painting black women as weak and defenseless. I for one was completely blind to the fact that some of them were independent property and business owners that took full advantage of their positions to benefit themselves and their children. I would have enjoy a small section dedicated to the relationship between free women of color and the slaves they owned or perhaps other family members who were still enslaved.
David Wheat’s book describes the Africanization of the Spanish Caribbean, almost two centuries before the rise of the Anglo colonial slave trade, with Latinized Africans, and free people of color acting more as colonists rather than as plantation slaves. Wheat is careful to stress that “the extensive participation of sub-Saharan Africans in Spain’s colonization, although not resembling models of later monoculture slave systems; it would be inaccurate to suggest that these enslaved Africans consciously collaborated in the colonization of the Caribbean.” They were after all, forced migrant populations that were displaced and suffered “multiple forms of brutality, equal to what slaves would endure 200 years later.” What do you all think?
Roberto, I had not seen your post before I published mine, but I think we are actually coming from the same place and asking a similar question. So, I will respond to yours, and maybe answer my question in the process. I feel it is extremely important for historians to revisit historical periods and phenomena in order to challenge preexisiting narratives and accounts. I think this is especially true when studying and attempting to tell the stories of marginalized peoples, slaves included. One of the challenges of this kind of work is the absence of personal narratives and accounts. This often leads historians with the difficult task of finding other sources and sometimes being creative with those sources in order to get at the truth (small t). The alternative is to not tell the story. Thus, I feel that Wheat does an amazing job of weaving a coherent and responsible narrative out of some fairly cut and dry (at least on the surface) sources: ship records, church records, census records, etc. I also love the way he is able to assign agency to the people in his study and bring out the fluidity of racial constructions in this context. That being said, I think his book can easily be misread as a sort of "slavery lite" wherein the "brutality" is overshadowed or not really mentioned. Like you, perhaps, I can not quite bring myself to a point of forgetting those realities and the suffering you mention here. I wonder if there were a way to tell this history and, at the same time, make that brutality a little more clear without undermining the book's central project.
Towards the very end of his well researched and provocative book, Wheat includes a very appropriate disclaimer, stating that he is not denying the existence of "multiple forms of brutality... in the early modern world" and acknowledging that slavery might have been just as "destructive" as would be in later centuries (264). While I feel this is a responsible statement, I have to say I am somewhat uncomfortable with what seems, at times, to be a very benign and antiseptic account of slavery. Part of this stems from his project itself, which is well supported and brilliantly argued, and part of this may be the nature of the sources with which he was working. Does anyone else feel somewhat uncomfortable with his depiction of human bondage in 16th century Africa and the Caribbean?
I had a similar feeling of discomfort while reading the Prologue, Mike, and for a similar reason as your own; "forced migrants" (3) felt like it was pivoting away from the real brutality other texts that we've discussed in this class (Davis' "Inhuman Bondage," in particular) have tried to include. By the time Wheat starts discussing amancebimento, I realized that much of the violence that we've come to identify with enslavement in the Americas had been pushed out of my mind and so, reading about free women of color exerting influence in Western Africa and in the Spanish Caribbean, I almost took their stories for granted. I think if the disclaimer that you pointed out would've been introduced much earlier than the very end, I might not have been "lulled" into that state.
But, maybe that's what Wheat intended? Historians or not, I think we're all aware of the brutality and cruelty that characterized racialized slavery in America. Maybe Wheat didn't feel like he *had* to write a book that, like others, finds itself grounded in violence, and maybe trusted that his readers would come into his book fully-aware of that history, and know to see his text as being but one piece of a complex puzzle?
Since my comment on Mike's post above speaks to the macro concern I had intended to include in my post for this week--how violence should/shouldn't be depicted in Wheat's text--I'll raise another question that I had: did anyone else feel like Wheat had an opportunity to discuss, even if just peripherally, about caste in the Spanish Carribean, but didn't pursue it?
Although I remember that the Martinez article from the previous week claimed that sistemas de casta (in Mexico) began to "surface in the second half of the sixteenth century" (31), just out of the range of Wheat's book, I kept feeling like it was a discourse that should've been included--especially when covering amancebimiento. In class, we've recognized the role that lineage played in the formation and fortification of the socio-economic categories of the New World, and so I felt that having a discussion on the offspring of European men and Luso-African/women of color would be useful.
In the book of this week marks the diversity of social and economic perspectives into Spanish Caribbean societies. In fact, the social integration of new races (indigenous and African) into the Iberian societies opened new doors a multiracial society. In this case, the author explains the new race of Latin, “Like other non-Iberians in early modern Iberian societies, African migrants to the Spanish Caribbean were commonly classified according to their degree of familiarity with Spanish or Portuguese languages and cultures” (pg.216). The exciting part of this is that eventually Luso-Africans, Ladinos, or Amerindians could obtain specific access to have some privileges as Iberians did. With this in mind, the mixing of the race could consider as a positive way to achieve status to coexist in a world dominated by Iberians. I just wonder, if that could happen in the Caribbean, Why didn't the coexistence of Africans or Africans-decedents progress in North American during the 1700s and 1800s, too?
It may be a bit nitpicky, but I was really struck by the fact that slave traders would bring infants to the Caribbean. I understood the possible reasons infants ended up captured such as the “kikumba,” baggage trains which were women, children, and noncombatants who travelled with armies and were coveted as potential captives by the enemies (pg. 95-6), but it still seems so harsh that a nursing infant is bought and sold before they are even aware of their own being. On page 99 Wheat displays in a chart several ships that came to the Caribbean carrying “crias de pecho,” nursing infants. I just can’t imagine what purpose infants would have to a slaveholder or why in an economical sense it would be worth the trouble of bringing an infant on such a hard journey across the ocean to be sold. To me this is also demonstrative of another aspect of the brutality of slavery that some of the other posts point out as missing in some of Wheats perspectives.
Another point I would like to examine is the power dynamics that are explored in the first few chapters of the book. Usually when slavery is taught lines are drawn along skin color creating a dichotomy between black and white, slaves and slaveowners. Wheat articulates that this relationship is more nuanced as there is a hierarchy within the slave population based on their area of origin. Slavery also allowed for those who participated in the slave trade to create a merchant class, such as the Luando elite. I think that really looking at these hierarchies and the nuances of these dynamics is an important topic to discuss to better understand the slave trade as something more complicated than just European enslavement of different African populations and the impact of this forced migration.
Wheat’s account of Caribbean life before African Slavery (the way we know it), was a complete mind-blowing experience that I had never heard of. African roles in Spanish colonization in this book really challenges the idea that the Iberians were the ones to introduce “contemporary” slavery in the Americas. This idea can be seen when Wheat says that, “Africans only became visible with the arrival of Northern Europeans and the establishment of sugar plantations” (e-book 347). This complicates the overall discourse that is assumed by many, which according to Wheat seems to place the African as the original full-scale colonists in the Carribean, rather than what we would refer to as slaves. What do you think of this argument? Did Wheat’s evidence convince you of this?
I agree with everyone about how well-documented and detailed the work is, as it seems the only way to really show us his idea. Besides this, I was fascinated with the idea of a "surrogate (or de facto) colonist". The overlapping of culture and influence was shocking to see and I had no idea about this development prior to the book. Everyone here mentions ideas that peaked my interest. I was mostly interested in the social structure that developed around this "new colonist" and despite how they were being used, developed around this structure and found ways to prosper. Also his attention to gender was nice to see, that it wasnt just a single scoped view.
I think it's been said enough that this book is detailed and mind-opening about the way and autonomy that slaves, and those of slave descent had acquired in the Spainish Caribbean.
As Melanie points out, though the brutality of slavery is equally shocking. The fact that the colonial Governor's aided in warfare in Africa, just to produce more captives for slavery. That Wheat mentions that during one particular Governorship of a colony, the slave trafficking was at a record high. My question for everyone is, while Wheat highlights the autonomy of free people of color, the blurring of lines and the ability to obtain freedom and the success of freed people, does this accurately highlight (or detail) the difficulty that slaves and others had in getting there?
The reading this week analyzes the state of African slaves in the Caribbean. What caught me off guard was the autonomy that blacks in these islands. Due in part to the lack of Spanish immigration to these islands, African were able to obtain some positions of power in the community. One would wonder had the English not got involved and introduced the sugar plantation system, would they have thrived on their own as they were or were they susceptible to outside influence due to the nature of their status among other European powers?
ReplyDeleteI think this is a very good point. We should for our discussion really go into detail about the comparisons between Anglophone countries and Latin American countries on the differences between the slavery institutions. Clearly their is a difference between both societies.
DeleteI observed the same point; I hypothesize that non-Iberian and Iberian could coexist mutually. Both of them were beneficial from the Caribbean's resources. In fact, one of the Iberian's goals was to establish circum-Caribbean ports, while non-Iberian looked for a place to live and work.
DeleteI was also caught off guard by Wheat’s argument. Your question is very fascinating and it’s also one that Wheats suggests in his book. I would like to also hear a discussion on the topic of the English introducing the sugar plantation system and how without them it would have been possible for Africans to “thrive on their own.”
DeleteI concur with Yosmiar on the hypothesis that Non-Iberians and and Iberians can coexist, it seems to have worked well in Havana and other port cities. The description of how Havana passed some laws against free people of color, or denied permits, and then these were ultimately either ignored or rejected by the Spanish crown is fascinating. Not just ignored, but to see a reversal in 12 years is astonishing.
DeleteThis weeks reading was one of my most eye opening when discussing a topic we have previously discussed but, not in great detail. We have discussed Africans in New Spain but we have clearly not gone into as much detail as the David Wheat reading goes into. He goes into great detail about the terms "surrogate colonists" and "Ladino" are discussions I have not heard about before. This complicates the idea of Spanish slavery in comparison to Anglo-based slavery. Free Africans in a lot of cases out numbered whites in certain areas and this clearly complicates what many think was race based slavery by the Spanish, even though its pretty clear that is the case.
ReplyDelete“A similar pattern appears to have unfolded in Cartagena, where, by the 1770’s, free people of color constituted more than 60 percent of the province’s inhabitants and almost half of the city’s urban population.” (Wheat 263) The idea of a Latinized African "Ladino" is something that seems to be important as to why some Africans were enslaved and others were not. This should be a big part of our discussion this week.
I agree with everything you stated. I would just like to expand upon it that I found it interesting the weight of names and identifications had in defining a slave or group. Whether an individual was from east or west Africa, what region, whether they were "Latinized" or not, etc. These subgroups have significance that I was not aware of before that I appreciated the detailed explanation that Wheat offers. I think these more specific groups also give us a better understanding of race as it is perceived in the time period we are looking at this week. We have discussed how race does not have a static definition in previous classes, and I think that how larger groups of people differentiate between individuals within them is a contributing factor in the definition of race.
DeleteSame here Melanie, I thought it was interesting to see the importance of ethnonyms in order to identify other slaves as well as place them in a hierarchy among each other. This led to the classification of "negro de ley" or "top quality blacks", contributing to this order even further.
DeleteExtremely well documented and detailed book. What stood out for me was everyday social interaction and the economic role of free women of color (morenas horras/ mulatas libres) . It was refreshing to read a book about the slave trade that went beyond painting black women as weak and defenseless. I for one was completely blind to the fact that some of them were independent property and business owners that took full advantage of their positions to benefit themselves and their children. I would have enjoy a small section dedicated to the relationship between free women of color and the slaves they owned or perhaps other family members who were still enslaved.
ReplyDeleteDavid Wheat’s book describes the Africanization of the Spanish Caribbean, almost two centuries before the rise of the Anglo colonial slave trade, with Latinized Africans, and free people of color acting more as colonists rather than as plantation slaves. Wheat is careful to stress that “the extensive participation of sub-Saharan Africans in Spain’s colonization, although not resembling models of later monoculture slave systems; it would be inaccurate to suggest that these enslaved Africans consciously collaborated in the colonization of the Caribbean.” They were after all, forced migrant populations that were displaced and suffered “multiple forms of brutality, equal to what slaves would endure 200 years later.” What do you all think?
ReplyDeleteRoberto, I had not seen your post before I published mine, but I think we are actually coming from the same place and asking a similar question. So, I will respond to yours, and maybe answer my question in the process. I feel it is extremely important for historians to revisit historical periods and phenomena in order to challenge preexisiting narratives and accounts. I think this is especially true when studying and attempting to tell the stories of marginalized peoples, slaves included. One of the challenges of this kind of work is the absence of personal narratives and accounts. This often leads historians with the difficult task of finding other sources and sometimes being creative with those sources in order to get at the truth (small t). The alternative is to not tell the story. Thus, I feel that Wheat does an amazing job of weaving a coherent and responsible narrative out of some fairly cut and dry (at least on the surface) sources: ship records, church records, census records, etc. I also love the way he is able to assign agency to the people in his study and bring out the fluidity of racial constructions in this context. That being said, I think his book can easily be misread as a sort of "slavery lite" wherein the "brutality" is overshadowed or not really mentioned. Like you, perhaps, I can not quite bring myself to a point of forgetting those realities and the suffering you mention here. I wonder if there were a way to tell this history and, at the same time, make that brutality a little more clear without undermining the book's central project.
DeleteTowards the very end of his well researched and provocative book, Wheat includes a very appropriate disclaimer, stating that he is not denying the existence of "multiple forms of brutality... in the early modern world" and acknowledging that slavery might have been just as "destructive" as would be in later centuries (264). While I feel this is a responsible statement, I have to say I am somewhat uncomfortable with what seems, at times, to be a very benign and antiseptic account of slavery. Part of this stems from his project itself, which is well supported and brilliantly argued, and part of this may be the nature of the sources with which he was working. Does anyone else feel somewhat uncomfortable with his depiction of human bondage in 16th century Africa and the Caribbean?
ReplyDeleteI had a similar feeling of discomfort while reading the Prologue, Mike, and for a similar reason as your own; "forced migrants" (3) felt like it was pivoting away from the real brutality other texts that we've discussed in this class (Davis' "Inhuman Bondage," in particular) have tried to include. By the time Wheat starts discussing amancebimento, I realized that much of the violence that we've come to identify with enslavement in the Americas had been pushed out of my mind and so, reading about free women of color exerting influence in Western Africa and in the Spanish Caribbean, I almost took their stories for granted. I think if the disclaimer that you pointed out would've been introduced much earlier than the very end, I might not have been "lulled" into that state.
DeleteBut, maybe that's what Wheat intended? Historians or not, I think we're all aware of the brutality and cruelty that characterized racialized slavery in America. Maybe Wheat didn't feel like he *had* to write a book that, like others, finds itself grounded in violence, and maybe trusted that his readers would come into his book fully-aware of that history, and know to see his text as being but one piece of a complex puzzle?
Hi all,
ReplyDeleteSince my comment on Mike's post above speaks to the macro concern I had intended to include in my post for this week--how violence should/shouldn't be depicted in Wheat's text--I'll raise another question that I had: did anyone else feel like Wheat had an opportunity to discuss, even if just peripherally, about caste in the Spanish Carribean, but didn't pursue it?
Although I remember that the Martinez article from the previous week claimed that sistemas de casta (in Mexico) began to "surface in the second half of the sixteenth century" (31), just out of the range of Wheat's book, I kept feeling like it was a discourse that should've been included--especially when covering amancebimiento. In class, we've recognized the role that lineage played in the formation and fortification of the socio-economic categories of the New World, and so I felt that having a discussion on the offspring of European men and Luso-African/women of color would be useful.
Does anyone have any take on this?
In the book of this week marks the diversity of social and economic perspectives into Spanish Caribbean societies. In fact, the social integration of new races (indigenous and African) into the Iberian societies opened new doors a multiracial society. In this case, the author explains the new race of Latin, “Like other non-Iberians in early modern Iberian societies, African migrants to the Spanish Caribbean were commonly classified according to their degree of familiarity with Spanish or Portuguese languages and cultures” (pg.216). The exciting part of this is that eventually Luso-Africans, Ladinos, or Amerindians could obtain specific access to have some privileges as Iberians did. With this in mind, the mixing of the race could consider as a positive way to achieve status to coexist in a world dominated by Iberians. I just wonder, if that could happen in the Caribbean, Why didn't the coexistence of Africans or Africans-decedents progress in North American during the 1700s and 1800s, too?
ReplyDeleteIt may be a bit nitpicky, but I was really struck by the fact that slave traders would bring infants to the Caribbean. I understood the possible reasons infants ended up captured such as the “kikumba,” baggage trains which were women, children, and noncombatants who travelled with armies and were coveted as potential captives by the enemies (pg. 95-6), but it still seems so harsh that a nursing infant is bought and sold before they are even aware of their own being. On page 99 Wheat displays in a chart several ships that came to the Caribbean carrying “crias de pecho,” nursing infants. I just can’t imagine what purpose infants would have to a slaveholder or why in an economical sense it would be worth the trouble of bringing an infant on such a hard journey across the ocean to be sold. To me this is also demonstrative of another aspect of the brutality of slavery that some of the other posts point out as missing in some of Wheats perspectives.
ReplyDeleteAnother point I would like to examine is the power dynamics that are explored in the first few chapters of the book. Usually when slavery is taught lines are drawn along skin color creating a dichotomy between black and white, slaves and slaveowners. Wheat articulates that this relationship is more nuanced as there is a hierarchy within the slave population based on their area of origin. Slavery also allowed for those who participated in the slave trade to create a merchant class, such as the Luando elite. I think that really looking at these hierarchies and the nuances of these dynamics is an important topic to discuss to better understand the slave trade as something more complicated than just European enslavement of different African populations and the impact of this forced migration.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWheat’s account of Caribbean life before African Slavery (the way we know it), was a complete mind-blowing experience that I had never heard of. African roles in Spanish colonization in this book really challenges the idea that the Iberians were the ones to introduce “contemporary” slavery in the Americas. This idea can be seen when Wheat says that, “Africans only became visible with the arrival of Northern Europeans and the establishment of sugar plantations” (e-book 347). This complicates the overall discourse that is assumed by many, which according to Wheat seems to place the African as the original full-scale colonists in the Carribean, rather than what we would refer to as slaves. What do you think of this argument? Did Wheat’s evidence convince you of this?
ReplyDeleteI agree with everyone about how well-documented and detailed the work is, as it seems the only way to really show us his idea. Besides this, I was fascinated with the idea of a "surrogate (or de facto) colonist". The overlapping of culture and influence was shocking to see and I had no idea about this development prior to the book. Everyone here mentions ideas that peaked my interest. I was mostly interested in the social structure that developed around this "new colonist" and despite how they were being used, developed around this structure and found ways to prosper. Also his attention to gender was nice to see, that it wasnt just a single scoped view.
ReplyDeleteI think it's been said enough that this book is detailed and mind-opening about the way and autonomy that slaves, and those of slave descent had acquired in the Spainish Caribbean.
ReplyDeleteAs Melanie points out, though the brutality of slavery is equally shocking. The fact that the colonial Governor's aided in warfare in Africa, just to produce more captives for slavery. That Wheat mentions that during one particular Governorship of a colony, the slave trafficking was at a record high. My question for everyone is, while Wheat highlights the autonomy of free people of color, the blurring of lines and the ability to obtain freedom and the success of freed people, does this accurately highlight (or detail) the difficulty that slaves and others had in getting there?