Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean

Abstract

This concise yet deeply researched volume joins a growing body of work that attends to the enslavement of Indigenous people in the colonial Americas. Distinguishing her book from studies of Indigenous slavery that focus on the North American mainland and that consider the period from the seventeenth century onward, Stone traces the enslavement of people native to the circum-Caribbean from the beginning of Spanish colonization in the 1490s until the passage of the New Laws in 1542. Arguing that “the search for and profit from Indian captives was central to the development of Spanish colonial institutions,” Stone convincingly demonstrates that Indigenous slavery and the slave trade were integral to Spanish exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Americas (p. 30). By combining archaeological and written colonial sources, she also succeeds in creating a detailed ethnohistorical account of the Caribbean's original inhabitants and their initial experiences of and responses to Spanish contact. The resulting work highlights the key role that Indigenous slavery played in early Iberian expansion while simultaneously striving to keep Indigenous people at the center of analysis.Among the most welcome elements of Stone's work is her careful attention to Indigenous social and political dynamics from the precontact era until the mid-sixteenth century. In chapter 1, Stone makes deft use of available archaeological and archival evidence to analyze fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iberia and the Greater Antilles, respectively, demonstrating that both societies were dynamic, expanding, and already engaged in practices of slavery that would continue to evolve after contact.Stone's careful reconstruction of the precontact Caribbean—a society that she convincingly shows was shaped by long-distance trade networks long before European arrival—in turn allows her to explore varied Indigenous responses to Spanish arrival. In chapter 2, Stone reconstructs why some Antillean caciques allied with the Spanish, while others—usually those who wielded more power at the time of Spanish contact—did not.Whereas Nancy van Deusen's Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (2015) explored how freedom suits brought by Indigenous Americans enslaved in early modern Iberia shaped metropolitan understandings of race, Stone is primarily concerned with the demographic, economic, legal, and social consequences of this large-scale trade in human beings in Spain's newly claimed colonies. In chapter 3, she shows how early sixteenth-century debates over Indigenous slavery reveal its importance in both religious and secular affairs, while also illustrating the limits of crown authority in the Americas.Chapters 4 and 5 explore how slaving shaped Spanish colonization of Florida, Mexico, and Central and South America, as Indigenous slavery became “one of the largest businesses in the New World” by the 1520s (p. 104). While some Indigenous captives became “involuntary collaborators” who served as translators and guides for Spanish explorers, thousands more were trafficked to the Andes or the Caribbean (p. 94).As Stone shows in her final chapter, Indigenous slavery in the circum-Caribbean eventually ended not because it was replaced by African slavery but because it became unsustainable. Although African and Indigenous people worked alongside one another in the first decades of the sixteenth century, repeated Indigenous and interethnic uprisings in the 1520s and 1530s, coupled with the increasing availability of enslaved Africans, led the crown to pass the New Laws in 1542. Realizing that “indigenous cooperation was crucial for the economic prosperity of their American colonies,” Spanish officials banned Indigenous slavery even in cases of war (p. 155). Yet much damage had already been done: as Stone shows, Spanish enslavement and forced movement of Indigenous people played an important and little-recognized role in facilitating early colonial expansion. Just as important, other imperial powers “followed the path of Spanish slavers, continuing to enslave indigenous peoples” elsewhere in the Americas (p. 162).The lack of specificity with respect to numbers is a common problem in studies of Indigenous slavery, and Stone's estimate that “between 250,000 and 500,000” individuals fell victim to the Spanish trade may frustrate some readers (p. 7). As Stone explains, however, the nature of available documents complicates the task of quantifying Indigenous bondage. Whereas European slavers trafficked people from West Africa as human cargo, leading them to produce shipping records, Indigenous people were often captured by individual raiders who sought to hide their activities, and “labor-starved residents of the Greater Antilles” proved willing to conceal the origins of their laborers (p. 113). Rather than focusing on numbers, Stone emphasizes how slavery “scattered diverse ethnic groups and cultures across the Americas,” changing the lives of countless individuals and helping to forge new ethnic groups, such as the Kalinago (p. 157).Captives of Conquest is short and readable, making it an excellent choice for courses on comparative slavery, Indigenous history, colonial Latin America, and the Caribbean-Atlantic world. Scholars interested in the origins and consequences of Indigenous slavery in the Americas have much to gain by engaging with this groundbreaking work.