Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean: The Greater Antilles, 1493–1550

Abstract

The sixteenth-century Caribbean is often overshadowed in histories of colonial Spanish America. After Christopher Columbus, Spaniards spilled from the Caribbean into Mexico and Peru. They left behind empty islands that would patiently await plantation slavery, imperial competition, and belated significance a century later. Or so the history of the Caribbean has sometimes been told. In contrast, Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean: The Greater Antilles, 1493–1550 by Ida Altman argues that the region had enduring transatlantic importance as successive generations of European, Black, and Indigenous inhabitants created a distinctively Caribbean society. While threatened by disease and violence, the Spanish cities on the islands were sustained in the first half of the sixteenth century by a diversifying economy, multiethnic households, and the labor of enslaved or coerced men and women.Joining a recent burst of scholarship on the early Spanish Caribbean by Molly A. Warsh, David Wheat, Erin Woodruff Stone, and Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean stands apart for its focus on the Spanish settlers on the islands. Based on extensive archival research in administrative reports, ecclesiastical investigations, and personal correspondence, the book creates a rich mosaic of fragmentary lives and glimpsed relationships. The book devotes chapters to the initial European invasion of the islands, the destabilizing presence of death and disease, the political and legal administration of the islands, the arrival of the Catholic Church, and the transitional changes that Caribbean society underwent in the middle of the sixteenth century.The final chapter, concerning the role of women in Caribbean society, is particularly compelling as it traces the varied biographies of Spanish women on the islands alongside the faintly documented Indigenous and Black women who often lived in the same households. Altman analyzes the myriad roles played by the region's women, ranging from the powerful to the powerless. Some Spanish women exercised great political and social influence on the islands. Yet the lives of other women offer a counterpoint of difficulty, suffering, and oppression. This attention to the experiences of Caribbean women is not limited to the final chapter and appears throughout the book. For example, the lists of laborers for one estate on Puerto Rico reveal a growing proportion of elderly Indigenous women as other laborers apparently either died or fled the estate.The book simultaneously interweaves historical details from the four main islands of the Greater Antilles (Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica) while nodding to their local distinctions. As a work of social history, the book excavates a profusion of named individuals, and a few emerge as vivid characters in their own right. One such figure is the priest Álvaro de Castro, who appears in nearly every chapter and who stands out for his ceaseless energy, commercial entanglements, untrammeled sexual relations, and wild eruptions of violence. He enjoyed a long and successful career in the Caribbean church. Altman describes Castro as emblematic of his society's “distinctive juncture of law, the church, criminality, and economic opportunism” (p. 206).Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean makes a pointed case for the complexity of the region's social relations. However, as Altman notes repeatedly, the documentary sources focus on Spanish experiences, and it is undeniably difficult to locate Black and Indigenous people within this lopsided archive. A reader skimming the book might miss the many places in which Black and Indigenous people do appear in the narrative. The book is laudably rigorous in avoiding speculation or overinterpretation in its use of archival evidence, and it describes regular contact between different segments of society without embellishment. In many ways, this approach captures the mundane and quotidian nature of cross-cultural relations for the period. Yet this approach may limit the book's utility to readers looking specifically for Black and Indigenous histories of the Caribbean. A careful reader will find many elements of those histories in this book, but they are subordinate to the histories of people who directly produced, signed, or testified within the sources: Spanish property owners, government officials, and church leaders. Whether the reader finds this narrow methodological approach to be a feature or a bug may depend on what they are hoping to find in a history of the Caribbean.Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean is an impressive achievement in meticulous archival research that will bring the complexity of early Spanish society in the Americas to the attention of a wider audience. Historians of gender will value Altman's attention to the lives of Caribbean women, while historians of Spanish colonialism will appreciate the book's precise study of political and urban development in the Greater Antilles. Finally, the book will be an invaluable resource to Caribbean scholars looking to understand the history of the region in the early sixteenth century on a deeply human scale.