This dissertation explores African and Portuguese roles in the rise of the Spanish Caribbean's most important port cities, with particular emphasis on Cartagena de Indias and Havana. During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Portuguese and Luso-African mariners, merchants, and immigrants linked the Spanish Caribbean to a broader Portuguese maritime world. This network's most significant outcome was the forced migration of tens of thousands of African captives, funneled to the Caribbean in overlapping waves from Upper Guinea, Lower Guinea, and West Central Africa. Spain's heavy reliance on sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants to populate and sustain key Caribbean seaports resulted in social transformations which often mirrored or directly responded to contemporary events in precolonial Western Africa. Rather than portraying the post-conquest Caribbean as a "backwater" within a historical framework that privileges Mexico or Peru, this study argues that the early colonial Caribbean may be more accurately viewed as an extension of the early modern South Atlantic world.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-05272009-181157 |
| Date | 02 June 2009 |
| Creators | Wheat, David |
| Contributors | Jane G. Landers, Marshall C. Eakin, Daniel H. Usner, Jr., David J. Wasserstein, William R. Fowler |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-05272009-181157/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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