WHITHER ATLANTIC HISTORY?

Wheat's work, however, goes much further, establishing in six intensively documented chapters-plus an introduction, conclusion, and five useful appendices-that the contours of life and labor in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanishcolonized Caribbean were not only essentiall...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Reviews in American history 2017-03, Vol.45 (1), p.6-10
Main Author: Krug, Jessica A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
17th century
19th century
Archives & records
Imperialism
Plantations
Scholars
Slavery
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Wheat's work, however, goes much further, establishing in six intensively documented chapters-plus an introduction, conclusion, and five useful appendices-that the contours of life and labor in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanishcolonized Caribbean were not only essentially African, but were connected to two very specific regional African histories. Since the advent of the first version of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database in 1999, scholars have been far better equipped to speak of the demographic contours of the enslaved people arriving in particular times and places in the Americas, rendering forever untenable Mintz and Price's longstanding claim that Africans arrived in the Americas in "heterogeneous crowds. Matching his impressive immersion in the archives is Wheat's exhaustive knowledge of a variety of relevant secondary literatures in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. [...]Wheat is able to avoid reinventing any type of scholarly wheel, instead focusing on questioning many of the problematic foundational assumptions that animate earlier work.
ISSN:0048-7511
1080-6628
1080-6628
DOI:10.1353/rah.2017.0001