Caribbean Kaleidoscope: Convergence and Transformation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Lecture by Ida Altman, Professor Emerita, University of Florida

As Iberians in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries expanded into the Atlantic world they intentionally and unintentionally created conditions for the unprecedented convergence of peoples and cultures in the Caribbean that would transform them and the region as a whole. The dimensions and complexities of that process can be identified at nearly all levels. Over time, as other European nations became active in the Caribbean, contraband or extra-legal trade and efforts to stake out territorial claims generated other forms of convergence. Other Europeans followed many of the precedents that the Spanish had introduced in the Caribbean. Most notably, perhaps, in contrast to the controversy that arose over Spanish treatment of Indigenous peoples, the European nations that participated in the slave trade and used the labor of enslaved Africans in their colonies did so for decades without facing any serious protest or challenge. Perhaps, then, the most notable point of convergence in the Caribbean in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was Europeans’ across-the-board commitment to the use of coerced labor in their overseas territories, whether they depended on encomienda labor, indentured servants, or enslaved workers.

Ida Altman received her Ph.D. in history from the Johns Hopkins University in 1982. She taught at the University of New Orleans (1982–2006) and the University of Florida (2006–2017), where she served as chair of the History Department (2010–2014). She is the author, co-author, or editor of numerous books and articles on early modern Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world, including The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century, co-edited with David Wheat. Her prize-winning book, Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century (1989), was the first scholarly work to demonstrate the role of family, kinship, and local society in shaping the movement of people from Spain to Spanish America. The War for Mexico’s West: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524–1550 provides a full account of events in western Mexico leading up to and through the Mixton War, the response of the West’s Indigenous peoples to Spanish aggression, and the politics of early New Spain. Her most recent book is Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean: The Greater Antilles, 1493–1550.

Presented in conjunction with the 2024–25 Core Program, Early Global Caribbean.

About the 2024–25 Core Program: Early Global Caribbean
The Caribbean has been a site of global interaction and dramatic change for centuries. Although consideration of the impact of the forces of globalization on the region often focuses on the eighteenth-and-nineteenth-centuries era of sugar and slaves, Caribbean people’s engagement with those forces long predates the period of the plantation complex. Yet a concerted reckoning with earlier global dimensions of Caribbean history, especially one that considers recent advances in scholarly understandings of Indigenous and early colonial histories of the region, has yet to be accomplished. This cycle of conferences and events will serve as an important catalyst for inter-disciplinary dialogue that will move Caribbean studies towards centering transformations in the region’s societies, cultures, ideas, and environments during a period that is conventionally assumed to be prefatory to the histories that followed in its wake.

The lecture is free to attend with advance registration. It will be held in-person at the Clark Library and livestreamed on the Center’s YouTube Channel. Registration will close on Monday, October 14 at 5:00 p.m. No registration is required to watch the livestream. Seating is limited at the Clark Library; walk-in registrants are welcome as space permits.

Images: Histoire naturelle des Indes: manuscript, ca. 1586., fol. 97 recto. Courtesy of The Morgan Library & Museum. MA 3900. Bequest of Clara S. Peck, 1983. Photograph courtesy of Professor Ida Altman.