Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America (original) (raw)

2015, The American Historical Review

WITHIN HALF A CENTURY OF COLUMBIAN CONTACT, the most powerful state in Europe had taken over the two most powerful polities in the Americas: the Aztec and Inca empires. From that point until at least 1810, Spanish America was the largest and most populated European imperial domain in the New World, stretching eventually from California to Buenos Aires. Both the first and the last slave voyages to cross the Atlantic disembarked not very far from each other, in the Spanish colonies of Hispaniola (1505) and Cuba (1867). 1 This continent-sized group of colonies developed the first and, until the late eighteenth century, the largest free black population in the Americas. 2 Spanish America was therefore the part of the Americas with the most enduring links to Africa. Yet while the French, the British, and even the Portuguese empires have reasonably precise data on the origins, composition, and de-1 The first African slaves probably arrived in 1501 from Seville, Spain, but not on a slave voyage in the usual sense. António de Almeida Mendes, "The Foundations of the System: A Reassessment of the Slave Trade to the Spanish Americas in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, Conn., 2008), 63-94. 2 Spain's American possessions, the size and complexity of which should not be underestimated, were the linchpin of an empire that was genuinely global in scope during the eras of Hapsburg and Bourbon rule. In Europe, it stretched from the Spanish Netherlands to Sicily, and from Oran in North Africa to the Canary Islands. It included the Philippines in Asia, and the Mariana Islands and Guam in Oceania. During the Iberian Union, which lasted from 1580 to 1640, the Spanish crown also ruled over Portugal and the entire Portuguese empire, including Brazil and Angola, and territories in North Africa, India, and the Moluccas, among many other sites. Until the Constitution of 1812, Spanish territories in the Americas were considered kingdoms or provinces under the rule of the Spanish crown (much like the kingdoms of Aragon and Naples), and were typically grouped into larger administrative units known as audiencias. The audiencias, in turn, nominally fell under the jurisdiction of viceroyalties, though some retained a considerable degree of autonomy. The main center of Spanish power in North America was the Viceroyalty of New Spain, which encompassed all of modern Mexico plus the provinces of Upper California, New Mexico, and Texas. Stretching across the circum-Caribbean, the Audiencia of Santo Domingo included the islands of Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba, as well as Florida. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it also included most of present-day Venezuela and its neighboring islands, and it would add the Floridas (again) and Louisiana during the eighteenth century. The neighboring Audiencia of Guatemala encompassed most of Central America, including territories that correspond to the modern nations of Guatemala,