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.
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.