The Caribbean

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THE CARIBBEAN

Historiography often renders the Spanish Caribbean islands of the early modern period either as mere backwaters, the initial significance of which was rapidly overtaken by the much larger and more lucrative colonies of New Spain and Peru, or as the "Caribbean experiment," the sites where insular colonialism was first tried before being perfected on the continents. However, from the very first moment of contact the encounters and clashes between Spaniards and native peoples of the Caribbean forged the intellectual and cultural template for Spain's subsequent colonial rule in the rest of the hemisphere. Though the major colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola became the imperial periphery after the conquest and colonization of the mainland empire, they remained strategically important as a periphery that Spain nonetheless defended fiercely. Thus Spain's Caribbean colonies must be understood as integral parts of the early modern colonial system.

CONQUEST AND COLONIZATION

When the inhabitants of the Caribbean islands first laid eyes on Christopher Columbus and his men in 1492, they could not have known that they were witnessing the creation of the modern world. Nor could Columbus himself have understood the fundamental difference of the world that lay before him, as evinced in his assertion, in his famous letter of the first voyage, that Cuba was part of mainland Asia, a continent already known to Europe. The Capitulaciones de Santa Fe —the contract between Columbus and the Catholic monarchs of Spain Ferdinand (ruled 1474–1516) and Isabella (ruled 1474–1504) for dividing the imagined spoils of his first voyage, which was typical in form and content to other commercial contracts of its time—also points to the extent to which the monarchs imagined a purely commercial enterprise, not the spiritual and military conquest that New World colonization would become. The necessity of this transformation quickly became apparent with Columbus's return with "Indian" slaves in tow as a gift to the queen. This act, by proving the existence not of the "human monsters" predicted by medieval lore but rather of souls thought ignorant of the word of God, immediately transformed the venture into one of colonization. It also presented a first challenge to the ways in which the world was understood, especially through the Bible, as a known, closed system. Notable among early attempts to recuperate the newly found peoples into received understandings of history include that of Hernán Pérez de Oliva. Despite having never seen the new possessions himself, he wrote a florid account of the meeting of Columbus with the Arawak cacique, 'chief', Guarionex in Hispaniola, in which both protagonists deliver stately speeches in the rhetorical style of classical Roman history writing, as exemplified by Cicero. Pérez de Oliva followed classical rhetorical style because it defined historical truth in late antiquity; eyewitness accounts from the New World would fundamentally alter this definition of historiographic authority.

The realities of cultural clash and adaptation on the new colonial ground were far more complex than anything Pérez de Oliva could imagine, and constructing eyewitness accounts of them was a much more compelling exercise for Europeans actually present in the Caribbean. The Caribbean gave rise to the first ethnographic treatise of the modern world, in Fray Ramón Pané's An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians. Pané, a friar who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, was charged by the admiral with learning the religious practices of the inhabitants of Hispaniola. His account, in a form as garbled as Pérez de Oliva's was logical, highlights his constant struggle with cultural understanding, particularly his failed attempts to grasp the structure and function of Arawak narrative style.

These problems of cross-cultural communication were not benign; rather, they directly contributed to the enormity of violence inflicted on the native inhabitants of the new colonies. The link between the pretense of linguistic comprehension and violent conquest is present in the ritual, unique toSpanishcolonialism, of the requerimiento, 'requirement'. Conquistadores were legally bound to read this document aloud, in the original Castilian, to natives to announce the act of colonization. Once the native peoples were thus conquered, native territories would be subject to the repartimiento, the "allocation" of a cacique and his people to a particular conquistador, the abuses of which were one of the key factors in the demographic collapse of the native population. In addition, the first systems of anthropological classification of Caribbean peoples, aseitherCaribsorTaínos (known today to ethnologists as Arawaks), also set the stage for violence. While Taínos were thought docile, Caribs—said to be ethnologically distinct from Taínos—were considered fierce, wild, and subject to conquest. Peter Hulme's textual analysis of contemporary Spanish documents, however, shows that this distinction was highly fluid and selectively applied to meet the political and strategic needs of a particular moment. Indeed, one of the key traits meant to distinguish one group from the other was its reaction to conquest: those whose response was deemed peaceful could be designated Taíno, while those who showed signs of resistance risked being classified as Carib.

The combined effects of the repartimiento— forced labor, population dislocation, and epidemics (particularly of smallpox in 1518–1519)—led to the demographic collapse of the native populations of the Caribbean. Natives on Hispaniola alone, of whom Massimo Livi-Bacci estimates there were up to 300,000 before the arrival of Columbus—numbered only 60,000 by 1508; by 1520 they were well on the road to extinction. Yet while the Caribbean saw the birth of genocide and violent conquest in the Americas, it also was the source of the first colonial critiques. Bartolomé de las Casas (1474–1566), who would become the most passionate defender of Indians throughout the Americas, witnessed the conquest of Cuba firsthand as a colonizer before a religious conversion left him a fierce opponent of colonial abuse. While he later catalogued (and some say exaggerated) maltreatment from many colonies, it was his initial witness in the Antilles that served as the template for the moral outrage and rhetorical power that made his most famous work, Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, so influential in its day.

OUTPOSTS OF EMPIRE

After the conquest of New Spain (1521) and Peru (1532), the importance of the Caribbean islands shifted: no longer the principal site of Spanish colonization, they became a colonial periphery. Although the islands had been "granted" to Spain by papal bull, rival imperial powers fiercely contested Spain's initial dominance in the New World. Although Columbus had in theory claimed all the islands he laid eyes on for the Spanish crown, in practice, significant settlement was limited to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and eastern Hispaniola, leaving many islands underdefended and open to being claimed by rival powers in the early modern period. Thus Jamaica, initially settled by Spaniards in 1509, was captured by the British in 1655, while in 1697 the western portion of Hispaniola, the island that had seen Spain's first settlement in the Americas, was ceded to France for what would become its most lucrative colony, Saint Domingue. The remaining major colonies—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo—became the gateway to an empire and were of enormous strategic importance to Spain as it continually fought off the English, French, and Dutch. Havana and San Juan became highly fortified cities, particularly in response to the presence in the Caribbean of British corsairs (Sir Francis Drake was defeated outside San Juan in 1595).

Though now a periphery with the shift of the center of empire to New Spain, the Caribbean colonies were still a part of the colonial system. Havana, because of its role as an entrepôt in the fleet system that lay at the heart of Spanish mercantilism, became a bustling port by the end of the sixteenth century. Because the fleets departed only twice a year, and because the Caribbean colonies were not as self-sufficient as New Spain and Peru, the islands necessarily depended on illegal trade with foreigners. The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century, which liberalized colonial trade within Spain and reorganized the empire's bureaucratic structure, meant a political and economic restructuring for the whole of the empire. For the Caribbean islands the Bourbon reforms marked economic growth and demographic change—the latter due to peninsular immigration and the slave trade—that would not be complete until the full flowering of the plantation societies of the nineteenth century and the return of these colonies to the center of a greatly reduced empire.

See also British Colonies: The Caribbean ; Colonialism ; Columbus, Christopher ; Dutch Colonies: The Americas ; French Colonies: The Caribbean ; Las Casas, Bartolomé de ; Slavery and the Slave Trade .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

"Las Capitulaciones de Santa Fé." In 1492–1992: Re/discovering Colonial Writing, edited by René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccin. Minneapolis, Minn., 1989.

Casas, Bartolomé de las. Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Translated by Nigel Griffin. New York, 1999.

Columbus, Christopher. The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Translated by J. M. Cohen. New York, 1969.

Pané, Fray Ramón. An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians. Edited by José Juan Arrom. Translated by Susan C. Griswold. Durham, N.C., and London, 1999.

Pérez de Oliva, Hernán. Historia de la invención de las Yndias. Edited by José Juan Arrom. Bogota, 1965.

"The Requirement." In History of Latin American Civilization: Sources and Interpretation, edited by Lewis Hanke, vol. 1, pp. 93–95. Boston, 1973.

Secondary Sources

Burkholder, Mark A., and Lyman L. Johnson. Colonial Latin America. 3rd ed. Oxford, 1998.

Dussell, Enrique. The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of Modernity. Translated by Michael D. Barber. New York, 1995.

Fuente, Alejandro de la, César García del Pino, and Bernardo Iglesias Delgado. "Havana and the Fleet System: Trade and Growth in the Perhiphery of the Spanish Empire, 1550–1610." Colonial Latin American Review 5, no. 1 (1996): 95–115.