Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean

If any more evidence were needed to dethrone Christopher Columbus as a hero, the story told by Erin Woodruff Stone in Captives of Conquest should end the debate. Stone's main contribution to studies of the enslavement of Indigenous peoples in the Americas is her geographic and temporal focus on the Caribbean and its littoral in the sixteenth century. As she notes in her introduction, much of the historiography to date, especially in English, has focused on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on areas that ultimately became part of the United States. By contrast, Stone argues that the enslavement of Indigenous peoples of the sixteenth-century Caribbean was both a crucial factor in the early collapse of Native populations in the region and a central element in Spanish strategies of conquest and colonization.Stone begins in the precontact Caribbean, highlighting the migrations and interconnections among peoples of the Antilles and the circum-Caribbean areas of Yucatán and the northern coast of South America. On the other side of the Atlantic, she argues that the Spanish physical and spiritual conquest of the Canary Islands established patterns of policy and practice that shaped later incursions in the Americas. For example, resistance by the Native Canarians led to warfare and enslavement. By the 1480s and 1490s a stream of Canarian slaves was added to a Mediterranean world of active slave trades from Africa, the Levant, and eastern Europe. The Spanish Crown sought to rationalize Canarian slavery as the result of “just war” against people who rejected the authority of the monarchy and the Christian god. These justifications for the enslavement of peoples claimed as Spanish subjects were transferred and further elaborated in the Caribbean beginning with Columbus.Popular narratives of Spanish American colonization often highlight the search for gold and converts to Catholicism as motives, but Stone is clear that Columbus proposed an active slave trade from the Caribbean to Spain as a source of labor and wealth from the beginning of his voyages. Though Queen Isabella opposed a transatlantic slave trade in Indigenous Americans, she did allow the enslavement of cannibals and those who resisted Spanish authority and conversion. Before long the Crown also claimed the royal fifth of slave sales and began to sell licenses for slaving expeditions. Hence, by the early years of the sixteenth century, the basic framework of Spanish policy and practice around Indigenous enslavement and slave trading had been established.The heart of Stone's story lies in the first half of the sixteenth century. In areas where Spaniards found resources of value, they needed laborers to extract them. In areas without such resources, or in places where they were quickly exhausted, the Indigenous people became the valued commodity. The gold mines of Española and Cuba and the pearl fisheries of coastal Tierra Firme were early sites in need of labor. Stone describes the development of two slave trades to supply this labor—a legal one and one that was “endemic illegal, and undocumented” (5). Because so much slaving and slave trading was officially illegal, it is impossible to quantify the extent of the trade with any certainty. Stone is able to document approximately 70,000 Indigenous people enslaved in the 1500s and estimates that there were between 250,000 to 500,000 who ultimately suffered that fate.Stone endeavors to show the evolution of Spanish colonial policy toward Indigenous slavery and something of the experience of those enslaved. She mines published chronicles of missionaries and conquerors such as Bartolomé de las Casas, compilations of sixteenth-century documents, and secondary sources on Spain's early American empire. She also consults archival materials from Spain, the Canary Islands, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia. The evolution of colonial policy is charted mostly through royal ordinances as the Crown extended the definitions of enslavable peoples to ensure labor and revenue, though policies were often ignored in practice. In the Americas, new expeditions of exploration and conquest took slaves as guides and interpreters or as a “consolation prize” when an expedition failed to find gold or other valuables (89). By the 1530s an active trade in Indigenous slaves had become a business with markets in ports around the Caribbean.Stone tries to illuminate the experiences of the enslaved as other historians have done through the rich documentation of suits by people petitioning the Crown or cases against people accused of illegal slave trading or rebellion. These cases reveal the cruelty of enslavement and often multiple displacements. She also consults archaeological collections to illustrate the slave trade's cultural diaspora.Stone identifies several consequences of the enslavement and trafficking of hundreds of thousands of people. Beyond the untold suffering and death wrought by these practices, Indigenous people were crucial, if often involuntary, participants in exploration and conquest. The Taínos of Española initially directed Spanish attention toward the Caribs and away from themselves; other Native groups captured and sold their enemies to Spanish traders. This agency, as Stone calls it, soon dissipated as the slave trade expanded, ensnaring even Native allies and the legally free. The devastation caused by slaving also sparked rebellions that the Spanish were able to quell only after taking a firmer stance against Indigenous slavery with the New Laws of 1542, once African enslavement was better established and the great mineral wealth and huge Indigenous populations of Mexico and Peru were discovered. She rightly notes, however, that Indigenous slavery continued on the frontiers of the empire into the nineteenth century.Captives of Conquest provides a broad historical view of the extent and importance of Indigenous slavery in the early years of Spanish America. Readers unfamiliar with the basic history of colonization might wish for a timeline of Crown policies and colonial events, as these details are scattered across several thematic chapters. Such a broad study necessarily rests on a large body of secondary works, but the bibliography does not include all cited sources, unfortunately. At the same time, the book's relative brevity, accessible prose, and clear argument will be of great benefit to students and scholars alike.