Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America

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 demographic evolution of their black populations, most of the information we have for the Spanish colonies is on nineteenth-century Cuba. How puzzling that we know less about the size, nature, and significance of the African connection with Spanish America, especially the Spanish role in the slave trade, than we do about any other branch of the transatlantic traffic.3 While there is an ancient and well-developed historiography on Latin America, Africans in the Spanish-speaking Americas, and indeed the Spanish themselves, have yet to receive their due in Atlantic history—at least for the years after 1640.