Atlantic Slaveries: Connecting African and Indian Slavery in the 16th-Century Spanish Caribbean

Upon their arrival in the Americas, Spanish colonists, conquistadors, and merchants all relied upon an expansive Indian slave trade to supply them with needed laborers and profits. Nevertheless, the high mortality rate of Americas’ indigenous peoples has led many to assume that Indian slavery was a limited and short-lived practice with African slavery replacing it in a matter of years. However, recent research shows that the indigenous slave trade was temporally, geographically, and numerically much more significant. In fact, the entrance of larger numbers of Africans into the Caribbean occurred at the peak of the Indian slave trade, in the 1520s and 1530s, not after its legal abolishment. Thus, the rise of the African slave trade co-existed with the Indian slave trade for decades.

This paper examines the connections between the two slave trades. In particular, it investigates the impact of the African transatlantic slave trade on the Indian slave trade of the Circum-Caribbean. By the l530s both Indian and African slaves were sold in the same markets, received the same brandings marking their commodification, were referred to with the same inhumane language (as pieces), worked side by side in sugar plantations and mines, and at times rebelled together. It is in the cases of rebellion in both the Greater and Lesser Antilles that we see the best examples of cultural sharing. By investigating the two trades, and who controlled them, together we can gain a better understanding of slavery and power in the early modern Atlantic World.