Early Global Caribbean: Conference 1: Convergences

Conference organized by Carla Gardina Pestana (University of California, Los Angeles) and Gabriel de Avilez Rocha (Brown University)

Co-sponsored by the Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World

The Caribbean became global through successive aggregations of disparate peoples across a wide span of time. Long before the arrival of Europeans, the Caribbean Sea served as a bridge among the more than 700 islands that dot the area. For millennia, Indigenous people moved among islands and between them and the adjacent mainland, motived by settlement, trade, and conflict. The circulation of peoples accelerated with the advent of Europeans who seized lands, killed many residents, displaced others, and facilitated the transshipment into the region of scores of enslaved Africans. Black Diasporic individuals would themselves follow routes that introduced new cohesion and terrains of struggle to the region. This meeting will consider the historical constructions of Caribbean space, the waves of people who moved through it across different temporalities before 1700, and the results—both violent and otherwise—that followed these contacts.

Speakers
Michael D. Bennett, The University of Sheffield
“The Global Dimensions of the Barbados Sugar Boom, c.1640–90”
Thiago Krause, Wayne State University
“Atlantic Divergence: Brazil, the Caribbean, and European Consumer Markets, 1640–1700”
Ernesto Mercado-Montero, Dartmouth College
“Entangled Colonies, Unfinished Conquest: Indigenes, Africans, and Settlers in the Seventeenth-Century Lesser Antilles”
Leonardo Moreno-Alvarez, Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellow
“Between Two Asientos: Forgotten Spanish Caribbean Slave-Trading Networks, 1640–1660”
Melissa N. Morris, University of Wyoming
“Illicit Trade, Invasion, and Go-Betweens in the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean”
Susanah Shaw Romney, New York University
“Shaping the Wild Coast: Indigenous-Dutch Interactions at Wiapoco in the Early Seventeenth Century”
Linda M. Rupert, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
“New Geographies of Empire and Marronage: The Seventeenth-Century Caribbean Roots of the Spanish Sanctuary”
Cassander L. Smith, University of Alabama
“Black Legend Rhetoric at the Borders of Guinea and the Caribbean in the Sixteenth Century”
Vikram K. Tamboli, University of California, Los Angeles / Smithsonian Institution
“Seeds of Power: Ritual Dance and Poisoning in the Americas”
David Wheat, Michigan State University
“Against the Myth of Isolation: Reconstructing Early Spanish Caribbean Maritime Circuits”

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 conference 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. The registration form will post here approximately a month in advance, and 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.

Image: Richard Blome’s The present state of His Majesties isles and territories in America… (London: Printed by H. Clark, for D. Newman, 1687). Clark Library Rare Book Stacks, E162.B65 1687*