GLC@Lunch: Ernesto Mercado-Montero "The Black Carib Archipelago: Afro-Indigenous Power and Autonomy in the Early Modern Caribbean."

Ernesto Mercado-Montero
Gilder Lehrman Center Research Affiliate, February 2023
Mellon Faculty Fellow & Assistant Professor, Department of History, Dartmouth College

The Black Carib Archipelago: Afro-Indigenous Power and Autonomy in the Early Modern Caribbean.
This presentation examines how the Carib Indians shaped the early-modern Antilles between the Spanish conquest of Puerto Rico in the 1510s and the French Revolutionary Wars in the 1790s. The Caribs were a group of Afro-Indigenous seafarers, warriors, and diplomats. They submerged multiple European powers into a complex Afro-Indigenous world of raiding, bartering, and captive-taking. Responding to the demands of colonialism, the Caribs evolved into independent slave traders, smugglers, and prolific planters, fully integrating themselves into the early modern Caribbean politics and economy.