This lecture will focus on the initial European encounter with the Caribbean, connecting this to the ‘expansion of Europe’. It will also draw attention to indigenous resistance to conquest.

Reading list

Abulafia, David, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, CT, 2008).

Boucher, Philip P., Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763 (Baltimore, 1992).

Crosby, Alfred W., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT, 1977).

* Funes Monzote, Reinaldo, ‘The Columbian Moment’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 83-95.

* Guitar, Lynne A., ‘Negotiations of Conquest’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 115-129.

Higman, Barry W., A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge, 2011), chapter 3.

Hulme, Peter and Whitehead, Neil L. (eds), Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day - An Anthology (Oxford, 1992).

Knight, Franklin W., The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (2nd edition, Oxford, 1990), pp. 27-65.

Moya Pons, Frank, History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World (London, 2007), chapter 1-2.

Moya Pons, Frank, ‘The Establishment of Primary Centres and Primary Plantations’ in P. C. Emmer (ed.), General History of the Caribbean II: New Societies (London, 1999), pp. 62-78.

Sauer, Carl, The Early Spanish Main(Berkeley, 1996).

* Sued-Badillo, Jalil, ‘From Tainos to Africans in the Caribbean’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 97-114.

Wheat, David, Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

For the text of the Treaty of Tordesillas, see…

Louise A. Breen (ed.), Converging Worlds: Communities and Cultures in Colonial America (New York, 2012), pp. 5-12.

On the ‘expansion of Europe’, see…

Ogborn, M., ‘Historical geographies of globalisation, c. 1500-1800’, in Graham, B. and C. Nash (eds), Modern Historical Geographies (Harlow, 2000), pp. 43-69.

Wallerstein, I., The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1974).