New Geographies of the Atlantic World: Connecting Lusophone Africa and Spanish America

Abstract

Recent studies of colonial and early national Brazil emphasize that the transatlantic slave trade forged not only economic but also cultural and political connections across the South Atlantic. As historians including Walter Hawthorne, Roquinaldo Ferreira, Mariana Candido, Paul Lovejoy, and James Sweet highlight how regular and sustained exchanges between West Africa and Brazil shaped societies on both sides of the ocean, they also offer new geographies for understanding the Lusophone Atlantic. In his new book, David Wheat engages with models of reciprocal exchange and inter-colonial connection in order to redraw the boundaries of the Atlantic World in an earlier period. Analyzing early modern Iberia, Africa, and Latin America as aspects of a single, unified (73), Wheat traces how developments in one area reverberated in the others. Doing so allows him to persuasively argue that the sixteenthand seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean should be viewed not as a precursor to the sugar colonies that later came to dominate much of the region, but as a natural extension of economic, social, and political precedents established in West Africa and the Luso-Atlantic world.