The Household of Doña Inés Peraza: Indigenous and African Slavery in the Fifteenth Century Canary Islands

In the fifteenth-century Canary Islands, seigneurial lords and their vassals utilized both indigenous and enslaved labor in their households. This paper provides a preliminary examination of the will of doña Inés Peraza and argues that the differences in the treatment of indigenous and African slaves attached to the household of the Lady of the Canary Islands suggest the existence of slave-holding that differentiated between the skills and knowledge of indigenous slaves and the role of African slaves as understood in Spanish peninsular society. In the conquest of the early colonial Caribbean, the differences observed in the Canary Islands provide a guide to the development of colonial households and patterns that would be replicated in households both great and small.

Contract or Contraband? A Case Study of Anglo-Spanish Trade in the 1750s

This paper explores the conflict between the Royal Havana Company and the William Walton Company of New York City, and the limits and violations of Spanish and British trade laws in the pivotal years of the 1750s. The Havana Company was obligated by the Spanish King to provision the garrison and supply trade goods to Spanish Florida. Struggling to meet these demands, the company subcontracted the work to a British company out of New York City with a history of ties to the Spanish Caribbean. A small scandal broke out in 1754 when military officials in Florida attempted to cut the Havana Company out entirely and save money by dealing directly with the Walton Company. Without the patronage of the Havana Company, Cuban officials argued this was contraband trade. Walton, meanwhile, had to fight the prohibition against supplying a neutral colony after the outbreak of the Seven Year's War.

Rethinking marginality: Labor, Economy, and Power across the African Diaspora in 19th Century Brazil

As centers of economic and political power, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Bahia have historically drawn focus away from the Brazilian North and South, understood today as marginal with respect to Afro-Brazilian history and culture, the development of the Brazilian republic, and the Black Atlantic. Yet Afro-Brazilians working at 19th-century beef jerky plantations in Rio Grande do Sul and in the Amazonian rubber trade materially inflected national and global events, serving also as local centers of development of Afro-Brazilian culture. Our work critically interrogates established narratives through rigorous historical archaeological research, revealing the substantial role of these so-called marginal places in these histories. We show how data driven research across multiple lines of evidence destabilizes established hierarchies of centrality and marginality and restructures knowledge, highlighting the importance of including all voices in the construction of history.

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