Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean

This concise yet deeply researched volume joins a growing body of work that attends to the enslavement of Indigenous people in the colonial Americas. Distinguishing her book from studies of Indigenous slavery that focus on the North American mainland and that consider the period from the seventeenth century onward, Stone traces the enslavement of people native to the circum-Caribbean from the beginning of Spanish colonization in the 1490s until the passage of the New Laws in 1542. Arguing that “the search for and profit from Indian captives was central to the development of Spanish colonial institutions,” Stone convincingly demonstrates that Indigenous slavery and the slave trade were integral to Spanish exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Americas (p. 30). By combining archaeological and written colonial sources, she also succeeds in creating a detailed ethnohistorical account of the Caribbean's original inhabitants and their initial experiences of and responses to Spanish contact....