10th Brown History Graduate Student Conference Keynote Lecture

Black Legend or Black Atlantic? Africa in the Spanish Atlantic Maritime World David Wheat, Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University, gives the keynote lecture for the Tenth Brown History Graduate Student Conference, Atlantic Trajectories: Trends and Movements in Atlantic World Studies, hosted at the John Carter Brown Library. Whereas traditional depictions of the rise of the Spanish empire emphasize militancy and intolerance, sources generated in the Caribbean and Atlantic Islands reveal a broader range of Spanish commercial and maritime activities in northern and western Africa during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In keeping with recent historiographical attention to the diffuse nature of political and economic power within the early modern Iberian world, this presentation argues that Spanish overseas expansion took place on multiple registers that included cross-cultural exchange, and cannot be accurately separated from the Portuguese empire or from the various African peoples who participated — often but not always involuntarily — in the making of an Atlantic world. Tuesday, 24 October 2017 5:30pm Brown University