David Wheat (Ph.D. Vanderbilt University, 2009) is a historian of Latin America & the Caribbean and the Iberian Atlantic world. His research interests include migration and diaspora, maritime networks, comparative slavery, and cross-cultural exchange.
His current book project is entitled Atlantic Africa & the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640. By the late sixteenth century—long before the era of racialized plantation slavery—Spain’s Caribbean colonies were primarily sustained by sub-Saharan Africans. Rather than drawing on hemispheric models, this study breaks new ground by exploring the early Spanish Caribbean’s unique relationship to Atlantic Africa, and its place within a broader African-Portuguese maritime world.
During the academic year 2012-2013, Wheat is on leave under the auspices of a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship.
Selected Publications
- “The Spanish Caribbean in the Colonial Period.” In Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies, ed. Ben Vinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). (web link)
- “Garcia Mendes Castelo Branco, fidalgo de Angola y mercader de esclavos en Veracruz y el Caribe a principios del siglo XVII.” In Debates históricos contemporáneos: africanos y afrodescendientes en México y Centroamérica, coord. María Elisa Velázquez, 85-107 (México, D.F.: INAH; CEMCA; UNAM-CIALC; IRD, 2011). (Open Access web link)
- “The First Great Waves: African Provenance Zones for the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Cartagena de Indias, 1570-1640.” The Journal of African History 52:1 (2011): 1-22.
- “Mediterranean Slavery, New World Transformations: Galley Slaves in the Spanish Caribbean, 1578-1635.” Slavery & Abolition 31:3 (2010): 327-322. Reprinted in Maritime Slavery, ed. Philip D. Morgan (London: Routledge, 2012).
- “Iberian Roots of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1640.” The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, History Now: American History Online, Issue 25: “Three Worlds Meet: Africa, Europe, and the Americas” (Sept 2010). (web link)
- “Nharas and Morenas Horras: A Luso-African Model for the Social History of the Spanish Caribbean, c.1570-1640.” The Journal of Early Modern History 14:1-2 (2010): 119-150.
- “A Spanish Caribbean Captivity Narrative: African Sailors and Puritan Slavers, 1635.” In Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812, eds. Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo Garofalo, 195-213 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009).
