Istwa Nou

For a long time the sixteenth century Caribbean was written as a blank. The islanders died, the Spanish took over, and indigenous history stopped there. The material record does not support that reading. Corinne Hofman, Angus Mol, Menno Hoogland and Roberto Valcarcel Rojas have traced the movement of objects and people through the islands across the first century of colonial rule, and they find indigenous communities still travelling, still trading, still marrying across islands and still shaping what happened where they lived. They describe the early colonial Caribbean as a stage of encounters, a region where Spanish, indigenous and African people were rearranging themselves in relation to each other under conditions nobody controlled. Transculturation is their term for the result, and resistance is visible in how goods were distributed. Taino survival in the Greater Antilles was longer and more active than the standard conquest story allows, which matters for a Haitian timeline that otherwise jumps straight from the caciques to the slave ships.