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Review of "Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean: The Greater Antilles, 1493-1550" by Ida Altman
Review   Peer reviewed

Review of "Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean: The Greater Antilles, 1493-1550" by Ida Altman

Erin Stone
The History Teacher, Vol.57(3), pp.410-412
2024

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Abstract

Book Review Caribbean Sea
(Excerpt) In order to depict the realities of life during the first decades of colonization in the Caribbean, Altman organizes her book thematically. Themes covered include disease, violent confrontations, hurricanes, how government actually worked versus royal orders, religious organizations/conversion, how colonists really made money (not just from sugar or gold), gender, education, and race. Isolating chapters by theme (instead of a more common chronological framework) allows her to focus more closely on certain groups or events, making the reader truly feel what it may have been like to live in the Greater Antilles facing pirate attacks, epidemics, hurricanes, and slave rebellions. The detailed examples also prevent the book from becoming too dry, or textbook like, despite the amount of information that Altman manages to include in the relatively brief monograph. While much of the book is a general overview of the first fifty years of Caribbean history, regarding the succession of governments, population movements, etc., the in-depth stories bring fresh perspectives, new sources, and a diversity of experiences to light in an accessible manner.

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