ABSTRACT
The key elements that helped explain the makeup of Hispaniola’s highly intensive slave-labor plantation economy included a series of closely connected, mutually interdependent factors. The administrative and political efficiency, along with the strategic position of Hispaniola’s chief port city of Santo Domingo as the most important commercial center of the Americas, largely accounted for the island’s overall high productivity. This productivity was naturally tied quite strongly to a specific kind of international commerce, totally different and new to world trade: the transatlantic slave trade. The arriving Africans, therefore, not only offset the demographic decline of the early settlement periods, but also contributed to greater social variation in the island. By the mid-1500s, the number of African arrivals was considerable. About two thousand African captives were entering Hispaniola annually. Records housed in Santo Domingo for the year 1542 calculated that some twelve hundred Spaniards—for the most part ranchers and mine owners—had legal possession of between twenty-five thousand and thirty thousand African slaves. 1 Further estimates showed that by the year 1571 some thirteen thousand slaves were working on hatos (cattle farms), estancias (ranches), and of course numerous ingenios; the remaining numbers of Africans were counted among domestic servants.
