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The movement of people from Spain to the Indies, starting with the voyages of Columbus in the late fifteenth century, is fundamental to the study of early Spanish America. While Spaniards played a pivotal role in the formation of New World society, their origins and background have received relatively little systematic attention. Why has this been true? Certainly the groundwork for a more detailed consideration of Spanish emigrants has been laid long since, 1 but despite some important beginnings, research has progressed little in the past two decades. The traditionally separate historiographical treatment of Spain and Spanish America has fostered neglect of topics not easily classified within one field or the other, including emigration and the relation of Spain to America. 2 While in recent years the other two major building blocks of colonial society-the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Africans brought to the New World as slaves-have received an increasing amount of attention, 3 a reaction to Eurocentrism has helped to create a situation in which a very superficial knowledge of early modern European or Spanish society is acceptable. Furthermore, the gaps in the historiography of early modern Spanish society, especially at the local level, may frustrate the scholar seeking greater enlightenment. 4 1 See bibliographical note following text. 2 There are some notable exceptions. Fredi Chiappelli, ed., First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), II, 707-804, contains excellent articles on aspects of migration and return migration in the Spanish world by

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Seaborne commerce, communication, and transportation to a great extent defined and enabled the Spanish enterprise in the Caribbean from the time Europeans first arrived in the islands. With the exception of a minority of towns such as Concepción de la Vega in Española that were established in the interiors of the islands to provide access to gold mines and the indigenous labor to exploit them, the majority of new towns and cities were located on the coasts. Although Santo Domingo, San Juan, and eventually Havana emerged as the principal ports and administrative capitals of the large islands of the northern Caribbean in the first half of the sixteenth century, many secondary and small port towns played essential roles in the rapid development of systems of local and regional exchange, indigenous slave raiding, and transatlantic commerce that linked the islands to Seville, the Canaries and other islands of the Atlantic and the southern Caribbean. Allowing island residents to take advantage of waterborne transportation often via indigenous-built canoes, linking the islands to one another and the circum-Caribbean mainland, and serving as staging grounds for slave-raiding and other expeditions that radiated out from the islands, these towns helped to forge a diverse and dynamic region that was closely tied both to Spain and later to the developing societies of Spanish America.