100 books like Creolization and Contraband

By Linda M. Rupert,

Here are 100 books that Creolization and Contraband fans have personally recommended if you like Creolization and Contraband. Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640

Juan José Ponce Vázquez Author Of Islanders and Empire: Smuggling and Political Defiance in Hispaniola, 1580–1690

From my list on the Spanish Caribbean in the early colonial period.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was born and raised in Sevilla, Spain, a city with profound ties to Spain’s colonial past in the Americas. Since college I've been fascinated by colonial history. Being a little contrarian, while most Latin American colonial scholars I knew focused on Mexico and Peru (the richest Spanish colonies in the so-called “New World”) I decided to focus my attention on their polar opposite: less prosperous colonies (from the perspective of the crown anyway), island societies, and places that were relegated to the margins. I love learning about the men and women in these colonial societies and trying to tell their stories to the best of my abilities.

Juan's book list on the Spanish Caribbean in the early colonial period

Juan José Ponce Vázquez Why did Juan love this book?

A multiple award-winning book that has given new wings to the field of early Caribbean history. Wheat’s insightful book forces to reckon with the extraordinarily close links between the Spanish Caribbean and the African slave trade in which Portuguese merchants played a crucial role. Even though local and peninsular Spaniards ruled, Afrodescendant men and women did most of the labor, cultivated most of the land, defended the colonies against other European powers, and constituted an overwhelming majority of the population, both enslaved and free. The early Spanish colonization of the region started a pattern of profound African cultural influence in the Caribbean that endures until today.

By David Wheat,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This work resituates the Spanish Caribbean as an extension of the Luso-African Atlantic world from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, when the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns facilitated a surge in the transatlantic slave trade. After the catastrophic decline of Amerindian populations on the islands, two major African provenance zones, first Upper Guinea and then Angola, contributed forced migrant populations with distinct experiences to the Caribbean. They played a dynamic role in the social formation of early Spanish colonial society in the fortified port cities of Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Panama City and…


Book cover of American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700

Carla Gardina Pestana Author Of English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell's Bid for Empire

From my list on the early modern global Caribbean.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian of the early English Atlantic who began studying New England but soon turned to the Atlantic more generally and the Caribbean in particular. All the aspects of 17th century Atlantic history that most intrigue me played out in the Caribbean. A fascinating and complicated place, the West Indies—although claimed by the Spanish as their exclusive purview—became diverse, witness to a variety of interactions. I’m particularly interested in works that allow us to see these changes in the period when the region was a global meeting place undergoing vast shifts. Much excellent scholarship explores the later era of sugar and slaves, of major imperial wars, of movements for independence and emancipation. What interests me most is the period before that, when the region was being transformed into a crucible of global transformation.

Carla's book list on the early modern global Caribbean

Carla Gardina Pestana Why did Carla love this book?

Molly Warsh’s American Baroque perhaps best captures my point about the Caribbean as a global space. The book follows pearls harvested off the coast of Venezuela from the beds that produced them, through the enslaved divers who harvested them, the imperial officials who taxed them, the merchants who traded them, all the way to the consumers who valued them. It is a commodity history—a sort of history that often features the Caribbean region prominently—while at the same time offering a rich evocation of the many cultural aspects of the pearl’s role. Laborers who secreted pearls on their person to gain some of the wealth they produced and artisans who created lavish objects featuring pearls are as important to this account as the wealthy and powerful who displayed them in portraits of this era. 

By Molly A. Warsh,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked American Baroque as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Pearls have enthralled global consumers since antiquity, and the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella explicitly charged Columbus with finding pearls, as well as gold and silver, when he sailed westward in 1492. American Baroque charts Spain's exploitation of Caribbean pearl fisheries to trace the genesis of its maritime empire. In the 1500s, licit and illicit trade in the jewel gave rise to global networks, connecting the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean to the pearl-producing regions of the Chesapeake and northern Europe.

Pearls-a unique source of wealth because of their renewable, fungible, and portable nature-defied easy categorization. Their value was highly…


Book cover of Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763

Tessa Murphy Author Of The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean

From my list on the Early Indigenous Caribbean.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian of the early Americas, and while I often teach courses such as “The U.S. to 1865,” my real passion lies in the Caribbean. As the first site of encounter between the Indigenous inhabitants of the place we came to call the "Americas," Africans, and Europeans, this, to me, is where "American" history began, yet the history of the Caribbean—particularly in the era surrounding European arrival—remains relatively little known. As a Canadian teaching American history at a university in the U.S., I try to disrupt familiar historical narratives by showing my students that American history also unfolded beyond the borders of the modern nation-state.

Tessa's book list on the Early Indigenous Caribbean

Tessa Murphy Why did Tessa love this book?

Boucher’s book was one of the first to look beyond initial Indigenous-European contact in the Greater Antilles to focus on interactions between colonizers and the people they called “Caribs”: the mobile, multiethnic inhabitants of the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles.

Boucher convincingly shows that far from being reduced to slavery or extinction, the Lesser Antilles’ Indigenous inhabitants remained important military and political players, particularly during the seventeenth century, on which much of the book focuses.

He further explores how Indigenous actions influenced European stereotypes of the region’s inhabitants, giving rise to exaggerated depictions of fierce cannibals.  

By Philip P. Boucher,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Cannibal Encounters as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Philip Boucher analyzes the images-and the realities-of European relations with the people known as Island Caribs during the first three centuries after Columbus. Based on literary sources, travelers' observations, and missionary accounts, as well as on French and English colonial archives and administrative correspondence, Cannibal Encounters offers a vivid portrait of a troubled chapter in the history of European-Amerindian relations.


Book cover of The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (Early American Studies)

Carla Gardina Pestana Author Of English Conquest of Jamaica: Oliver Cromwell's Bid for Empire

From my list on the early modern global Caribbean.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a historian of the early English Atlantic who began studying New England but soon turned to the Atlantic more generally and the Caribbean in particular. All the aspects of 17th century Atlantic history that most intrigue me played out in the Caribbean. A fascinating and complicated place, the West Indies—although claimed by the Spanish as their exclusive purview—became diverse, witness to a variety of interactions. I’m particularly interested in works that allow us to see these changes in the period when the region was a global meeting place undergoing vast shifts. Much excellent scholarship explores the later era of sugar and slaves, of major imperial wars, of movements for independence and emancipation. What interests me most is the period before that, when the region was being transformed into a crucible of global transformation.

Carla's book list on the early modern global Caribbean

Carla Gardina Pestana Why did Carla love this book?

This new book realizes much of my wish to see histories of the Caribbean take seriously its importance as a site of diverse groups and unexpected exchanges. The Creole Archipelago focuses on five little-studied islands—Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago. Tessa Murphy reveals an interconnected maritime world, shaped by the use of canoes that allowed mobility free of the prevailing winds. Alongside consideration of the space itself and movement within it, Murphy explores the region’s diversity, its indigenous peoples, African, and Europeans of various stripes. She gives special attention to the indigenous peoples whose traditions, presence, and legacy determined much about these islands. In this watery borderland—a region within the larger Caribbean—interisland, intercolonial, and interimperial interactions were everyday occurrences.

By Tessa Murphy,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Creole Archipelago as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In The Creole Archipelago, Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of volcanic islands, each one visible from the next, whose societies developed outside the sphere of European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Murphy argues that the imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region.…


Book cover of The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History

Alan Verskin Author Of A Vision of Yemen: The Travels of a European Orientalist and His Native Guide, A Translation of Hayyim Habshush's Travelogue

From my list on the life stories of modern Middle Eastern Jews.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a history professor who is drawn to history out of a love of recovering and making accessible otherwise forgotten voices and stories of the past. I’m especially interested in relationships between Jews and Muslims and how they’ve dealt with minorityhood, displacement, colonialism, and modernization. I’ve written four books, two focusing on Muslims and two on Jews, as well as numerous articles. Among my greatest pleasures as a scholar is seeing my readers begin with an interest in the stories of one religious group (either Muslims or Jews) and then become so curious about the drama, joy, and conflicts of the era that they become interested in the stories of the other as well.

Alan's book list on the life stories of modern Middle Eastern Jews

Alan Verskin Why did Alan love this book?

Dina Danon’s The Jews of Ottoman Izmir vividly captures life in that city as it was being transformed by Ottoman and European modernities. Danon’s book embraces the full diversity of the city. We meet men, women, children, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, rich and poor, foreigners and locals. Danon argues that the story of Jewish modernization in Izmir is very different from that of the Jews of Europe. In Izmir, Jews were not made to feel that their religious particularism impinged on their loyalty as citizens. They never dismantled their semi-autonomous institutions of communal leadership, nor were they asked to do so. Nonetheless, even as the community retained its organizational structure, fissures developed along socio-economic lines that profoundly changed how Jews engaged both with one another and with their fellow Ottomans. 

By Dina Danon,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Jews of Ottoman Izmir as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

By the turn of the twentieth century, the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir had been home to a vibrant and substantial Sephardi Jewish community for over four hundred years, and had emerged as a major center of Jewish life. The Jews of Ottoman Izmir tells the story of this long overlooked Jewish community, drawing on previously untapped Ladino archival material.

Across Europe, Jews were often confronted with the notion that their religious and cultural distinctiveness was somehow incompatible with the modern age. Yet the view from Ottoman Izmir invites a different approach: what happens when Jewish difference is totally…


Book cover of Inquisitorial Inquiries: Brief Lives of Secret Jews and Other Heretics

Amanda Scott Author Of The Basque Seroras: Local Religion, Gender, and Power in Northern Iberia, 1550-1800

From my list on Spain’s golden age.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was a stubborn teenager, and growing up, I vocally declared I would never set foot in Spain. The Spanish Empire was oppressive! It was full of religious fanatics! Yet… in college I took a course on Spain’s Golden Age, and for the first time I saw a different side of history, full of paradoxes and contradictions, Inquisitors and female mystics, bumbling priests and powerful nuns, decadence and poverty, emperors, tricksters, artists, pirates, scientists, and everything in between. Spain of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries was extraordinarily complex and far from one-dimensional. Now, years later, I have travelled to Spain over twenty times, lived in Pamplona, and I am a historian of early modern Spain at Penn State University.

Amanda's book list on Spain’s golden age

Amanda Scott Why did Amanda love this book?

No list of books about early modern Spain would be complete without something on the infamous Spanish Inquisition. Historians are well aware that Inquisition trials were complex, full of coercion and secrecy, but also sometimes appropriated by individuals for their own purposes. This is an extremely accessible introduction to the Spanish Inquisition, told through “autobiographies” of six prisoners, such as Islamic and Jewish converts, a prophet, and a transgender individual. The collection includes transcriptions of the actual trials, plus brief analyses that guide readers through religious, social, gender, and political themes.

By Richard L. Kagan (editor), Abigail Dyer (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Inquisitorial Inquiries as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

On the first day of Francisco de San Antonio's trial before the Spanish Inquisition in Toledo in 1625, his interrogators asked him about his parentage. His real name, he stated, was Abram Ruben, and he had been born in Fez of Jewish parents. How then, Inquisitors wanted to know, had he become a Christian convert? Why had a Hebrew alphabet been found in his possession? And what was his business at the Court in Madrid? "He was asked," according to his dossier, "for the story of his life." His response, more than ten folios long, is one of the many…


Book cover of Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century

Alan Verskin Author Of A Vision of Yemen: The Travels of a European Orientalist and His Native Guide, A Translation of Hayyim Habshush's Travelogue

From my list on the life stories of modern Middle Eastern Jews.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a history professor who is drawn to history out of a love of recovering and making accessible otherwise forgotten voices and stories of the past. I’m especially interested in relationships between Jews and Muslims and how they’ve dealt with minorityhood, displacement, colonialism, and modernization. I’ve written four books, two focusing on Muslims and two on Jews, as well as numerous articles. Among my greatest pleasures as a scholar is seeing my readers begin with an interest in the stories of one religious group (either Muslims or Jews) and then become so curious about the drama, joy, and conflicts of the era that they become interested in the stories of the other as well.

Alan's book list on the life stories of modern Middle Eastern Jews

Alan Verskin Why did Alan love this book?

A true academic page-turner, Family Papers is an intimate, intergenerational portrait of an Ottoman Jewish family from Salonica, a city that a young David Ben Gurion once dubbed “the most Jewish city on earth.” Sara Abrevaya Stein describes their transformation as they are buffeted by the events of the twentieth century that nearly extinguish them and see them dispersed and living under “Greek, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, Indian and Brazilian rule.” Stein’s book is simultaneously a powerful lesson in the historian’s craft and a compelling introduction to an era that saw borders redrawn, nations invented, and Jewish identity reimagined.

By Sarah Abrevaya Stein,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Family Papers as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

For centuries, the bustling port city of Salonica was home to the sprawling Levy family. As leading publishers and editors, they helped chronicle modernity as it was experienced by Sephardic Jews across the Ottoman Empire. The wars of the twentieth century, however, redrew the borders around them, in the process transforming the Levys from Ottomans to Greeks. Family members soon moved across boundaries and hemispheres, stretching the familial diaspora from Greece to Western Europe, Israel, Brazil, and India. In time, the Holocaust nearly eviscerated the clan, eradicating whole branches of the family tree.

In Family Papers, the prize winning Sephardic…


Book cover of The Secret Heart of the Clock

Brian Castro Author Of The Garden Book

From my list on writing that falls between the cracks of genre.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an aficionado of lost objects, lost time, afterlives; of writing which never “fitted” its era. Examples would be that of John Aubrey, Herman Melville, Fernando Pessoa, Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Hardwick, Ralph Ellison… the list goes on. I look for writing that has stood the test of time, not celebrated for the fame and bling of the moment. I look for the futile products of those who possessed genius, but who never earned enough readers until decades or centuries later, once they were released from the prison-house of genre. I look for the posthumous brilliance of language; the phosphoric glow of its offerings and of the buried treasures found therein.

Brian's book list on writing that falls between the cracks of genre

Brian Castro Why did Brian love this book?

Someone once said that novels were for light summer reading by bourgeois ladies. W.G. Sebald may have shared this opinion. The latter preferred letters, notes, fragments and diaries. Similarly, Elias Canetti, Bulgarian-born, of Sephardi ancestry, German-speaking and winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for literature, only ever wrote one novel. But his aphorisms, both long and short, are remarkable. He unearths forgotten writers, important ones that he had met, and he meditates on literary gossip and the remaining time in his life. Here’s an example: Klaus Mann’s last proposal: a mass suicide of writers (of the great names).

By Elias Canetti, Joel Agee (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Secret Heart of the Clock as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From one of the preeminent intellectual figures of the twentieth century, a highly personal testimonial of what Canetti himself chooses to term "notations," bits and pieces: notes, aphorisms, fragments. Taken together, they present an awesomely tender, guiltily gloomy meditation on death and aging.

" A mosaical portrait of an old body's mind determined to do its exercises and not lose a step--and fascinating for that." - Kirkus Reviews


Book cover of The Scholar's Haggadah: Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Oriental Versions

Stuart Leven Author Of The Passover Story Haggadah: A New Narrative for a Modern Seder

From my list on Passover Haggadahs.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have led many seders using a traditional Haggadah. We would just recite the Haggadah at the seder and put the books away until Passover of the following year. And then one year, after Passover, I read the Haggadah in earnest. I realized that the traditional Haggadah didn’t tell the Passover story very well, that big chunks of the story were missing, that much of the time we had no understanding of what we were reading, and that, for literally decades, we had been doing a rote recitation with little meaning. It was because of that realization that I decided to write my Haggadah.

Stuart's book list on Passover Haggadahs

Stuart Leven Why did Stuart love this book?

The Scholar’s Haggadah provides Ashkenazik, Sephardic, and Yemenite versions of the Haggadah. The versions for the three groups are shown together for easy comparison. And then more than half of the book is devoted to the examination of these differences. This is a complete Haggadah, but it’s not really suitable for a seder. It is, primarily, an academic work. But it’s fascinating. I did not know, until I read The Scholar’s Haggadah, that the rituals and texts for seders are different between these groups. I used this in my book by including beautiful and highly relevant Yemenite Haggadah text that none of my readers will have ever seen. 

By Heinrich Guggenheimer,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Scholar's Haggadah as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this unprecedented masterwork, The Scholar's Haggadah: Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Oriental Versions, Heinrich Guggenheimer presents the first Haggadah to treat the texts of all Jewish groups on an equal footing and to use their divergences and concurrences as a key to the history of the text and an understanding of its development. The Seder (the ceremony of the Passover night) is one of the most universally celebrated rituals among Jewish families, for what it commemorates-Jewish freedom from bondage-is the glue that bonds all Jews together, traditional and modern, Ashkenazic and Sephardic alike. In the Book of Exodus the Jewish people…


Book cover of The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World

Alan Verskin Author Of A Vision of Yemen: The Travels of a European Orientalist and His Native Guide, A Translation of Hayyim Habshush's Travelogue

From my list on the life stories of modern Middle Eastern Jews.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a history professor who is drawn to history out of a love of recovering and making accessible otherwise forgotten voices and stories of the past. I’m especially interested in relationships between Jews and Muslims and how they’ve dealt with minorityhood, displacement, colonialism, and modernization. I’ve written four books, two focusing on Muslims and two on Jews, as well as numerous articles. Among my greatest pleasures as a scholar is seeing my readers begin with an interest in the stories of one religious group (either Muslims or Jews) and then become so curious about the drama, joy, and conflicts of the era that they become interested in the stories of the other as well.

Alan's book list on the life stories of modern Middle Eastern Jews

Alan Verskin Why did Alan love this book?

Daniel Schroeter’s The Sultan’s Jew focuses on the colorful life of Me'ir Macnin (d. 1835), an ambassador-at-large for two successive Moroccan sultans. Schroeter uses Macnin’s life to discuss three main topics: the relationship between Jews and Muslims in Morocco; the relationship between Moroccan Jews and the Sephardic world beyond; and Morocco’s relationship with Europe. Macnin’s ambassadorial stint in London, which eventually saw him become the president of the city’s main synagogue, also allows Schroeter to talk about the complexities of Jewish life in Britain and of Sephardic/Ashkenazic rivalries. The power of Schroeter’s work is in presenting a sophisticated political and socio-economic study through the lens of a gripping biography.

By Daniel Schroeter,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Sultan’s Jew as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This pathbreaking study uses the extraordinary life of Meir Macnin, a prosperous Jewish merchant, as a lens for examining the Jewish community of Morocco and its relationship to the Sephardi world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Macnin, a member of one of the most prominent Jewish families in Marrakesh, became the most important merchant for the sultans who ruled Morocco, and was their chief intermediary between Morocco and Europe. He lived in London for about twenty years, and then shuttled between Morocco and England for fifteen years until his death in 1835.

This book challenges accepted views…


5 book lists we think you will like!

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