Ernesto Mercado-Montero

|Assistant Professor
Academic Appointments

Assistant Professor of History

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Ernesto Mercado-Montero is a historian of the African diaspora in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World. His current book project, The Afro-Indigenous Caribbean: Slavery, Warfare, and Power in the Making of an Early Modern Archipelago—under advanced contract with The University of Pennsylvania Press—is based on his doctoral dissertation, which won the 2022 Richmond Brown Prize for the Best Dissertation on Latin America, the Atlantic World, the Borderlands, and the Caribbean by the Southern Historical Association (SHA). This book manuscript offers a revisionist history of Lesser Antillean geopolitics between the Spanish conquest of Puerto Rico in the 1510s and the French Revolutionary Wars in the 1790s. This project illuminates how the autonomous Afro-Indigenous society known as "Caribs" or "Kalinagos" influenced the development of the early-modern Antilles to the same extent as Spain, England, Holland, and France. These Afro-Indigenous people were formidable seafarers, warriors, and diplomats who integrated the Atlantic World's politics and economy through the slave trade, smuggling, and warfare. By centering the history of the Caribbean on Afro-Indigenous people, Professor Mercado-Montero's book project offers a ground-up portrayal of the Lesser Antilles beyond established narratives of European competition, plantations, and mercantilism.

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Contact

Ernesto.Mercado-Montero@dartmouth.edu
Carson Hall, Room C200
HB 6107

Department(s)

History

Education

  • B.A. Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
  • M.A. The State University of New York at Buffalo
  • Ph. D. The University of Texas at Austin

Selected Publications

  • "Indigenous Raiding, Captive-Taking, and the Politics of Maritime Violence in the Long Sixteenth-Century Lesser Antilles." The Hispanic American Historical Review (In Press).

  • "Atlantic," in The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas, Ed. Olaf Kaltmeier, Josef Raab, et. al. (London and New York: Routledge), 2019.

  • "Jean Baptiste Sans-Souci," in Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, Ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Franklin W. Knight (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), 2016.

Works In Progress

"Thomas 'Indian' Warner: Native Power, Autonomy, and Warfare in the Era of European Expansion" (book chapter).