ABSTRACT
Where do Indigenous peoples of the Americas t within the Atlantic World paradigm? It cannot be imagined without them. Like their counterparts in the North Atlantic, Natives in the mostly Iberian South Atlantic were prominent allies in European military conquests and active participants in an extraordinary cultural and intellectual exchange. Their lands and labour were essential to the wealth of new empires. Their agriculture helped trigger a demographic boom in Europe. Like Africans and to a lesser extent Europeans, Native Americans experienced dramatic relocation and dislocation in the South Atlantic during the early modern period. ‘Indians, far from being marginal to the Atlantic experience, were, in fact, as central as Africans,’ writes Jace Weaver, arguing for a Red Atlantic to parallel Paul Gilroy’s Black one. ‘Native resources, ideas, and peoples themselves traveled the Atlantic with regularity and became among the most basic de ning components of Atlantic cultural exchange.’1
