C.IAS Lectures Series: Inter-American History and Culture

Several converted Sephardic Jews have been among the first colonizers of the Americas even it was forbidden for them to cross the Atlantic. The majority escaped illegally because they have been persecuted by the Spanish and later Portuguese Inquisition. The Jews who did not convert were expelled from the Iberian kingdoms at the end of the 15th century. This lecture reconstructs New Christian trading networks between the Caribbean, West Africa, and Atlantic Europe.

Christian Cwik teaches Inter-American and Atlantic History at the Center for Inter- American Studies at the University of Graz. His most recent publication The Sephardic Diaspora in the Early Caribbean in Kristen Block, et. al. (eds.): The Cambridge History of the Caribbean. Cambridge University Press released in 2021.