A Review of Colin Palmer's Slaves of the White God

Colin A. Palmer. Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976. In the introduction to Slaves of the White God, Colin A. Palmer noted that his research on blacks in colonial Mexico was inspired by the protests of the Black Consciousness movement of the late 1960s, which demanded the inclusion of the black experience in academic work, and in this case, in Latin American history. Palmer's work was the first …

…an entirely distinct anomaly. The justifications of enslavement, use of force to control, and resistance of the enslaved was similar to that in other parts of the New World, though documentation of such is a bit less abundant in this instance. Overall, Palmer's book was an important contribution to what has now blossomed into an entire body of work, and even a field of study focused on the historical experiences of Africans throughout the Diaspora.