Puerto Rico before 1898

This chapter provides an overview of Puerto Rico before 1898. It explains that the Taínos were the first Indigenous inhabitants of the Americas to come into contact with Christopher Columbus. However, Spanish colonists and enslaved Africans promptly replaced the Taíno population, roughly between 1508 and 1550. The Spanish conquest of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean unleashed one of the greatest demographic catastrophes of the modern world, caused by enslavement, diseases, interracial unions, suicide, and migration, which decimated the Indigenous population of the Greater Antilles. The bulk of the chapter examines the workings of the Spanish colonial regime in Puerto Rico between 1493 and 1898. The chapter then elaborates on the United States’ growing interest in Puerto Rico during the nineteenth century, which included having a permanent naval base in the Caribbean.