‘I write hurriedly and very late as I have just returned from a 2 days jaunt … of a ride of 108 miles in the hot sun alternating with tropical rains’, wrote Charles Edmonstone from Cuba in 1861. He continued:

Edmonstone was a migrant engineer, one of many such skilled workers who came to Cuba in the course of the nineteenth century to install, run, and maintain the steam-powered machinery that was being introduced into the Cuban sugar industry, helping to turn the island into the world's leading sugar producer.Footnote ² Although he was British-born, the activities of Edmonstone – and others like him coming from the North Atlantic industrial centres – reveal an independence from the narrow national concerns of the respective imperial powers from which they came, happily filling orders ‘in the United States, England or wherever the buyer wishes to give his preference’.Footnote ³ Just like the diasporic merchants through whom much capital investment and external trade occurred,Footnote ⁴ these migrants demonstrate the globalizing processes, developing beneath the bounds of conflicting imperial projects, that were eroding Cuba's identity as a Spanish colony. At the same time that they were contributing to the island's liberation, however, they were also helping to lay the foundations for new manifestations of imperial control.

Despite the tendency for Cuban historiography to focus upon the developing national project, this has generally been done within an implicitly transnational context, with many historians seeing how the nation emerged not in isolation but in reaction to competing imperial designs over the island.Footnote ⁵ Others have focused on the economic aspects, in particular the island's dependency on sugarFootnote ⁶ and the imperialism resulting from this.Footnote ⁷ The strongest analyses have looked beyond the national boundaries to take a regional approach,Footnote ⁸ in which the geopolitical rivalries of the Atlantic powers provides the context for understanding the history not just of Cuba but of the Spanish Caribbean as a whole in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹ In this paper I take such approaches further, through the case of the importation of steam technology into Cuba in the course of the mid nineteenth century and the experience of the migrant workers employed to operate it. Here the focus is not on Cuba as an isolatable entity but within the context of transnational networks that were involving the island in processes of globalization.Footnote ¹⁰ However, rather than seeing these processes as the consequence of imperial designs, I argue that this was, at the outset, a ‘sub-imperial’ globalization, operating independently, and implying liberation, from empire.

There are a number of uses of the term ‘sub-imperial’, elements of which can be seen in this Cuban case. On the one hand, it can be a description of the way in which ‘white settler states acquired more autonomy from the “mother country” and acted as partners in the exercise of imperial power'.Footnote ¹¹ The term was first employed in this way in the early 1970s by the Brazilian economist Ruy Mauro Marini, to describe the way in which Brazil aspired to become a regional power, not merely succumbing to imperial dictates (in this case from the United States) but ‘rather of collaborating actively with imperialist expansion, assuming in this expansion the position of a key nation’.Footnote ¹² Among historians of the British Empire, the term came to be employed in a variety of contexts, in particular with reference to South African white settlers: ‘Such colonies articulated their own interests, which did not always synchronize with metropolitan imperial policy and developed an “internal” colonial relationship with indigenous peoples'.Footnote ¹³ But these ‘indigenous peoples’ themselves have sometimes come to act in a ‘sub-imperial’ manner, as in India, where the economically and politically expansive interests of local elites continued to come into conflict with the interests of the metropolitan British presence and control.Footnote ¹⁴

In Cuba, the growth in sugar production from the end of the eighteenth century saw the emergence of a Creole elite who sought the development of the island. They did so in what could be described as a ‘sub-imperial’ way, as they strived to define themselves in a manner that was distinct from that of the Spanish, developing the sugar industry in pursuit of their own interests, and pushing the frontier of their cane-growing activities and control ever further down the island. As with the white settlers in South Africa, this entailed a different, more exploitative relationship, not with the ‘natives’ (who had been all but eradicated from Cuba – or thoroughly absorbed – by the nineteenth century) but with the black slaves upon whom they depended for labour.Footnote ¹⁵ The search for new technologies to enable improvements in sugar production necessarily took them beyond the restricted possibilities of the Spanish empire to the industrial centres of the United States, Britain, and France.

On the other hand, ‘sub-imperialism’ can also be taken to mean a different set of processes, whereby migrants coming from metropolitan powers to colonial societies benefited from their sojourn in these lands, not as imperial representatives (even if they often held formal official positions) but rather in their own individual or collective interests, ‘even against the declared will of their governments in Europe’.Footnote ¹⁶ In the Cuban case, we can see how, in the mid nineteenth century, the sugar plantation owners were assisted in their efforts to develop their industry both by the migrant engineers who accompanied the new machinery and also by the often foreign-born merchants who enabled the island's involvement in the transnational commercial networks through which sugar was exported and industrial goods imported. Such tendencies made Spanish dominion over Cuba increasingly irrelevant and helped fuel both the emergence of an independent Cuban identity and the explosion of the independence struggle after 1868.

However, the same globalizing tendencies that were eroding the Spanish empire were causing Cuba to fall into new forms of imperial domination. Already in the mid nineteenth century, the ‘sub-imperial’ migrants had come to act as the conduit through which Cuban planters (along with the island's industry and economy) became subjugated to new imperial forces. The increasing expense of the new steam technology led to a growing dependence upon investment from metropolitan merchant banks, which gradually assumed control over much of the island's production and trade. Despite some efforts to develop indigenous industry, Cuba remained dependent upon imported technology. The same migrant engineers who had begun by assisting Cuban planters took on the role of agents for North American and European engineering companies. Rather than contributing their skills, as one more group of migrants in a nation formed out of multiple migrations, engineers such as Charles Edmonstone tended to assert a ‘foreign’ identityFootnote ¹⁷ and guarded their privileged position; alongside the advantages of which they became singled out negatively, pointed to as convenient scapegoats, and seen as symbolic of the process by which Cuba shook off the Spanish yoke only to replace it with another.Footnote ¹⁸ Just as the phoenix emerges reborn from the flames that consumed it, so too did empire in Cuba from that which at one time appeared to be hastening its demise.

Sugar and technological advances

Although sugar production first began in Cuba in the sixteenth century, it remained a small-scale business until the final years of the eighteenth century, when Cuba found itself particularly well placed to benefit from the vacuum in the world sugar market resulting from revolution in neighbouring Saint Domingue.Footnote ¹⁹ This occurred at a time of growing world demand for sugar, as it became an increasingly important element of proletarian diets in Europe and North America.Footnote ²⁰ Thus, sugar prices rose rapidly, making an expansion in cane fields particularly attractive for Cuban planters who had previously devoted most of their land to coffee.Footnote ²¹ The rise in Cuban sugar production was later assisted by the crisis in the British West Indies following slave emancipation,Footnote ²² at a time when, despite the outlawing of the slave trade, the use of chattel labour in Cuba intensified.Footnote ²³

As a result, by the mid nineteenth century Cuba had become the world's leading sugar producer, accounting for more than 40% of all cane sugar,Footnote ²⁴ with the island's importance seen not only in quantity of production but also in the quality of the sugar, it ‘being of a dry, firm grain [and] therefore always sold readily and at good prices’.Footnote ²⁵ This period saw the establishment of large numbers of new plantations and sugar mills, with the sugar frontier moving inexorably down the island.Footnote ²⁶ The scale of production likewise increased, with the average output per mill growing from just 72 tons a year in 1830 to 316 tons by 1860,Footnote ²⁷ with the largest producing as much as 3,000 tons in a single harvest.Footnote ²⁸ Sugar came to dominate not only land use but also Cuba's trade. Between 1827 and 1846, sugar and its derivatives made up almost two-thirds of the island's exports, bringing with it considerable wealth to those in a position to benefit.Footnote ²⁹ Although excluded from political power by the Spanish, prominent Cuban families, with fortunes accumulated from expanding sugar plantations, dominated not just rural societyFootnote ³⁰ but national life in general. This new economic elite was instrumental in the emergence of liberal, modernizing bodies, in particular the Real Consulado and the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, through which Enlightenment influences and scientific advances from Europe and North America found their way into Cuba.

They also went out of their way to facilitate the introduction of the latest advances in steam technology and sugar-milling machinery, originally developed in eighteenth-century Britain for cotton manufacture but subsequently adapted to the demands of other industries and gradually extended to other countries, in large part through the migration of engineers.Footnote ³¹ These enabled an intensification in production and processing, along with a considerable improvement in the global transport of commodities.Footnote ³² Sugar, for all that it was an agricultural product, was – because of its need for some form of industrial processing to be turned into a usable, and marketable, product – particularly suited to the application of such technological advances. The high profitability of sugar production in the nineteenth century also provided this industry with the wherewithal to sponsor further improvements.Footnote ³³ In Cuba, the earliest use of a steam engine connected to a sugar mill was not until the 1790s.Footnote ³⁴ Joaquín de Santa Cruz purchased an engine from London for his ‘Ceibabo’ estate in 1796Footnote ³⁵ and, although this does not seem to have met with much success, interest in exploring the application of steam technology on Cuban sugar estates did not wane.Footnote ³⁶ By 1819, Pedro Diago was able to process an entire year's harvest using a steam-driven mill,Footnote ³⁷ and his example encouraged other leading planters, many of whom had likewise installed steam engines by the 1830s.Footnote ³⁸

It quickly became evident how irrelevant Spain had become to the island's development. For example, in 1851 attempts were made by the authorities to facilitate the purchase of a first-class steam engine from Spain, out of a desire to stimulate Spanish rather than foreign industry,Footnote ³⁹ news having reached them that engines were built there just as well and solidly as in other countries. However, when enquiries were made, the best they could come up with was a factory that boasted to be able to build any sugar mill, so long as they were given the details of the steam engine to be used – the implication being that they would be unable to supply this themselves.Footnote ⁴⁰ The reality was that steam engines, and almost all other sugar machinery, had to be obtained from the industrial centres of Great Britain, the United States, and France. New York, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Le Havre – the port cities that together formed the nexus for nineteenth-century Atlantic commerce – were also the principal centres for the engineering industry and the source of most of the steam engines and other machinery imported into Cuba.Footnote ⁴¹

The first steam-powered mills to be introduced in Cuba came from such British engineering companies as Fawcett Preston of Liverpool;Footnote ⁴² even in the mid nineteenth century, despite growing competition from other countries, it could be boasted that ‘we must still believe that English engineers are to carry out the majority of the great works of improvements in all countries where engineering talent is not indigenous’.Footnote ⁴³ As late as the 1870s, over 90% of cane-crushing mills bought in Puerto Rico came from Britain, with just 15 of a total of 294 bought in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, by the 1830s and 1840s, US engineering firms were making innovations in technology, taking it in different directions to that of the British, in particular through the development of higher pressure engines.Footnote ⁴⁵ New York engineering firms such as the Novelty Iron Works and the Matteawan Works became important producers of stationary steam engines of the kind that might be applied to sugar mills,Footnote ⁴⁶ and from the late 1830s the West Point Foundry established its reputation among those planters more inclined to look to the north than to Europe.Footnote ⁴⁷ As a result, for all that British engineering continued to be influential in Cuba, by the 1840s the United States was becoming established as the principal provider of sugar machinery.Footnote ⁴⁸

Luis Martínez-Fernández argues that development in Cuba during this period was broadly defined by the pressures and influences exerted by the rival imperial powers that were vying for regional hegemony.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, although the machinery that was acquired in the development of the Cuban sugar industry came from the factories of these competing powers, the initial impulse for its introduction in Cuba came not from attempts by these powers to challenge Spanish control over the island but from the Cuban planters themselves seeking to satisfy Cuba's developmental needs by accessing the latest technological advances. Prominent landowners became students of milling and refining technology, eagerly learning from all such developments and exploring how to apply them to their own industry – not in a slavish attempt to mimic the ideas and practices of Europeans and North Americans, but because they recognized in this both the potential to further their own individual interests and also the possibility of collectively pulling the island out of the feudal and protectionist past of Spanish dominion into the modern age of industrial production and globalizing trade. For example, in 1849, Joaquín de Ayesterán became the first planter to install centrifuges in a Cuban mill,Footnote ⁵⁰ just five years after the first ever demonstration of the use of a centrifuge for separating sugar crystals, in Germany.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1850, he travelled to Europe, visiting Liverpool, Birmingham, and Paris, and returned to Cuba with the materials and machines that he needed to modernize his ‘Amistad’ estate.Footnote ⁵²

During the mid nineteenth century, the use of steam in Cuba's sugar mills became generalized, with 70% using steam engines by 1860, up from just 20% in 1846.Footnote ⁵³ Advances were introduced in all aspects of sugar production, so enabling the improvements in quality for which Cuban sugar became renowned.Footnote ⁵⁴ Accelerated sugar production also required improved transport, and this led to the development (again using mainly British and North American technology) of an extensive rail network – the sixth in the world to be constructed, several years before that in Spain itself – and steam-boat routes.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although leading to the importation of large quantities of machinery, far from originating in a process of imperial penetration of the Cuban market by foreign producers, the initial impulse for this came from Cuba itself, through personally established networks. Not only did this enable the development of Cuba's sugar production and infrastructure through inclusion in the globalizing distribution of new technologies but it also enabled the engineering companies themselves to further extend the reach of their products, far beyond the bounds of their respective national empires. In the initial years, this occurred not through the unequal exchanges characteristic of economic imperialism but through the equal interchange between Cuban planters and foreign machine manufacturers, in a process that sidelined Spanish imperial control over the island.

Migrant engineers and transnational development

This new machinery required specialized labour for its installation, operation, and maintenance, and Cuba lacked workers with the necessary skills.Footnote ⁵⁶ As a result, ‘with steam engines came mechanics, who were mostly foreigners’:Footnote ⁵⁷ ‘every mill, every steam boat, every train locomotive has to have with it an intelligent foreigner to direct and inspect the engine’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Such skilled workers were generally looked for in the same countries that produced the machinery. Often orders included a condition that appropriate technicians be sent at the same time ‘to put together that machinery and remain in charge of it’.Footnote ⁵⁹ For example, when two steam boats to be used in Matanzas Bay were bought in New York from the Novelty Iron Works, it was stipulated that the factory should provide two trustworthy engineers skilled in their operation.Footnote ⁶⁰ Likewise, when locomotives were acquired from Philadelphia for the Cárdenas to Bemba railway in 1839, it was requested that they should come with ‘a man who knows how to direct them’.Footnote ⁶¹

Even when there were engineering workers available locally, there was often a preference shown by planters to engage those recommended by the manufacturers, who had proven experience with the specific machines that they were installing. They would also be recruited on behalf of planters and other employers through agents placed in countries such as Britain and the United States. In 1838, the chief engineer of the Havana–Güines line ordered four locomotives from Britain. He requested that Alexander Robertson, who was acting as both the chief investor and British agent of the rail company, also find, along ‘with duplicates of machinery’, four engineers ‘and as many machinists or men who understand the repair and construction of Locomotives’.Footnote ⁶²

The number of engineering workers in these countries increased greatly during the nineteenth century;Footnote ⁶³ and, although such workers were among the better paid, lived in less cramped conditions, and had least recourse to the workhouse, for many, poverty and job insecurity continued to be a threatening presence.Footnote ⁶⁴ With the exportation of machinery around the world came an extension of the well-established tramping tendencies of engineering workers.Footnote ⁶⁵ While there were those who travelled to Cuba intentionally, often with pre-arranged jobs, others arrived almost by accident, as they pursued journeys from one job and place to another. For example, William Bisby had passed through a wide selection of jobs in the United States, before accepting a position on a steam ship. This opened up to him the possibility of travelling overseas in search of work, prompted by the unstable prospects that he had experienced back home, eventually leading him into employment in Cuba.Footnote ⁶⁶

A lively internal labour market for engineering workers quickly developed in Cuba, as burgeoning sales of steam engines and steam machinery brought a rapid increase in their demand – ranging from the more highly skilled, capable of constructing the machinery and even contributing to its further development, through those who operated and maintained it, to those with less specialized skills, employed in urban workshops and foundries. Those already established in the island provided a route in for others eager to work there, often seeking out opportunities for them. It was in this way that William Whitehorn left Britain ‘in order to fit up machinery in Cuba’, contracted by the veteran engineer Edward Beanes.Footnote ⁶⁷ Joel Watts travelled to Cuba having been assured by Henry Elkins, who was already established on a sugar estate, that he would have secure employment there. On his arrival, this job proved not to exist, but he nevertheless found work in the foundry in Havana. Between 1843 and 1852, 622 migrant engineers are recorded as having settled in the islandFootnote ⁶⁸ – or 22% of all migrants so applying –and their numbers were likely to have been increased to a certain extent by those who only travelled to the island seasonally.Footnote ⁶⁹ With at least 943 sugar mills using steam by 1860,Footnote ⁷⁰ along with the spreading rail network, mines, and urban foundries and workshops, although there were a growing number of Cuban and Spanish engineers employed, it is probable that the number of migrant engineers continued to expand.

By the 1860s, this job market was well established, with migrant engineering workers often passing from one job to another by word-of-mouth recommendations,Footnote ⁷¹ by placing adverts in the local press, or by directly approaching potential employers. As more and more gained experience of Cuba, their presence made the necessity for the engine manufacturers to provide artisans less pressing. As early as 1838, the planter Pedro Diago told William Kemble of the West Point Foundry that he would not need him to send out anybody with his new machinery, since he was already in agreement with the man who had mounted the machinery of a neighbouring mill, ‘and this one has the advantage for me that he speaks Spanish, and has experience of this country’.Footnote ⁷² Although Baring Brothers intended to send a favourite engineer of theirs to oversee the installation of the new steam engine and mill on the ‘Arroyo’ estate,Footnote ⁷³ he himself declined the position, recommending that they should simply employ the engineer already working there, ‘saying he knew he was as competent as any man we could find’. Besides, he had no need to accept, since he had more than sufficient engagements to keep him occupied.Footnote ⁷⁴

Far from all being members of a clearly defined trade, mid nineteenth century migrant engineers came from an industrial milieu that brought together ‘Engineers, Machinists, Millwrights, Smiths, and Pattern Makers’, the boundaries between which were far from clear.Footnote ⁷⁵ Unfortunately, Cuban and Spanish records from the mid nineteenth century tended to use fairly indiscriminately and interchangeably the terms maquinista (machinist), ingeniero (engineer), and mecánico (mechanic) to describe foreign artisans who may have ranged greatly in the level of skill that they possessed. Nevertheless, it is probable that the majority of those who worked in the sugar mills necessarily demonstrated sufficient skill not only to be left in sole charge of expensive machinery and ensure its smooth operation but also to maintain it and have the wherewithal to carry out, or otherwise guarantee, the necessary repairs.

So long as the machinery was running smoothly, the job of a sugar-mill engineer was a relatively relaxed one. Even during the grinding season, when they supposedly had little free time because their full attention was required – and even more so during the other six months of the year when there was relatively little work to be done at the mill, beyond routine maintenance – such workers had much opportunity to turn their attention to more than merely keeping existing engines in operation. Manuel Moreno Fraginals – who, from the 1960s, set the scene for the study of the Cuban sugar industry – asserted that ‘the slave had no contact with the engine’.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, even when there was only one engineer employed by a sugar estate, he would not be expected to do all the machine-related work. For all that most slaves were employed in the unskilled manual labour of the fields and mills, there was nevertheless an important elite of slaves trained and skilled in artisan trades. For example, on the ‘Palma’ estate, of the seventy-five adult male slaves, eleven had trades and two of these were engaged in engineering duties.Footnote ⁷⁷ Such slaves were considered to have a market value considerably higher than that of others. In 1844, when troops killed seven slaves and arrested three others on Theodore Phinney's estate, accusing them of involvement in a conspiracy for an uprising, one of these was listed as an engineer/blacksmith, worth $5000 – twenty times the average price for a male slave.Footnote ⁷⁸ On the ‘Flor de Cuba’ estate, the slave Juan was known by all as ‘el maquinista’ and had a close working relationship with the foreign engineer.Footnote ⁷⁹ Just as the migrant engineers were privileged among free workers, so too were the slave engineers among their fellow slaves, with the foreign engineers often showing them a level of trust that was highly unusual on slave plantations. For example, whenever Henry Elkins left the estate on which he worked, he always felt confident in leaving the engine in charge of the slave Juan Lucumí;Footnote ⁸⁰ and there were many cases in which the engineers would encourage the slaves appointed to work under them to learn the trade well, so that one day they would be able to practise it in their own right.Footnote ⁸¹

This situation meant that many of the migrant engineers on the sugar estates were able to accrue not just their own capital, thanks to their high income, but also time to engage in other activities. The experience that they acquired in Cuba provided them with the knowledge and skills necessary to make contributions themselves to further technological development. For example, Ezra Dod invented, while working on Cuban sugar estates, a ‘tubular juice heater’, which ‘worked with the exhaust steam of the mill engine as the estate had no multiple effect’; an ‘upright tube vacuum pan’; and a new housing for the mill, successfully demonstrating the advantages to be gained by placing the cane carrier in such a way as to ensure that the cane entered at right angles to the mill rollers.Footnote ⁸²

Seasonal employment also enabled engineers to divide their time between work in Cuba and leisure in the United States or Europe. It was very common for planters to take advantage of such trips to use them as agents charged with placing orders with factories for new machinery and parts.Footnote ⁸³ Although most planters had commercial agents representing them, it was felt that these skilled workers were most effective in such a role, since they could give very precise specifications to the manufacturers.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, when Henry Elkins travelled back to Britain in 1843 to spend the summer, he placed orders directly with the leading Liverpool firm of sugar-machine manufacturers, Fawcett Preston.Footnote ⁸⁵ In June 1840, Frederick Shuck, who worked on Francisco Diago's ‘Caunabaco’ estate, left for the United States carrying a letter of introduction from his employer to the latter's commercial representative in New York, requesting him to place an order at the West Point Foundry according to the specifications given by Shuck, who was to return to Cuba in September.Footnote ⁸⁶

The initial stimulation for Cuba's involvement in the technology-driven globalization that was underway in the nineteenth century might have come from the desire of Cuban planters to develop sugar production, thus increasing their own fortunes. However, the migrant engineering workers that this required quickly became the agents through whom such networks became strengthened and extended, motivated primarily by considerations of technological and commercial advantage, rather than furthering economic imperialist interests. They assisted Cuba's entrepreneurs in their break from Spanish monopoly to the free selection of where best to take their business, apparently liberated from commitment to any particular national or imperial interests.

Transnational merchants and commercial networks

An important role was played in both importing machinery and contracting the necessary skilled workers by merchant houses based in the island, generally foreign-born merchants who did much to improve Cuba's place within the international commercial networks. While the majority of merchants operating in Cuba were from Spain,Footnote ⁸⁷ there was an important core of non-Spanish traders who dominated much of the island's import and export business (although Spanish law required them to operate in formal partnership at least with a Spanish merchant) and were highly influential in the development of the island's connections with Europe and North America.Footnote ⁸⁸ These non-Spanish merchants do not appear to have been particularly committed to the national/imperial interests of the countries from which they came. Although founded by James Drake, who emigrated from Britain to Cuba in the 1790s, Drake Brothers & Co. traded more heavily with Spain, France, Russia, and Germany than with Britain;Footnote ⁸⁹ among its partners it came to include, alongside Drake's sons, a Spaniard, a North American, and a Swiss.Footnote ⁹⁰

In the nineteenth century, the Spanish who dominated Cuban commerce appear to have lacked the spirit of speculation necessary for pushing the island into the transnational commercial networks through which trade was becoming globalized.Footnote ⁹¹ The non-Spanish merchants, on the other hand, were able to take advantage of their relationships with European and North American merchants and manufacturers to ‘execute orders more advantageously’Footnote ⁹² or to otherwise use their superior knowledge of modern commercial methods.Footnote ⁹³ Hence, although Adot, Spalding & Co. had ‘no property outside of their business capital which is supposed not to be large’, they were much sought after, and had a very good credit rating both in Cuba and the United States, where they had ‘many good friends’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Thus it was through such merchants that the transnational commercial networks reached into Cuba; and partnerships were frequently formed that included one merchant in Cuba and the other in another country. For example, the dry goods business of Tennant & Clark was made up of Tennant in Havana and Clark in England;Footnote ⁹⁵ and the Matanzas-based merchant Florentio Huertas teamed up with James Baring (British-born) in Wiesbaden in Germany.Footnote ⁹⁶ Even if they had no formal partner, merchants would often form close alliances with the foreign-based agents, such as Henry Coit in the United States, who represented the interests of many of the Cuban-based merchants and planters in North America and Europe, acting as a go-between with metropolitan merchant bankers such as Moses Taylor of New York or Baring Brothers of London, through whom they encouraged the consigning of sugar shipments, and who assisted in ensuring that Cuban products penetrated into more distant markets.Footnote ⁹⁷

Considerable resources came to be expended by Cuban planters in their attempt to maintain themselves ahead of the technological game, and such costs continued to increase as the century progressed and more advances were made. By 1873, the British Consul at Havana was reporting that ‘The machinery and engines on the Cuban estates are generally of an expensive and superior character … [I]mmense capital is invested solely in the “manufacture”; and sugar, far superior in quality to the “muscavado” of Jamaica and Demerara, is made here on the estates themselves … [E]verything has been done, at vast cost, to supersede or supplement manual labour.’Footnote ⁹⁸

Such outlays required finance and, since initially there were no banks operating directly in the island and no system of government securities, both planters and the Cuban economy in general quickly became highly dependent upon the foreign-led commercial networks and in debt to metropolitan bankers.Footnote ⁹⁹ Although the Cuban financial system did gradually develop through the mid nineteenth century, such that by 1857 there was one principal bank with deposit and discount facilities and empowered to issue bank notes, and several other banks in operation,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ these were themselves often underwritten by foreign bankers.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Susan Fernández has shown how ‘encumbered’ the late nineteenth-century Cuban economy was by debt and financial dependency, and how strongly the foundations for the twentieth-century neo-colonial domination of the island by the United States had been laid during the final decades of Spanish dominion.Footnote ¹⁰² However, her analysis, beginning as it does following the end of the Ten Years' War (the first war for Cuban independence) in 1878, falls short of fully comprehending the origins of Cuban economic indebtedness and dependency – not exclusively to US capital, but to a range of transnational investors – which can be traced back into the first half of the nineteenth century, and which was closely related to the development of the Cuban sugar industry and related infrastructure. Metropolitan bankers were increasingly underpinning most of Cuba's commerce and economy, and the door was opened to them by the non-Spanish merchant community (albeit in partnership with Spanish-born merchants). In 1832, George Knight proposed that Baring Brothers become his sleeping partners.Footnote ¹⁰³ Though he was keen for them to leave him to manage his own affairs in the island, this enabled the merchant bankers to gain a foothold in Cuba, which would gradually turn into a stranglehold. When Knight ran into financial difficulties a few years later, he was forced into bankruptcy by Barings, who readily extended their credit facilities to Knight's successor,Footnote ¹⁰⁴ drawing the latter deeper into debt through the granting of additional credits.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Such credits were soon also being made to Cuban planters. As Roland Ely notes, ‘Credit was the life blood of the island's system for the commercialization of sugar. Without improvements in production and without long-term loans, few planters would have been in a condition to feed and clothe their workers, buy agricultural implements and necessary machines, cultivate new land or satisfy their personal pleasures.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The same merchants who had initially been the channel bringing external investment into Cuba came to act as the conduits through which control by the metropolitan bankers was applied. Mortgages became more and more common, ‘often in the form of loans secured against the earnings of future crops’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Economic crises, or simply a poor crop, would lead to defaults in payments, as a result of which ownership of Cuban plantations began to fall into the hands of foreign bankers. Two-thirds of Cuba's sugar industry had become mortgaged in this way by the 1860s, with some 95% of estates at least partially so.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Their policy was ‘that of a usurer,’ commented the Cuban planter Betancourt Cisneros, ‘who little by little provides means to a youthful fool until he places him on an unrepayable debt, and then proceeds to embargo his real estate’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Planters, particularly those of small to middle-sized estates, would thus lose control over their plantations, administration of which was turned over by the bank to merchant companies resident in Cuba,Footnote ¹¹⁰ in a manner somewhat similar to that affecting other sectors of the Cuban economy, such as the railways, most of which had, by the late nineteenth century, ‘lost nearly all of their national character’, with foreign capital moving from a ‘role of mortgage-holding creditor’ to assume direct control.Footnote ¹¹¹

Anton Allahar has argued that, by the mid nineteenth century, merchants in Cuba had displaced the old Creole landowning class ‘from the pinnacle of Cuban prosperity’.Footnote ¹¹² However, even the foreign-born merchants who played such an important part in opening up Cuba to the wider commercial networks had themselves fallen under the control of the increasingly powerful metropolitan merchant bankers. As with the planters, they were dependent upon the success of the sugar harvest, and its trade, for their own survival.Footnote ¹¹³ Having started as innovators, they quickly took on the role of debt collectors. This ensured that not just Cuban trade but increasingly land ownership and production fell under foreign control. This would be exacerbated after 1868, when the Cuban wars of independence led to a far greater weakening of the position of the Cuban landowners and a far greater penetration of foreign capital and ownership.

Migrant engineers, privileged scapegoats and frustrated nationalism

With the migrant engineering workers playing such an important part in the technological development of Cuba's sugar industry, it might be expected that their presence would have been seen to have a positive influence upon the island. However, the increasing debts that were leading to the island falling inexorably into foreign hands were so firmly connected to the introduction of steam engines and other machinery that the engineers themselves came to be seen as symbolizing the new foreign economic domination of Cuba. Having begun as contributors to the process by which, through new globalizing technologies, Cuba was gradually shaking off imperial Spanish control, the migrant engineers became representatives of the flip side of this liberation, through which new forms of imperial subjection were being imposed.

When migrant engineering workers first began to arrive, their presence was seen as beneficial. In 1838, Francisco Diago commented that it ‘suited all of them that there should be abundant engineering workers in the Island’;Footnote ¹¹⁴ and Francisco de Paula Serrano declared in 1839: ‘Small matter that they be foreigners who at present direct the machines; my principles are not founded on such absurd nationalism’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Such support was not simply because of their technological contributions but also because, in a culture in which manual labour was looked down upon by many whites, who felt that it was racially demeaning, the migrant engineers helped to make it acceptable to get your hands dirty. They were also exceptionally well paid, and this more than anything demonstrated just how respectable this was as a career for a young white Cuban. It became a valued prize to secure an apprenticeship in a North American foundry. In the late 1850s, it cost between $20 and $30 a month for a Cuban to be placed with a North American engineering firm,Footnote ¹¹⁶ and hence those who sought advancement in this way had either to be from reasonably well-off families or to have a wealthy sponsor.

Mid nineteenth century sugar mills did not offer an opportunity for the engagement of free apprentices, since – with the exception of the largest – they generally only required a single engineer, who would be assisted by slaves trained in the necessary skills under his guidance.Footnote ¹¹⁷ There was therefore a shortage of appropriate placements in the island to meet the growing demand, and the Sociedad Económica (which oversaw many of the economic and infrastructural improvements of the period) felt that foreigners opening workshops in Cuba should be obliged to take on local apprentices, to teach them their trade. There was growing resentment that many of them declined so to do.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Engineering was a trade with a long tradition of craft exclusiveness, access to which was often closely guarded. Juan Angel Echerri discovered this on being apprenticed to the machine workshop of the foreign engineers Keen and Lochkurd in Cienfuegos. During his four years there, his foreign masters paid little attention to his education in the trade, using him and others as little more than cheap labour. They finally refused to qualify him because he ‘was a blockhead incapable of learning’; though it would seem that, in fact, they had simply not bothered to train him in the necessary skills.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Such intransigence fed a growing opposition to their presence in Cuba, augmented by jealousy of the privileges extended to them and paranoia at the possibly detrimental political and cultural role that they were thought to be playing. These engineers commanded wage levels far in excess of those of other workers at the time, which generated resentment as well as helping to mark them as different. For example, in the ‘Angelita’ sugar mill, the foreign engineer received $153 a month – a great deal more than the estate's carpenter and mason, who only earned $60 and $40 respectively.Footnote ¹²⁰ It was not only on the sugar plantations that migrant engineers could expect to be very well paid: the engineer on the Havana Bay dredger was earning $300 a month, compared to the $95 that the most senior crew member (other than the captain) was taking home (and the $23 earned by the common sailors).Footnote ¹²¹ Not only were they paid more, but the engineering workers (in particular those located on sugar plantations) generally received housing and sustenance free of charge. They could also on occasion aspire to promotion into positions of greater responsibility, as did the North American Ezra Dod, who began his time in Cuba working on the construction of the Havana–Güines railway before becoming an engineer in the ‘Amistad’ sugar mill. Here he was eventually named as administrator;Footnote ¹²² indeed, other estates also appointed their migrant engineers as temporary, or on occasions permanent, administrators.Footnote ¹²³ Some were able to accumulate sufficient capital to become land owners, establish workshops, or become merchants themselves – with a potential for upward social mobility unmatched by others in the plantation economy. This was a source of jealousy among Cuban workers – and, while one of the first trade unions to be established on the island, in 1850, organized engineering workers, it overtly excluded non-Spanish migrants from joining.Footnote ¹²⁴

The migrant engineers may have been much sought after by the sugar-mill owners, but their presence was so tied to the machinery (the cost of which was, more than anything else, leading to the indebtedness of these same planters) that even among the planters they came to be regarded with distrust. Although it was commonplace for mill owners to make use of their engineers as agents in their dealings with metropolitan engineering companies,Footnote ¹²⁵ these same engineers often at the same time came to represent the interests of the engineering companies. This would lead to them occupying a rather contradictory position, since disputes often occurred between the two parties, as when O. J. Reynolds – engineer for the Diago family – became employed by the West Point Foundry, while still working for the Diagos, and given the task of both extending the Foundry's sales in Cuba and of ensuring that the Diagos continued to purchase their machines from them.Footnote ¹²⁶

The combination of these elements led them to become ‘privileged scapegoats’,Footnote ¹²⁷ their presence manipulated by the Spanish authorities – themselves highly nervous of the increasing non-Spanish involvement in the Cuban economy, of rival imperial involvement in anti-slavery and separatist movements, and even (in the case of the United States) of open attempts to assume control over the island.Footnote ¹²⁸ Partly through the scapegoating of these migrants – symbols though they were, alongside the machines that they operated, of the modernity that the Creole elite was seeking to bring to the island – the colonial authorities were able to ‘portray the spread of Cuban nationalism or ideas of slave trade abolition and emancipation as serving foreign, not local, interests’.Footnote ¹²⁹ This contributed to the finger of suspicion being pointed at several foreign engineers in 1844, accused of complicity in the revolutionary conspiracies and slave uprisings that subsequently became known as La Escalera.Footnote ¹³⁰ Although the evidence presented against them was highly questionable, a number were arrested and imprisoned for several months – apparently victims of the reprisals against the role played by British abolitionists in stirring up rebellion. The activity of the British Consul at Havana, David Turnbull, in actively seeking out British subjects who had been kidnapped into slavery in Cuba – and in acting as an intermediary between the two, racially segregated, committees attempting to organize an uprising – helped to generate an atmosphere in which the migrant engineers (most of whom were British or North American) could readily be placed under suspicion.Footnote ¹³¹ Although they were finally released, the cases against them having become quite untenable, they had already served the purpose of helping the Spanish authorities tarnish the conspiracies as foreign-inspired.

By the 1850s, not only had the numbers of privileged migrant engineers working in Cuba increased but so to too had both the planters' indebtedness and the control by foreign capital. At the same time, the Spanish hold over the colony was becoming shakier, with opposition to them growing among the Cuban population. This created an atmosphere of paranoia surrounding the migrant engineering workers, which resulted in an official order being sent out by the island's governor to his officials in the provinces to keep a careful watch and account of all such non-Spanish migrant engineers, their absences and movements, with the clear implication that this group should be especially suspected of subversive involvement.Footnote ¹³² Nevertheless, no evidence has been found that any of these engineers were at all involved politically – beyond the individual expression of views that may have been considered anathema by the colonial authorities. At the same time, the authorities decreed that all residents (regardless of national origin) should register their trade, and pay a duty in order to exercise this. Visible by their absence from the long list of occupations stipulated for such a tariff are the sugar-mill engineers – despite their privileged position and despite the policy of reporting upon their movements.Footnote ¹³³ The Spanish authorities might not have been able to prevent their employment (the sugar industry would have collapsed without them), but they could certainly ensure that they would continue to be marked as undesirable, albeit indispensable, aliens.

Another reaction to the presence of and dependency upon migrant engineers was the attempt to establish specialist schools in the island to train indigenous engineering workers. By so doing, it was hoped to end the skills shortage that had made the immigration necessary in the first place. The establishment of such a school was first suggested in the late 1830s, shortly after the extensive immigration of engineering workers had begun. It was an increasing concern for the authorities in Havana that, as more and more steam engines, mills and other high-tech equipment poured into the country's plantations, the country was finding itself dependent not only upon foreign capital but also upon the physical presence in the island of many non-Spanish skilled workers. They were not so concerned about the carpenters, masons, or even boilermakers who arrived; from the start, they were disproportionately preoccupied with the migrant engineers. As Cubans travelled abroad to learn the necessary skills, and returned to the island, there were attempts locally to pass such knowledge on to their countrymen. In 1845, the following proposal to establish a school in Matanzas was advertised in the press:

It was in Havana that most effort was made to establish an engineering school, and this was promoted by the Sociedad Económica as a part of its general campaign to improve urban, working-class education. The Escuela de Maquinaria (School of Machinery) was founded in 1845,Footnote ¹³⁵ with fifty students matriculating in its first year – more not being possible, since the building with which they were provided lacked the space. By the end of this first year they were claiming success, with many landowners (for whom the students had worked during the year) contracting the students again for the coming grinding season: ‘because they have not been able to avoid feeling heated by that holy patriotic fire that is always to be found in the breasts of the Spanish, when they so visibly perceive happy results’. Footnote ¹³⁶

This might have seemed encouraging by those who were patriotically minded, and certainly it was important as a first step towards the indigenous development of industrial skills in Cuba. However, the School made very little real impression on the country's need for foreign workers. The latter were quite scathing of the efforts of the School: ‘One very grave [obstacle] has been that the opinion of the foreign engineers has constantly been opposed to [the School], and without knowing nor even visiting it, they have declared the impossibility that good operatives could be produced by an establishment that does not belong to them, and which is not in France or England but in Havana.’Footnote ¹³⁷ They may have had a point. Since the numbers graduating from the School were hardly a threat to the job prospects of the migrant engineers, given the ever-increasing demand for such workers and the general shortage of them, it is unlikely that such criticism was motivated by selfish reasons. It seems that the sponsors and organizers of the School underestimated the degree of training needed to be able to take personal charge of the equipment of a sugar mill, dealing with all eventualities. In mid-nineteenth-century Britain and the United States, engineers generally began their education in the trade in early adolescence. Having served an apprenticeship lasting several years, they qualified to become journeymen. Their training did not stop there: if they aspired to become masters, they not only had to work their way up the workshop hierarchy but also had to obtain specialist technical education. Even though many of them may have travelled to Cuba in the hope of short-circuiting the craft exclusiveness that may have prevented them from advancement in their home countries, the average age on arrival of such engineers was thirty-one.Footnote ¹³⁸ Supposing they had begun in the trade around the age of fourteen, they therefore already had an average of seventeen years' experience before being employed in Cuba.

This was something that does not seem to have been fully appreciated. Many of the Cubans who studied in the School of Machinery, and their families, seem to have believed that ‘they could be, and that they are, complete engineers in a year’.Footnote ¹³⁹ Often driven by the prospect of the high earnings that they dreamed of obtaining (and that they saw foreigners claiming), this failure to understand the slow, incremental path of formation needed, not just by aspiring engineers but by the country as a whole in its attempt to develop the skills needed by its economy, led to a high dropout rate from the School. Not surprisingly, this provoked considerable scepticism on the part of the migrant engineers. However, by seeking to protect the standards of their craft, which they saw being undercut by the School, while at the same time generally showing little interest in playing a positive role in the development of native engineers, they exacerbated the feelings of hostility shown towards them and fuelled the impulse that led to the establishment of the School in the first place.

At the time of the heightened official paranoia about the presence in Cuba of so many migrant engineers, in the early 1850s, the Junta de Fomento assumed control over the School, ‘so that it may succeed in the important and primordial objective of satisfying our local necessities without the help of foreign hands’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ José Gutiérrez de la Concha, the Captain General and Governor of Cuba, considered this to be important more as a patriotic undertaking than one of economic necessity. The original motivation for the school had been to train the brightest of the urban working class. Under the new, Spanish-state-sponsored management, priority was given to ‘the orphans of military families and servants of the State, and particularly those who lost their lives and fortunes in the defence of Spain in our old American possessions’. The intention was that these would form a bulwark against foreign engineers, ‘who, spread about our sugar mills and on the railroads, are a seed for propaganda in the ideas of secession, and who are internal enemies that it is essential that we free ourselves from’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The new directors of the School sought to make it a ‘large industrial enterprise’, so moving away from the original conception of it assisting in the gradual foundation and improvement of the skills upon which the island's economy could subsequently be developed. Previously, the School had provided subsidized training for young Cuban engineers who could then obtain employment in the mills and railways, providing them with the theoretical knowledge that they would later put into practice. But now they purchased expensive machinery from abroad, with the students becoming apprentices, attempting to learn the advanced applications of steam technology through construction. By so doing, the state hoped that it might acquire a workshop of which it could be proud, rivalling the great foundries of the metropolitan powers. But this attempt to turn an institution that had begun with the simple aim of enabling some native engineers to replace some of the foreigners into one that attempted both to train highly skilled technicians and to produce its own machines – virtually overnight, in conditions lacking the necessary pre-existing industrial infrastructure and skills base – was a disaster. As soon as the state realized this, they quickly returned it to its original management, slashing its budget in the process and virtually guaranteeing its failure.Footnote ¹⁴²

Although the aim had been to free Cuban planters and rail companies from the need to contract foreign engineers, the School may actually have accentuated this reliance on outsiders. By the 1850s there were, to be sure, a small but steadily growing number of suitably skilled Cubans and Spanish. However, they continued to be too few to meet the growing demand for engineers that resulted from the generalization and extension in the use of steam engines and mills, as the sugar frontier pushed eastwards. The failure of the school experiment inspired little confidence in the majority of planters, driven as they were more by economic than patriotic concerns; and they were more likely to show prejudice in favour of employing ‘superior’ foreign technicians to operate and maintain the foreign-built engines and mills that had cost them so much and towards which they felt such pride. Native engineers might have been cheaper, but both engineer and engine were seen almost as status symbols by those planters who could afford them, and an indication of their estate's modernity and the superiority of its product.Footnote ¹⁴³

But the island's reliance on non-Spanish migrant engineers continued to rankle. In 1857, the Compañía Española de Fundición y Mecánica (Spanish Foundry and Machine Company) was formed. Its founder argued that ‘The establishment of this Society is evidently useful and even necessary because in the material of Foundry and Mechanics we depend on foreigners imposing the law.’Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The following year, Manuel Hernández Aranda invented a sugar train, which he advertised as being specifically ‘Cuban’. His application for a patent and privilege for his invention reads more like a nationalist treatise, than a blueprint for a contribution to technology: ‘Our emerging agriculture demands a great help so as to remove it from that rachitic state in which it finds itself, and to elevate it to its peak, given that, without the necessity of begging from foreigners, there exists in our country extraordinary elements with which to achieve this.’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Even though his invention seems to have been little more than an adaptation of the Jamaica trains widely used for the evaporation process of sugar production, Hernández Aranda showed the same excess of patriotic optimism that had doomed the School of Machinery to ineffectuality, believing it possible for Cuba not only to be on the same technological level as the industrial countries but even to rival and surpass them; all that was needed was the desire to do so.

Conclusion

Hernández Aranda and his Cuban sugar train are symbolic of the shift that had occurred during the nineteenth century. The same spirit for advancement that the early promoters of new technology in Cuba had shown, and which had represented a break with the Spanish imperial past and self-confident hopes for a more independent future, was also demonstrated by Hernández Aranda, only this time as something of a forlorn hope against the, by then, irrepressible forces of technological advancement that were being led and controlled by foreign powers, exerting ever-increasing control over the Cuban economy and production. The introduction of steam engines and related machinery, along with the skilled workers required to operate them, was not simply an example of this process but was central to it, along with the commercial networks with which they were so associated. Although this would be accentuated later in the century, through a combination of the devastating impact of the wars of independence and the ever more costly and complex steam and sugar-making machinery, the process was already well advanced by the 1850s.

David Jeremy has identified four stages of technological transfer: new technology introduced through migrants or the diffusion of plans and prototypes; establishment of pilot installations; modification of designs as a result of local conditions; and reverse transfer, back to where the technology had originated.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ However, in the Cuban case, local protagonists were of fundamental importance in the initiation of the transfer process. Rather than it coming from the seeds sown by migrants (whether engineers or entrepreneurs), it was the Cuban planters themselves who went out into the world in search of solutions for what they perceived as being the necessities of their industry. Once they had brought back and introduced examples of new technology and scientific-industrial thinking, it would certainly seem that Jeremy's stages occurred, but his model is perhaps too linear. It might be more appropriate to think of the stages as ongoing, coexisting elements, once the initial impulse had been given. In effect, a network of technological transfer and development became established, involving the introduction and spread of new advances not just from the metropolitan industrial centres but also from the sugar mills. This network linked a number of agents, from Creole planters to the engineering companies, through commercial agents, metropolitan banks, diasporic merchants, and migrant engineers. The relationship between these different groups resulted in a network that was dynamic, responsive to advances (wherever they occurred), and that had a gathering momentum that resulted in its ongoing extension, and with this the spread of the new technology to ever more plantations and mills. However, the need for external investment led to a financial situation in which local upsets – whether economically or politically inspired – resulted in those who controlled this capital (generally based in the metropolitan centres) gaining in influence and power over the local actors who had instigated the process.

Both the spread of steam technology in the nineteenth century and the related international trade networks are examples of how the processes of globalization that are seen to characterize our current period of late capitalism were historically founded. This has long been recognized – as seen in Immanuel Wallerstein's concept of the centrality of world systems in understanding the interconnected development of the planet's economy and society –as a necessity for tracing the history of the emergence of the global capitalist system, presided over by European hegemonic powers.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Similarly, Eric Hobsbawm has shown how the interdependence of every part of this world system reveals how individual nations come to emerge not just as historically contingent but within the constraints imposed by wider, transnational forces.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ More recently, the ‘global history’ approach has developed on such perspectives, seeking ‘to transcend the nation-state as the focus of history’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

I would argue that this mid-nineteenth-century Cuban case demonstrates how the networks of capital, trade, skills, and technology through which key commodities, such as sugar, moved – along with the related human movement and settlement – were not directly tied to competing empires, related though they may have been to these. Rather, they were transnational, transimperial, even globalized in scope. What is also shown is that such networks were not simply imposed upon Cuba by imperial interests. As Robert Marks has written, ‘however influential Europeans may have been in the making of this modern world, they did not make it themselves’,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ and much of the impetus for development in Cuba came from actors in the island itself and from the transnational relationships that they themselves established. Thus, although the machines that were increasingly revolutionizing production worldwide were mainly built in the core industrializing countries, the technological developments were the result of the interconnection between manufacturers and their clients, such as Cuba's sugar planters. This would seem to confirm what Patrick O’Brien has shown: that ‘for the Third World, the history of enforced (and/or unavoidable) dependence on “European middlemen” did not necessarily signify exploitation’.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The actors through which this was made possible were, alongside the Creole planters, the skilled migrant workers who, like Charles Edmonstone, were using their presence in the field to stimulate further developments, so as to better meet the needs of local production. As David Jeremy has argued, migrant engineering workers were ‘by far the most important vehicle of technology transfer’: ‘they were able to interact with the technological system on the one hand, with the natural and cultural environment of the receptor society on the other hand, and so make the multitude of adjustments that were necessary in accommodating a new technological system to fresh, cross-cultural surroundings.’Footnote ¹⁵²

What this Cuban case shows is that the globalizing tendencies that were in motion were not initially brought about by the imperial designs of powerful nations, intent upon extending their global influence. At the outset, the impulse came from beneath the shadow of conflicting empires, inspired by the needs and aspirations of local actors, with the collaboration of migrant artisans and merchants who facilitated Cuba's entry into the transnational networks that were extending themselves globally during the nineteenth century. It is for this reason that I have characterized this as ‘sub-imperial’ globalization, and those involved – the Cuban sugar planters, and the migrant merchants and engineers – as being the ‘sub-imperial’ agents through whom this came about.

However, as Cuba's history shows, for all that it may be necessary to look beyond the political boundaries imposed by empires – so as to see the much more complex social interactions that lay beneath – this is not to deny the dominant role played by imperialism. The sub-imperial globalizing tendencies described here were instrumental in weakening the Spanish empire's hold over Cuba. Yet, with terrible ironic inevitability, out of the flames that consumed one empire, stepped – phoenix-like – the figure of empire reborn. The technological advances that so inspired the Cuban planters brought new forms of subjugation, which would lead, at the end of the nineteenth century, to freedom from Spain being replaced by domination by the United States; and the migrant engineers and merchants, for all their own sub-imperial identity and apparent freedom from imperial prejudice and concern, proved to be the agents through which this new imperial control came to be imposed. Thus, the compelling figure of Charles Edmonstone riding through all weathers to spread new machinery to Cuba's sugar plantations hides the story of how engineering advances, spreading independently of imperial projects, could at the same time be the cause both of the weakening of old imperialisms and the emergence of new ones.