This innovative volume places Spain and its empire at the heart of studies of Atlantic slavery and emancipation. Rejecting comparative models that either ignore Spain altogether, or see it as particularly vicious or virtuous, it achieves a more nuanced comparative and connected picture. In fact, ‘this apparently singular case is in reality part of the very historical trends it would seem to defy’ (p. 1).
Spain has remained at the margins of Atlantic slavery scholarship, although it pioneered African slave labour from the beginning of its contact with the Americas, was the last power in the hemisphere to end the slave trade, and was almost the last to abolish slavery itself. Yet, as the contribution explores, African slavery usually took second place, within imperial self-constructions, to the issue of indigenous labour, aided by the fact that, for most of its imperial history, Spain did not participate directly in the slave trade. Josep Delgado Ribas' piece explores the late-eighteenth-century shift from the asiento monopoly contract system to a new arrangement in which slave trading ‘occupied a central role in Spanish transatlantic trade and was a … major source of income for a Spanish merchant class attempting to adapt to the reality of a shrunken empire’ (p. 36). Spanish distance from slave trading is partly explained by early Portuguese dominance, and Luis Felipe Alencastro's essay explores Portuguese missionaries' role in justifying, and linking, ‘slave reproduction zones’ in Angola and ‘slave production zones’ in Brazil (p. 67).
Spain's shift to direct slave trading and intensive plantation slavery is at the heart of the book. This is inevitably a transnational issue, because slavery became central to Spain's imperial fabric precisely as it was being challenged elsewhere. Rather than explaining this change in terms of Spanish ‘inertia’, the book explores in detail ‘the traumatic revolutionary cycle’ that shook the Spanish Empire between 1780 and 1830 (p. 8). Following Dale Tomich's work, Ada Ferrer's essay points out that slavery's rise in Cuba, following the Haitian Revolution and overlapping with British slave trade abolition, was not a paradox or contradiction. Rather, slavery's simultaneous expansion and eradication in different areas was fundamentally linked. Seymour Drescher's essay also explores this theme, reminding us, for example, how, later on, Britain's 1846 decision to embrace free trade directly stimulated the slave trade to Cuba.
Several other essays explore the implications of the Spanish shift towards slave trading and intensive plantation agriculture. Ferrer highlights how the direct transfer from Haiti of slaves, capital and knowledge stimulated the Cuban sugar industry. Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla excavates the slave-trading pasts of various prominent nineteenth-century Spanish businessmen, demonstrating how slaving enabled them to amass capital which they invested in industry, transport and banking, especially in Catalonia. This afforded them social and political leverage, which they used to help bolster slavery and the colonial status quo. Josep Fradera's illuminating essay reminds us that the colonial relationship was fundamentally refigured from the 1820s, as most of Spain's American empire collapsed. A new pragmatic generation of liberal politicians focused on domestic economic development, using the remaining overseas possessions, particularly Cuba, as a market for Spanish exports. This new imperial trading circuit necessitated ignoring anti-slavery arguments in favour of a ‘strategic trade-off with the Havana elite’ (p. 271). Zeuske and García Martínez's work on the slave ship Amistad reveals the intricate slaving networks of which Spain and Cuba were a part, spanning other Caribbean areas as well as Brazil, the United States and West Africa. Turning to a Hispanic region not normally associated with intensive use of slave labour, Juan Carlos Garavaglia reminds us that, in the late colonial era, the livestock-raising countryside of Buenos Aires and the wine-producing region of Mendoza were also surprisingly dependent on slavery.
The nature and timing of the Spanish turn to large-scale slave imports affected, in turn, the reach and focus of anti-slavery arguments. Several essays ask why anti-slavery did not gain traction in Spain until the 1860s, engaging with comparative models centred on the British experience. The introduction reminds us that criticisms of the slave trade in sixteenth-century Spain ‘resembled those made more than two hundred years later by William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson’ (p. 4). Albert García Balañá reveals that anti-slavery voices did emerge in 1840s Catalonia. Although the renewed economic connections between Cuba and Catalonia prevented such voices from reaching the political mainstream, most of the founding members of the Spanish Abolitionist Society in later decades were Catalans, shaped by the Progressive Barcelona of the 1830s and 1840s. The Spanish Empire's specific, historically-shifting relationship with slavery is explored in Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's piece. Tasked in 1810 with translating Wilberforce's anti-slave-trade arguments for a Spanish public, Joseph Blanco White resorted to specific Spanish notions. He ‘translated’ Wilberforce's quest for sympathy for African war captives by invoking the experiences of imprisonment and exile suffered by Spaniards under Napoleon's occupation. Spain's heightened involvement with slave trading, meanwhile, was portrayed as a dangerous anomaly in Spanish imperial history; instead, Blanco White called for a return to the Habsburg era's moral distance from slavery. The chronological singularities of the Spanish experience of slavery reverberated, too, in nineteenth-century Cuba, as slaves appealed to older customary precepts in the pursuit of new legal rights, even at the height of the new plantation context, as discussed by Alejandro de la Fuente.
While the main metropolitan and creole actors in the volume's pages are not generally the enslaved themselves, the collection does also engage with histories that explore slave life, voice and agency (particularly through the contributions of Ferrer, de la Fuente, and Zeuske and García Martínez). There are moments that underline the need for such conversations to be strengthened, such as Fradera's assertion that ‘What is still lacking … is a more in-depth analysis of … the formation of slave families and conditions both in and outside the ingenio … the real conditions of slaves and … their lives … in economic and social settings that lent themselves to legal claims …’ (p. 281). While plenty remains to be done, historians on and off the island are already doing such work. Similarly, historians of Brazil have argued convincingly that enslaved resistance, as well as the naval and diplomatic British pressures on which Drescher's piece concentrates, helped push for the abolition of the slave trade to Brazil by 1850. What is perhaps more urgent is to broaden the interactions between political, economic and social histories, between those written from ‘above’ and ‘below’, and between colonial and metropolitan, local and Atlantic, perspectives. The volume takes some important steps in this direction.
By putting Spain at the centre of the story of Atlantic slavery, this collection inspires us to tell that story in new ways. Bringing together excellent Spanish and English-language scholarship, it is an important reference for historians of slavery far beyond Spain itself. In this sense, it bears the hallmarks of the work of Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, who tragically passed away in 2015. Chris's tremendous scholarly contributions and his warm collegiality will be greatly missed, across so many parts of the Atlantic world whose interconnected histories he helped illuminate.
