Abstract
The French overthrow of the Spanish monarchy in 1808 set the stage for the first major challenges to colonial slavery in Spanish America. These challenges came not through pressure from an organized abolitionist movement, like the British one that had forced the suppression of the slave traffic in the same era, but from a combination of political and social changes put in motion by warfare in the colonies. Though there were formal expressions of abolitionism by Spaniards and Americans during this revolutionary crisis, the most important actors were slaves, who responded to the call for troops in the colonies by enlisting in both royalist and patriot armies in exchange for their freedom. Thus, in Venezuela, New Granada, Peru, and the River Plate colonies, protracted warfare effectively crippled slavery.1
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Notes
For overviews of the process, see George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800– 2000 (New York, 2004);
Peter Blanchard, Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and Wars of Independence in Spanish South America (Pittsburgh, PA, 2008).
Arthur S. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817–1886 (Austin, TX, 1967);
David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge, 1980).
Jordi Maluquer de Motes, “La burgesia catalana i l’esclavitud colonial: modes de producció i pràctica política”, Recerques, 3 (1974), pp. 83–136;
and Josep M. Fradera, Colonias para después de un imperio (Barcelona, 2005).
Robert L. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT, 1988);
Matt Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in the Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006);
See Josep Maria Delgado, “The slave trade in the Spanish empire (1501–1808): the shift from periphery to center”, in Fradera and Schmidt-Nowara, eds., Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire; David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, CT, 2008).
On Bourbon reformism, see Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III (Baltimore, MD, 2003). On plantation agriculture and reform in the Caribbean,
see Francisco Scarano, Sugar and Slavery: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800–1850 (Madison, WI, 1984);
Allan Kuethe, Cuba, 1753–1815: Crown, Military, and Society (Knoxville, TN, 1986);
Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio (Barcelona, 2001);
Ma. Dolores González-Ripoll and Izaskun Álvarez Cuartero, eds., Francisco Arango y la invención de la Cuba azucarera (Salamanca, 2009);
Márcia Berbel, Rafael Marquese, and Tâmis Parron, Escravidão e política: Brasil e Cuba, 1790–1850 (São Paulo, 2010).
Charles Esdaile, The Peninsular War: A New History (New York, 2003).
John Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven, CT, 2006), pp. 41–64.
Manuel María Alaix quoted in James E. Sanders, Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, 2004), p. 76;
John V. Lombardi, The Decline and Abolition of Negro Slavery in Venezuela, 1820– 1854 (Westport, CT, 1971);
George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Madison, WI, 1980);
Peter Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru (Wilmington, DE, 1992);
Carlos Aguirre, Agentes de su propia libertad: los esclavos de Lima y la desintegrción de la esclavitud, 1821–1854 (Lima, 1993);
Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima’s Slaves, 1800–1854 (Berkeley, CA, 1994).
Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia, 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh, PA, 2007).
Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio; Laird Bergad, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton, NJ, 1990);
and Dale Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Lanham, MD, 2004).
Carolyn Boyd, “A Man for All Seasons: Lincoln in Spain”, in Richard Carwar-dine and Jay Sexton, eds., The Global Lincoln (Oxford and New York, 2011), pp. 189–205.
Lisa Surwillo, “Representing the slave trader: Haley and the Slave Ship; or, Spain’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, PMLA, 120 (May 2005), pp. 768–82.
Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Cuban Slavery; Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (Pittsburgh, PA, 1999).
For a recent study of abolitionism in Puerto Rico, see Astrid Cubano-Iguina, “Freedom in the making: the slaves of Hacienda La Esperanza, Manatí, Puerto Rico, on the Eve of Abolition, 1868–1876”, Social History, 36 (August 2011), pp. 280–293.
Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860– 1899 (Pittsburgh, PA, 2000);
Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999).
Rafael María de Labra, La abolición de la esclavitud en las Antillas españolas (Madrid, 1869), p. 33. See also the diagnosis of the colonial situation in “Los negros de la insurreción cubana”, El Abolicionista Español 1(3), Madrid (1 Nov. 1872).
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Schmidt-Nowara, C. (2013). Anti-slavery in Spain and Its Colonies, 1808–86. In: Mulligan, W., Bric, M. (eds) A Global History of Anti-slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137032607_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137032607_8
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