Manuel Barcia
Biographic Data
| ID | 209991 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Manuel Barcia |
| GIVEN NAMES | Manuel |
| FAMILY NAME | Barcia |
| SIGNATURE | BARCIA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leeds |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5672-7039 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Response to Kristie Flannery, Casey Schmitt, and Jamie Goodall
Cause and Consequence
The Breath of Destruction’
In the years 1823, 1829–1830, and 1837, West and West Central Africa had to contend with three devastating yellow fever epidemics that affected both slave dealers who had settled along the coast and anti-slave trade officials tasked with bringing the slave trade to an end. In this paper I argue that these epidemics had a profound impact on the actions of both sets of actors, and eventually on the expansion and demise of the slave trade in the reg…
Into the future
This article examines developments in the field of Atlantic History within the past two decades and through the prism of slavery studies and a number of close sub-fields. By paying attention to what Atlantic historians have achieved since the turn of the century, it discusses contributions and critiques in equal measure, highlighting the field's place in wider global discussions. While probing a number of methodological challenges that are alread…
White Cannibalism in the Illegal Slave Trade
The Portuguese schooner Arrogante was captured in late November 1837 by HMS Snake, off the coast of Cuba. At the time, the Arrogante had more than 330 Africans on board, who had been shipped from the Upper Guinea coast. Once the vessel arrived in Montego Bay, Jamaica, the British authorities apprenticed those who had survived. Shortly after landing, however, the Arrogante's sailors were accused of slaughtering an African man, cooking his flesh, a…
The Yellow Demon of Fever
The Blood of Thousands
This chapter focuses on the ways in which slave traders throughout the Atlantic world understood and fought against the diseases that affected them and their human cargoes. It does so by illustrating the risks associated with slave trading expeditions and with the residence in African towns and factories. It also discusses to what extent their understanding and treatment of these diseases were similar to those of the medical officers who confront…
The Yellow Demon of Fever
The Yellow Demon of Fever unravels the story of the uninterrupted Atlantic struggle between humans and often terrifying and puzzling diseases, a struggle that generated a vast amount of information at a time when transatlantic means of communication were significantly enhanced. It seeks to demonstrate that while the enforcement of abolitionist policies in the Atlantic contributed to the eventual ending of the transatlantic slave trade, it also le…
“A Beautiful Spot for a Grave”
This chapter grapples with a number of issues associated with how diseases associated with the slave trade were perceived across the Atlantic world, and what ideas and methods were advised and devised to prevent their arrival and dissemination. It does so by focusing first on the ways in which authorities and individuals attempted to sanitize ecosystems, in order to reduce the threat that so-called pestilential environments, and second on their n…
“Such an Asylum of Wretchedness”
Creating safe havens for the Africans seized on board slave ships was from early on a necessity for all those involved in putting into practice abolitionist policies throughout the Atlantic. This chapter examines the scope and limitations of the most important Atlantic reception centers, while exploring their impact on the places where they were located. It also considers a number of relevant issues related to the postcapture experiences of these…
Cruising for Slaves and Boating up Rivers
At sea, disease was a common adversary to both slave traders and anti–slave trade officers in the various navies involved in the implementation of abolition policies in the Atlantic. Their many challenges are covered in the pages of this chapter, placing special emphasis on the ways in which they dealt with potential epidemics whenever they seized a vessel full of sick enslaved Africans. Other important issues discussed here are the ways in which…
New approaches to the slave trade, slavery, abolition and emancipation across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans
Taking the theme of “abolition” as its point of departure, this collection of essays builds on the significant growth in scholarship on unfree labour in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds during the past two decades. The essays revisit some of the persistent problems posed by the traditional comparative literature on slavery and indentured labour and identify new and exciting areas for future research
Comment From Revolution to Recognition
When in 1959 R. R. Palmer published the first volume of his foundational work The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, references to the Haitian Revolution within its pages were few and far between.1 In a text overwhelmingly dominated by the American and French Revolutions, the slave rebellion-turned-unforeseen revolution, which shook the foundations of the Western Hemisphere’s status quo, was referr…
The War against the Pirates
Weapons from their land’
This article addresses the essential issue of weaponry and war paraphernalia used by West African men and women in Bahia and Cuba throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that it was due to the similarities existing between their African and American environments that they were able to reproduce the ways in which they had acquired the weapons necessary to undertake their military actions. Moving away from the concept of slav…
Innovation and entrepreneurship as strategies for success among Cuban-based firms in the late years of the transatlantic slave trade
This article examines how Cuban-based firms and entrepreneurs circumvented ever- increasing risks in the illegal slave trade. The article sheds light to this question by analyzing new qualitative information of 65 Cuban-based firms against the Slavevoyages database. Our findings indicate that Cuban-based firms were entrepreneurial as they exploited the opportunities arising from the volatility of the slave trade by: (a) internalizing networks of …
To Kill all Whites”
Using case studies extracted from primary sources produced predominantly in Brazil and Cuba, this article contends that West African military commanders and troops in both regions during the first half of the nineteenth century exhibited an ethical behavior associated with war, which was strongly tied to their cosmologies of the world. Since these actions were all staged against either slavery or enslavement, it argues that the central ethical is…
Cuba in and After 2016
Charlotte A. Cosner. The Golden Leaf
Throughout most of the colonial era in Cuba, tobacco was a sui generis product in the sense that it held a draconian royal monopoly until the second decade of the nineteenth century. As a result, the history of its production and commerce differs significantly from that of other important crops such as coffee or sugar. In The Golden Leaf: How Tobacco Shaped Cuba and the Atlantic World, Charlotte A. Cosner has taken on the daunting task of examini…
Fully Capable of Any Iniquity’
In the early eighteenth century, two Basque brothers of the Spanish Zangroniz family established a trading house in the Cuban capital. Through the expansion and diversification of their business activities over time, they created a powerful transatlantic commercial network, and in the process became important actors during a period characterized by vastly increased economic integration in the Atlantic world. Behind this growth were technological …
Freedom's mirror
Powerful Subjects
This article explores the ways in which Cuban-based merchants and planters attempted to keep a robust control upon their increasingly large slave population, while endeavouring to show to the rest of the world an idyllic picture of Cuban slavery. By using James C. Scott's concepts of ‘Hidden’ and ‘Public Transcripts’, the article examines primary sources produced precisely by those merchants and planters, sources that were meant to be kept betwee…
Between Home and the Sea
This chapter focuses on the practice of the slave trade to Bahia and Cuba in the first half of the nineteenth century, and offers a reassessment of the impact that processes and forms of enslavement and the transportation to the coast, and across the Atlantic, had on the shaping of plantation societies on the other side of the ocean. It also re-examines the figures of this trade with the purpose of making sense of the numbers of the trade to Bahi…
Between Glory and Decay
This chapter deals with the political and socio-economic changes that took place in and around Oyo from the early 1790s onwards. Zooming in from the general (creation and destruction of states, inter-state and internal wars, enslaving raids, etc.), to the particular (personal experiences of those who were enslaved and sent to the Atlantic world during this period), it also addresses a number of issues and themes that were paramount to the functio…
Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World
The conclusion of this book offers a number of propositions for future studies of what until now we have considered as slave rebellions or revolts. It suggests that more attention needs to be paid to the history of Africa by historians of the Americas, so that the experiences of the African slaves are not lost in associations with events and ideas originated elsewhere. The conclusions also suggest a number of new research paths that may lead us t…
Fully Capable of Any Iniquity’
In the early eighteenth century, two Basque brothers of the Spanish Zangroniz family established a trading house in the Cuban capital. Through the expansion and diversification of their business activities over time, they created a powerful transatlantic commercial network, and in the process became important actors during a period characterized by vastly increased economic integration in the Atlantic world. Behind this growth were technological …
Into the future
This article examines developments in the field of Atlantic History within the past two decades and through the prism of slavery studies and a number of close sub-fields. By paying attention to what Atlantic historians have achieved since the turn of the century, it discusses contributions and critiques in equal measure, highlighting the field's place in wider global discussions. While probing a number of methodological challenges that are alread…
Innovation and entrepreneurship as strategies for success among Cuban-based firms in the late years of the transatlantic slave trade
This article examines how Cuban-based firms and entrepreneurs circumvented ever- increasing risks in the illegal slave trade. The article sheds light to this question by analyzing new qualitative information of 65 Cuban-based firms against the Slavevoyages database. Our findings indicate that Cuban-based firms were entrepreneurial as they exploited the opportunities arising from the volatility of the slave trade by: (a) internalizing networks of …
Locking horns with the Northern Empire’
Fighting With the Enemy's Weapons
This article focuses on the use of the colonial legal framework by Cuban slaves. It examines briefly the particulars of the slave laws across the Americas, before focusing on nineteenth century Cuba. Cases drawn from Cuban plantation archives illustrate and analyse the way plantation slaves learned to use the law for their own benefit, and show what limitations they found while attempting to exercise their legal rights. Slaves often encountered a…
An Islamic Atlantic Revolution
Over the past decades the impact of Atlantic revolutions on slave revolts in the Americas has become a constant subject of discussion. The ways in which the French and Haitian revolutions determined the actions of African slaves in the Americas has only been matched by the relevance given by scholars to the impact of British abolitionist policies from 1807 onwards. While, at least for a period, a series of events that took place in Europe and the…
New approaches to the slave trade, slavery, abolition and emancipation across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans
Taking the theme of “abolition” as its point of departure, this collection of essays builds on the significant growth in scholarship on unfree labour in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds during the past two decades. The essays revisit some of the persistent problems posed by the traditional comparative literature on slavery and indentured labour and identify new and exciting areas for future research
To Kill all Whites”
Using case studies extracted from primary sources produced predominantly in Brazil and Cuba, this article contends that West African military commanders and troops in both regions during the first half of the nineteenth century exhibited an ethical behavior associated with war, which was strongly tied to their cosmologies of the world. Since these actions were all staged against either slavery or enslavement, it argues that the central ethical is…
West African Islam in Colonial Cuba
Over the past decades, the impact of Atlantic ideas and ideologies in the Americas has become a constant subject of discussion. The ways in which the French and Haitian revolutions determined the actions of African slaves in the Americas have only been matched by the relevance given by scholars to the impact of British Abolitionist policies from 1807 onwards. West African wars associated with the transplantation of Islam were just as important. U…
Un coloso sobre la arena
A partir de 1791 las elites criollas de la isla de Cuba comenzaron a tomar ventaja de la situación política en la vecina colonia francesa de Saint-Domingue, a la cual intentaron reemplazar en los mercados internacionales de azúcar y café. Para conseguir sus objetivos fue necesario importar mayores números de esclavos africanos destinados a laborar en las plantaciones. La pelea por el derecho a continuar importando africanos a la isla se libró dur…
A Proslavery Foreign Policy
In recent years, important studies on the history of Saint Domingue and the Republic of Haiti have rectified, to a great extent, our previous ignorance about many issues related to this always-conflictive Caribbean territory. Tim Matthewson’s book constitutes a new effort to shed light upon the foreign policies developed by the first American administrations toward Saint Domingue and Haiti.This ambitious book, written in an old-fashioned, solidly…
Fighting With the Enemy's Weapons
This article focuses on the use of the colonial legal framework by Cuban slaves. It examines briefly the particulars of the slave laws across the Americas, before focusing on nineteenth century Cuba. Cases drawn from Cuban plantation archives illustrate and analyse the way plantation slaves learned to use the law for their own benefit, and show what limitations they found while attempting to exercise their legal rights. Slaves often encountered a…
Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean. Colin A. Palmer, Durham & London
Writing a biography is probably the most difficult task that any historian can undertake. In every historical character there are private and public dimensions and an infinite number of elements, including ideas, circumstantial actions, and secrets that can easily be overlooked or overstated and can divert the biographer from his objective
Seeds of Insurrection
Les « Epines de la Truite
En 1809, poco después de la invasión Napoleónica a España las autoridades de la isla de Cuba comenzaron a expulsar a todos los habitantes francoparlantes que fueran considerados un peligro a la seguridad de la colonia española. Cientos de ellos, llegados pocos años antes de la Luisiana y del revuelto Saint Domingue se vieron forzados a vender todas sus pertenencias y a salir inmediatamente de Cuba en un periodo de tiempo extremadamente breve. Est…
Locking horns with the Northern Empire’
New Negroes from Africa
Slavery in Brazil - by Klein, Herbert S. and Vidal Luna, Francisco
Un coloso sobre la arena
A partir de 1791 las elites criollas de la isla de Cuba comenzaron a tomar ventaja de la situación política en la vecina colonia francesa de Saint-Domingue, a la cual intentaron reemplazar en los mercados internacionales de azúcar y café. Para conseguir sus objetivos fue necesario importar mayores números de esclavos africanos destinados a laborar en las plantaciones. La pelea por el derecho a continuar importando africanos a la isla se libró dur…
Cuba
This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in Cuba. In the sixteenth-century, Africans crossed the Atlantic and accompanied Diego Velésquez and other Spanish conquistadors in the first expeditions sent to subjugate Cuba. Africans served in post-conquest Cuba as enslaved assistants to powerful military and political officials or as domestic servants. During the nineteenth-century heyday of plantation slavery, Cub…
From Africa to Brazil
Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World
Solimar Otero’s Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World is a welcome addition to the increasing number of studies focusing on the history of African individuals and peoples within the Atlantic world context. The book is written using a combination of anthropological, ethnographic, and historical analytical tools aimed at recovering the history and legacy of a group of Africans and their descendants in both Cuba and Nigeria. Although Otero’s st…
An Islamic Atlantic Revolution
Over the past decades the impact of Atlantic revolutions on slave revolts in the Americas has become a constant subject of discussion. The ways in which the French and Haitian revolutions determined the actions of African slaves in the Americas has only been matched by the relevance given by scholars to the impact of British abolitionist policies from 1807 onwards. While, at least for a period, a series of events that took place in Europe and the…
Between Home and the Sea
This chapter focuses on the practice of the slave trade to Bahia and Cuba in the first half of the nineteenth century, and offers a reassessment of the impact that processes and forms of enslavement and the transportation to the coast, and across the Atlantic, had on the shaping of plantation societies on the other side of the ocean. It also re-examines the figures of this trade with the purpose of making sense of the numbers of the trade to Bahi…
Between Glory and Decay
This chapter deals with the political and socio-economic changes that took place in and around Oyo from the early 1790s onwards. Zooming in from the general (creation and destruction of states, inter-state and internal wars, enslaving raids, etc.), to the particular (personal experiences of those who were enslaved and sent to the Atlantic world during this period), it also addresses a number of issues and themes that were paramount to the functio…
Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World
The conclusion of this book offers a number of propositions for future studies of what until now we have considered as slave rebellions or revolts. It suggests that more attention needs to be paid to the history of Africa by historians of the Americas, so that the experiences of the African slaves are not lost in associations with events and ideas originated elsewhere. The conclusions also suggest a number of new research paths that may lead us t…
West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba
This chapter begins with a discussion of the use of Western terms by Bahian and Cuban authorities while dealing with African insurgents. Relying on primary sources, the chapter questions the use of terms such as revolt and rebellion and their subsequent use by historians over the years. It proposes a reassessment of the terminology and suggests that these actions seem to have been nothing but acts of wars to their protagonists, and that they shou…
West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba
This chapter continues to examine the characteristics of West African armed movements in Bahia and Cuba. The chapter relies heavily on primary sources and focuses on a series of aspects that defined the character of the actions of war carried out by West African men, women, and children in Bahia and Cuba. By looking into aspects such as operations and tactics of war, the composition of the insurgent troops, weaponry, and war paraphernalia, the ch…
West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba
This book seeks to explain how a series of historical events that occurred in a specific geographical area of West Africa from the mid-1790s onwards had an impact upon life in cities and plantations in western Cuba and Bahia. Why did these two geographical areas serve as the theatre for the rise of the Nagôs, the Lucumís, and other West African men and women? The answer, the book argues, relates to the fact that plantation economies supported by …
West African Islam in Colonial Cuba
Over the past decades, the impact of Atlantic ideas and ideologies in the Americas has become a constant subject of discussion. The ways in which the French and Haitian revolutions determined the actions of African slaves in the Americas have only been matched by the relevance given by scholars to the impact of British Abolitionist policies from 1807 onwards. West African wars associated with the transplantation of Islam were just as important. U…
Powerful Subjects
This article explores the ways in which Cuban-based merchants and planters attempted to keep a robust control upon their increasingly large slave population, while endeavouring to show to the rest of the world an idyllic picture of Cuban slavery. By using James C. Scott's concepts of ‘Hidden’ and ‘Public Transcripts’, the article examines primary sources produced precisely by those merchants and planters, sources that were meant to be kept betwee…
Charlotte A. Cosner. The Golden Leaf
Throughout most of the colonial era in Cuba, tobacco was a sui generis product in the sense that it held a draconian royal monopoly until the second decade of the nineteenth century. As a result, the history of its production and commerce differs significantly from that of other important crops such as coffee or sugar. In The Golden Leaf: How Tobacco Shaped Cuba and the Atlantic World, Charlotte A. Cosner has taken on the daunting task of examini…
Fully Capable of Any Iniquity’
In the early eighteenth century, two Basque brothers of the Spanish Zangroniz family established a trading house in the Cuban capital. Through the expansion and diversification of their business activities over time, they created a powerful transatlantic commercial network, and in the process became important actors during a period characterized by vastly increased economic integration in the Atlantic world. Behind this growth were technological …
Freedom's mirror
To Kill all Whites”
Using case studies extracted from primary sources produced predominantly in Brazil and Cuba, this article contends that West African military commanders and troops in both regions during the first half of the nineteenth century exhibited an ethical behavior associated with war, which was strongly tied to their cosmologies of the world. Since these actions were all staged against either slavery or enslavement, it argues that the central ethical is…
History (34 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (30 works) · Political science (26 works) · Cuban History and Society (19 works) · Ancient history (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Archaeology (13 works) · Geography (13 works) · History (13 works) · Sociology (13 works)