Slavery and Antislavery in Spain's Atlantic Empire

The essays in this volume make an important contribution to understanding the process through which European empires shifted, as Seymour Drescher's aptly titled contribution puts it, “from empires of slavery to empires of antislavery” (p. 291). They do so by centering on Spain and its Atlantic empire. This focus results in the volume's most significant contribution and resounding statement: that the Spanish empire, far from being “a case apart in the study of slavery and abolition” (p. 1), played an important role in the histories of slavery and antislavery in the Atlantic world.Chronologically, the essays focus on the nineteenth century, when slavery (and antislavery) gained ground in the Spanish empire. The previous three centuries of Spanish activity in the Americas are collapsed in an essay by Josep Delgado Ribas that presents the evolution of the slave trade to Spanish America, emphasizing the logic that kept trade in goods separate from trade in slaves. An essay by Luiz Felipe de Alencastro on Portuguese Jesuits working on both sides of the Atlantic serves as a useful reminder that antislavery arguments had been advanced long before the nineteenth century. Geographically, the volume emphasizes two locations: Cuba and Catalonia. Essays on the central role of slaves in the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata and the debates among sixteenth-century Portuguese missionaries regarding the morality and legitimacy of slavery and the slave trade (by Juan Carlos Garavaglia and Alencastro, respectively) add geographical diversity to the volume. Collectively, the essays emphasize that both slavery and antislavery took many forms and found a variety of justifications. In addition, while accepting a general transition from slavery to antislavery, the essays demonstrate that both advocates of slavery and proponents of antislavery always faced some level of opposition.That the nature of slavery and antislavery was always debated is most clearly expressed in Ada Ferrer's contribution. “Clearly,” Ferrer writes, “the nineteenth century was the antislavery century” (p. 135). It was also the century in which “slavery in Cuba underwent its most dramatic expansion” (p. 135). While Ferrer, as well as Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Michael Zeuske, and Orlando García Martínez, turns this apparent contradiction into a nonparadoxical example of how slavery and antislavery were “mutually constitutive” and always in conversation (p. 144), Alejandro de la Fuente uses a multiplicity of cases of “entrepreneurial slaves” (p. 108) who took abusive masters to court to show that Cuban slaves were active participants in the often-heated conversation (as opposed to passive observers witnessing others talk about them).The essays on Catalonia, a region that does not usually figure in accounts of the slave trade, slavery, and antislavery, are the most illuminating contributions. A group of historians from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where a conference that led to the volume was held in 2009, contributes essays that effectively link the slave trade and Cuba's sugar revolution to Barcelona's nineteenth-century industrialization. Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla follows the money to uncover the connection between slave-trade profits and the development of factories, banks, and insurance companies in Barcelona. In his essay, Barcelona appears as the center of a strong and politically influential antiabolitionist lobby whose efforts should be at least partially credited with the late abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Albert Garcia Balañà's analysis of the Barcelona-based antislavery tradition further demonstrates the book's argument that slavery and antislavery were never discrete processes but were always antagonistic contemporaries.Biographical sketches and prosopographical reconstructions help the authors make the editors' case for the importance of focusing on the Spanish empire. Individuals like Francisco Arango y Parreño, Joseph Blanco White, Isidoro de Antillón, Francisco de Borja, and Antonio López y López, as well as the many French technicians who settled in Cuba after the Haitian Revolution, the Catalan slave traders who became industrial magnates, and the Jesuits who debated the pros and cons of slavery and antislavery, allow us to understand that, despite being a “plantation latecomer” (p. 1), the Spanish empire was not in the peripheries of the contentious history of Atlantic slavery and antislavery. The abolitionist activism of Blanco White, Antillón, and Antonio Bergnes de las Casas — explored in the essays by Schmidt-Nowara, Josep Fradera, and Garcia Balañà — needs to be recognized along with the antislavery contributions of better-known abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and Toussaint Louverture. The strong proslavery and antiabolitionist arguments of Cuban planter Arango y Parreño (whose role in launching Cuba's sugar revolution and in defending slavery against the attacks of Blanco White is analyzed by Ferrer and Schmidt-Nowara) and Catalan industrialist López y López (a representative of the Barcelona-based slave traders turned industrial magnates studied by Rodrigo y Alharilla) should be known by historians of the British Atlantic who, since the publication of Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1944), have been acquainted with the “West India interest” and its staunch defense of slavery and the slave trade. That many of the individuals introduced in the essays have remained at the margins of the history of slavery and antislavery in the Atlantic world is testament to the enduring power of political geographies to cloud our understanding of historical processes that cut across imperial borders and feature quotidian exchanges of goods, news, ideas, and knowledge, all of which made the Atlantic a transimperial geography of experience.As is often the case with edited volumes, most of the essays point to monographs in the making that will further enrich our understanding of the ideological currents and on-the-ground experiences that shaped the history of slavery and antislavery in the Atlantic world. Slavery and Antislavery in Spain's Atlantic Empire is a wonderful book that could productively be assigned to an undergraduate audience. Should a more affordable paperback edition be made available, this reviewer would adopt this enlightening volume

Ancient history · Art · Atlantic slave trade · Atlantic World · Empire · Humanities · Legitimacy · Morality · Political science · Portuguese · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History · Law · Philosophy