Slave Families and the Hato Economy in Puerto Rico

Recently, historians of the early modern Caribbean have begun to move beyond a traditional focus on sugar plantations by highlighting alternate economic, environmental, and political systems that structured the social lives of enslaved and free people. David M. Stark's Slave Families and the Hato Economy in Puerto Rico is a major contribution to this literature. Stark examines the relationship between slave labor, demography, and family structure in Puerto Rico from 1660 to 1815, a period during which the island produced little sugar and legally exported few cash crops. Stark shows that far from being an economic backwater, midcolonial Puerto Rico produced a diversity of commodities, including hides, foodstuffs, and timber, most of which entered the contraband trade. These were the principal products of large rural ranches called hatos, where many of the island's slaves lived and worked. Hatos were less regimented than sugar plantations, allowing slaves in Puerto Rico to achieve higher birth rates, live longer lives, and form more stable families than their counterparts elsewhere in the Caribbean. Ultimately, Stark argues that the hato economy fostered the development of an Afro-creole society and culture that were particular to Puerto Rico.Stark first describes the rise of the hato economy in the late seventeenth century, when Puerto Rico experienced a sharp decline in legal trading opportunities and waning cash crop production. Where some historians have seen stagnation, Stark sees the origin of a more diversified economy, typified by the hato. Relative to sugar plantations, hatos required few laborers and allowed more time for provision farming, both of which had an ameliorative effect on the hardships of slavery. The result was a stable slave population that, Stark argues, did not rely on the regular introduction of new slaves via the slave trade. Using baptismal records to work around gaps in shipping evidence, he demonstrates in chapter 3 that the majority of slaves baptized on the island were baptized as infants, which indicates that the slave trade was a minor source of the island's enslaved population. This, Stark argues, led to the “deculturation” of African-born slaves, rapid creolization, and the emergence of a “coherent, functional, and unified Afro-Puerto Rican slave community” (p. 94). Social cohesion, in turn, manifested in marital opportunities and family stability, the subjects of the final two chapters. In chapter 4, we learn not only that slave marriage rates were higher in Puerto Rico than elsewhere in the Caribbean but also that spousal selection was not dictated strictly by age, place of birth, or relationships between owners, which indicates that slaves exercised some freedom of choice in marriage. Finally, chapter 5 introduces what is possibly Stark's most significant finding: that slaves in Puerto Rico achieved high birth rates and, ultimately, a natural growth rate, both exceedingly rare in Caribbean slave societies.Stark builds his arguments on an impressive foundation of quantitative evidence, collected from the marital, baptismal, and burial records of 21 parochial archives across Puerto Rico. He concentrates on the northwestern province of Arecibo, where the hato economy was most entrenched and where records are most complete, and contextualizes his findings there within the broader scope of the island. Stark uses the method of family reconstitution—reading disparate records side by side to map changes to individual families—allowing him insights into issues that are often not addressed explicitly, like the size of slave populations on individual hatos. Although the limitations of parish records are evident throughout—a fact that Stark discusses frankly—his methodology is a valuable model for scholars confronting similar evidentiary constraints.There are some areas in which the book's limits are more noticeable. For instance, Stark regularly shuffles between quantitative measures in an effort to extract as much meaningful data as possible, which occasionally leads to greater confusion than it does clarity. More seriously, Stark's reading of hato slavery, contrasted with the brutality of plantation slavery, sometimes appears somewhat rose-colored. A more critical analysis of racial violence and power dynamics would have been a helpful complement to Stark's explicitly comparative approach.Stark is meticulous in his research, clear in his writing, and judicious in his argument. By connecting contraband trade to rural slave labor, Stark successfully fuses familiar strains of Caribbean social history with more recent interest in transimperial commerce. Above all, this book makes a thoroughly original contribution to scholarship on a time and place that are both understudied and central to our understanding of Caribbean slavery beyond the sugar plantation. For these reasons, it constitutes a major addition to Caribbean history and the history of slavery more generally and will be of lasting importance to scholars in these fields

Agriculture · Archaeology · Cash crop · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Geography · Political science · Politics · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Cuban History and Society · Law

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