William C. Van Norman Jr. Shade-Grown Slavery

The historiography of Cuban slavery is replete with works that examine the role of sugar in Cuba and its preeminence in the nineteenth-century Cuban economy. Likewise, to a lesser degree, tobacco has long been a focus of historians of Cuba. William Van Norman's Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba has as its objective the restoration of those slaves' stories into the historical record by exploring their role in the formation of the Cuban identity. The work is divided into three parts. Part I examines the rise of the coffee plantations (cafetales) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Chapter one discusses the expansion of the cafetales with respect to legal, economic, and demographic change. Chapter two details the structural changes in eighteenth-century Cuba that allowed for the expansion of Cuban agriculture and argues against the notion that it expanded solely as a result of the events of the Haitian Revolution. Moreover, Van Norman notes that cafetales exhibited a more balanced sex ratio than seen on sugar plantations; consequently, coffee-producing areas saw creolization occur years before other areas, a notion with important implications for Cuban history.

Archaeology · Art · Creolization · Economic history · Historiography · Identity (music) · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History