E lena A. S chneider . The Occupation of Havana

In 1762, shortly before the British sieged Havana’s harbor, an enslaved woman purchased her freedom out of Spanish slavery. María del Carmen, the formerly enslaved woman, would not only survive the events that led to the eleven-month occupation of Havana but would negotiate competing empires and a web of intercolonial relationships to return to Kingston as a free subject of the British monarch. She remained a freedwoman, as far as we know, despite the Spanish process of manumission not normally being recognized in British Jamaica. This opening anecdote introduces Elena A. Schneider’s The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic, a book that is ostensibly about the siege and eleven-month British occupation of the city but that reveals a more complex history of imperial competition and exchange undergirded by slavery and the slave trade. Like María del Carmen’s story, the book reveals the entangled histories of empire and the shifting roles of free and enslaved African descendants in eighteenth-century Cuba.

Ancient history · Anecdote · Archaeology · Art · Atlantic slave trade · Competition (biology) · Economic history · Empire · Fur trade · Genealogy · Literature · Negotiation · Political science · Siege · Spanish Civil War · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies