11 - Africans and Their Descendants in the Spanish Empire in the Age of Revolutions

Summary

As they had in early modern Spain, Africans and their descendants across the Spanish Empire were able to achieve freedom through a variety of legal means. In the seventeenth century, as European competitors contested Spain’s claims on the Americas, free black military units became key to the defense of Spanish territories and the Spanish Crown recognized and rewarded their service. After a French monarch assumed the vacant throne of Spain in the eighteenth century, Bourbon administrators established Disciplined Militias offering additional protections and privileges to the African descended men who joined their ranks, and to their families. In return, this expanding free black class often expressed its loyalty to the Spanish Crown. The French and American Revolutions that rejected monarchy and disseminated new ideas such as the Rights of Man and constitutional forms of government forced Africans and their descendants to re-consider their options. Some rejected monarchy. Others, however, continued to trust in the monarchical system that had benefitted many generations of African descended families. Those chose royalism over rebellion. Africans and their descendants continued to face such choices as independence movements sprung up across Latin America in the early nineteenth century and as Spain sent armies to crush them.