6 - Cuba, c. 1760–c.1860

Summary

Hugh Thomas, Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom (London, 1971), is a general history of Cuba since 1762. Raymond Carr, Spain 1808–1939 (Oxford, 1966), is the best general history of Spain for this period. On the Bourbon reforms in Cuba, see Allan J. Kuethe, Cuba, 1753–1815: Crown, Military and Society (Knoxville, Tenn., 1986). Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and Society in the Caribbean: An Economic History of Cuban Agriculture, trans. Marjorie Urquidi (New Haven, Conn., 1964) and Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York, 1947), are brilliant and suggestive essays by great Cuban writers. Planter society is well analysed in Roland Ely, Cuando reinaba su majestad el azúcar: Estudio histórico-sociológico de una tragedia latinoamericana (Buenos Aires, 1963), a major work of historical reconstruction largely based on the papers of the Drake and Terry families. See also Franklin W. Knight, ‘Origins of wealth and the sugar revolution in Cuba, 1750–1850’, HAHR, 57/2 (1977), 236–53. Laird W. Bergad, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton, N.J., 1990) is an important provincial study. The sugar industry is best studied from a technical point of view in Manuel Fraginals, El ingenio, 1 (Havana, 1964), Eng. trans. The Sugarmill: The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba 1760–1860 (New York, 1976). The slave trade to Cuba in the nineteenth century, and its abolition, has been adequately covered in David Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge, Eng., 1980), while the Spanish side of the abolition of both the slave trade and slavery has been analysed in Arthur F. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba 1817–1886 (Austin, Tex., 1967).