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Silver, Slaves, and Sugar: The Persistence of Spanish Colonialism from Absolutism to Liberalism

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SILVER, TRADE, AND WAR: SPAIN AND AMERICA IN THE MAKING OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE. By Stein Stanley J. and Stein Barbara H. (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. 351. $49.95 cloth.)
BLACK SOCIETY IN SPANISH FLORIDA. By Jane Landers. Foreword by Wood Peter H. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Pp. 390. $50.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)
LOS MARQUESES DE COMILLAS, 1817-1925: ANTONIO Y CLAUDIO LOPEZ. By Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla. Prologue by Ribas Josep María Delgado. (Madrid: LID Editorial Empresarial, 2000. Pp. 405. N.p.)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara*
Affiliation:
Fordham University
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Type
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Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 39 , Issue 2 , June 2004 , pp. 196 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © 2004 by the University of Texas Press

References

1. Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 262.

2. Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America (New

3. The classic discussion of the Spanish monarchy's weakness, especially in its confrontations with France in the seventeenth century, is J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469-1714 (New York: New American Library, 1963). Idem., Richelieu and Olivares (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Robin Blackburn characterizes the political economy of early modern England and France in similar fashion, though with a concentration on the state's partnership with the commercial bourgeoisie in developing colonial slavery rather than controlling bullion flows. See The Making of New World Slavery, 1492-1800: From the Baroque to the Modern (London: Verso, 1997).

4. On the Cuban slave complex, the fundamental work is Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio, 3 vols. (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978). See also Dale Tomich, “World Slavery and Caribbean Capitalism: The Cuban Sugar Industry, 1760-1868,” Theory and Society 20 (1991): 297-319. On the impact of military reforms, see Allan J. Kuethe, Cuba, 1753-1815: Crown, Military, and Society (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986); and Sherry Johnson, The Social Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Cuba (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).

5. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998), 1-92.

6. Berlin borrows this distinction from the ancient historians Keith Hopkins and Moses Finley.

7. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 1-14. See also Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

8. For instance, Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, the Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage, 1946).

9. See Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery; and Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713, foreword by Gary Nash (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

10. Though Landers refers to Tannenbaum in her book's introduction, she never returns to consider his thesis in light of her findings and argument. Given the many years of harsh criticism of Tannenbaum by historians of Latin American slavery, further reflection would have been welcome. For a more sustained and vigorous reconsideration of Tannebaum's characterization of Latin American slavery, see María Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Responses to Tannenbaum by scholars of Latin American and Caribbean slavery have generally been highly critical. The Steins are among those critics. See The Colonial Heritage of Latin America. An especially nuanced critique of Tannenbaum, and of Stanley Elkins' work Slavery, is offered by Sidney Mintz in “Slavery and Emergent Capitalism” in Slavery in the New World: A Reader in Comparative History edited by Laura Foner and Eugene D. Genovese (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), 27-37. For critical perspectives on the “paternalism” of Brazilian slavery, see Stuart Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

11. See also Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre for a discussion of the pueblo El Cobre in Cuba, also populated by slaves and free blacks who defended their unusual rights and prerogatives by emphasizing their military service to the monarchy.

12. See Frank Tannebaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage, 1946).

13. In addition to the works cited in n. 4, see Franklin Knight, Slave Society in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970); David Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1865-1899 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Laird Bergad, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

14. Díaz makes interesting observations regarding the changes in slavery over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. See the “Epilogue” in The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre. More generally on Cuban slave society in the shadow of the plantation, see Robert L. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); Verena Martínez Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1989); Joan Casanovas, Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850-1898 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); and Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). On La Escalera, see Robert L. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict Between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).

15. See also Angel Bahamonde and José Cayuela, Hacer las Américas: Las elites coloniales en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1992); and Astrid Cubano Iguina, Un puente entre Mallorca y Puerto Rico: La emigración de Sóller, 1830-1930 (Gijón: Ediciones Júcar, 1993).

16. By Maluquer de Motes, see “El mercado colonial antillano en le siglo XIX,” in Agricultura, comercio colonial y crecimiento económico en la España contemporánea, edited by Jordi Nadal and Gabriel Tortella (Barcelona: Ariel, 1974), 322-57; and Nación e inmigración: Los españoles en Cuba (ss. XIX y XX) (Gijón: Ediciones Júcar, 1992). By Fradera, “La participación catalana en el tràfic d'esclaus,” Recerques 16 (1984): 118-39; and Industria y mercat: Les bases comercials de la industria catalana moderna (1814-1845) (Barcelona: Crítica, 1987).

17. See also his Filipinas, la colonia más peculiar: La hacienda pública en la definición de la política colonial, 1762-1868 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicos (CSIC), 1999).

18. See Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

19. See Juan Pérez de la Riva, ed. Correspondencia reservada del Capitan General D. Miguel Tacón (Havana: Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, 1963); and Jesús Raúl Navarro García, Entre esclavos y constitutciónes (el colonialismo liberal de 1837 en Cuba) (Seville: CSIC, 1991).

20. José Alvarez Junco, Mater dolorosa: La idea de España en el siglo XIX (Madrid: Taurus, 2001).

21. Carlos M. Trelles, quoted in Maluquer de Motes, España en la crisis de 1898, 203.

22. An especially ebullient reflection can be found in Juan Pablo Fusi's essay “España: el fin del siglo XX,” Claves de razón prática, no. 87 (1998): 2-9. See also, Fernando García de Cortázar, “Un '98 sin llanto,” Historia 16, no. 257 (1997): 3, 72-75.