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Still Continents (and an Island) with Two Histories?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
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Extract

Historians of Latin American slavery will find de la Fuente's article to be a particularly trenchant and learned essay on familiar historiographic controversies. The archival research awakens anticipation for the author's in-depth study of the earlier period of Cuban slavery, much neglected in favor of the heyday of the sugar complex of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Concentrating on the law and “slaves' claims-making” (341) allows for an important entry into the subject, complementing recent studies of slavery in Spanish America that have focused on how slaves used the institutions of Spanish colonialism to gain freedom or greater autonomy. However, reviving the Tannenbaum thesis, even in the limited form of the law, inspires less enthusiasm. De la Fuente's interpretation of Cuban slavery, through his rereading of Tannenbuam, does not produce misrepresentations in his treatment of historiography or sources; rather, I sense in this work the static conception of New World slavery created by Tannenbaum's dichotomous vision, both among and within particular colonial and national slave societies.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Summer 2004 , pp. 377 - 382
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2004

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References

1. See de la Fuente, Alejandro, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22 (2004): 339–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Landers, Jane, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Diaz, María Elena, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre; Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).Google Scholar

3. Berlin, Ira, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar See also Tomich, Dale, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1815–1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Blackburn, Robin, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997)Google Scholar; and Thornton, John, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. On French and Spanish slave laws and their use by the enslaved in colonial New Orleans, see Gould, L. Virginia, “Urban Slavery-Urban Freedom: The Manumission of Jacqueline Lemelle,” in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. Gaspar, David Barry and Hines, Darlene Clark (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 298–314.Google Scholar See also Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida.

5. Ferrer, Ada, insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Scott, Rebecca J., Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1865–1899, 2nd ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. Scott, Julius S., “Crisscrossing Empires: Ships, Sailors, and Resistance in the Lesser Antilles in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Paquette, Robert L. and Engerman, Stanley L. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 128–43Google Scholar; and Geggus, David and Gaspar, David Barry, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).Google Scholar

7. See also Diaz's comments on this issue in The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre, 12–13.

8. Riva, Juan Pérez de la, “Una isla con dos historias,” in El barracón: esclavitud y capitalismo en Cuba (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1978), 175.Google Scholar

9. Pérez de la Riva, “Una isla,” 176.