Slave Society In Cuba During The Nineteenth Century

Investigates how patriarchy operated in the lives of the women of Cuba, from elite women to slaves Scholars have long recognized the importance of gender and hierarchy in the slave societies of the New World, yet gendered analysis of Cuba has lagged behind study of other regions. Cuban elites recognized that creating and maintaining the Cuban slave society required a rigid social hierarchy based on race, gender, and legal status. Given the dramatic changes that came to Cuba in the wake of the Haitian Revolution and the growth of the enslaved population, the maintenance of order required a patriarchy that placed both women and slaves among the lower ranks. Based on a variety of archival and printed primary sources, this book examines how patriarchy functioned outside the confines of the family unit by scrutinizing the foundation on which nineteenth-century Cuban patriarchy rested. This book investigates how patriarchy operated in the lives of the women of Cuba, from elite women to slaves. Through chapters on motherhood, marriage, education, public charity, and the sale of slaves, insight is gained into the role of patriarchy both as a guiding ideology and lived history in the Caribbean's longest lasting slave society. Sarah L. Franklin is assistant professor of history at the University of North Alabama.

A study of marriage patterns in 19th-century Cuba

Slavery was in many ways the fundamental institution in colonial Cuba, whose economy was based on the export of sugar from the slave-worked plantations. This volume presents a quantitative study of Cuban slavery from the late eighteenth century until 1880, the year slavery was formally abolished on the island. The core of this study is an examination of the yearly movement of slave prices and changes in the demographic characteristics of the slave market. Based on data from the notarial protocol records of the Archivo Nacional de Cuba, this book establishes precise price trends for slaves by age, sex, nationality, and occupation, and considers a number of other variables including the prices of coartados (slaves who had begun the process of buying their freedom) and the patterns of emancipation. Incorporating over 30,000 slave transactions from three separate locations in Cuba - Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos - this work comprises the largest extant database on any slave market in the Americas.

"Slavery throughout the capitalist world-economy expands. The old zones in one way or another reach their limits and the new zones break through: to become part of the new division of labor (in the 19th century). In that sense The Second Slavery would encompass both decline and renewal of slaveries. I never intended the idea to apply just to Cuba, Brazil, and the cotton South as some people seem to take it. For me it is a concept of world economy and Cuba, Brazil, and the South are the obvious examples of those zones that break through. They permit us to think about slavery in a more dynamic way, but there is much more work to be done. From this perspective I would be more inclined to include Reunion, Mauritius and some parts of India, Ceylon and Java as well as British Guiana, than the older French and British Caribbean islands." -- contributor Dale Tomich, Binghamton U., New York *** The Second Slavery includes the following essays: African Slaves and the Atlantic: A Cultural Overview * The End of the British Atlantic Slave Trade or the Beginning of the Big Slave Robbery, 1808-1850 * Peasant or Proletarian: Emancipation and the Struggle for Freedom in British Guiana in the Shadow of the Second Slavery * The End of the "Second Slavery" in the Confederate South and the "Great Brigandage" in Southern Italy: A Comparative Study * Puerto Rico: "Atlantizacion" and Culture during the "Segunda Esclavitud" * The Second Slavery: Modernity, Mobility, and Identity of Captives in Nineteenth-Century Cuba and the Atlantic World * Commodity Frontiers, Conjuncture and Crisis: The Remaking of the Caribbean Sugar Industry, 1783-1866 * The Aftermath of Abolition: Distortions of the Historical Record in Machado de Assis' Counselor Aires' Memorial * The Second Slavery: Modernity in the 19th-Century South and the Atlantic World. (Series: Slavery and Postemancipation / Sklaverei und Postemanzipation / Esclavitud y Postemancipacion - Vol. 6)

Wage-Earning Slaves is the first systematic study of coartación, a process by which slaves worked toward purchasing their freedom in installments, long recognized as a distinctive feature of certain areas under Spanish colonial rule in the nineteenth century. Focusing on Cuba, this book reveals that instead of providing a “path to manumission,” the process was often rife with obstacles that blocked slaves from achieving liberty. Claudia Varella and Manuel Barcia trace the evolution of coartación in the context of urban and rural settings, documenting the lived experiences of slaves through primary sources from many different archives. They show that slave owners grew increasingly intolerant and abusive of the process, and that the laws of coartación were not often followed in practice. The process did not become formalized as a contract between slaves and their masters until 1875, after abolition had already come. Varella and Barcia discuss how coartados did not see an improvement in their situation at this time, but essentially became wage-earning slaves as they continued serving their former owners. The exhaustive research in this volume provides valuable insight into how slaves and their masters negotiated with each other in the ever-changing economic world of nineteenth-century Cuba, where freedom was not always absolute and where abuses and corruption most often prevailed.

A valuable narrative of the often paradoxical and conflicting human bonds between female owners and the enslaved in nineteenth-century Cuba In the early nineteenth century, while abolitionism was rising and the slave trade was declining in the Atlantic world, Spain used this opportunity to massively expand plantation slavery in Cuba. Between 1501 and 1866, more than 778,000 Africans were torn from their homelands and brought to work for the Cuban slaveholding class. An understudied aspect of Cuban slaveholding society is the role of the white Cuban slave mistress (amas). The Power of Their Will: Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba illuminates the interaction of female slaveholders and the enslaved during this time. Teresa Prados-Torreira shows, despite the lack of political power in a highly patriarchal society, Cuban women as property owners were instrumental in supporting the long duration of slavery, whether by enforcing the disciplining of the enslaved in the domestic sphere or helping to create the illusion of slavery as a humane institution. Thousands of Creole slaveholding women relied on slaves to lead a comfortable life. Even the subsistence of many poor women depended on the income derived from the hiring out of their enslaved. In this accessible cultural history, culled from government documents, fiction, newspaper articles, traveler’s accounts, women’s wills, and archival research, Prados-Torreira coalesces a valuable narrative out of the often paradoxical and conflicting stories of the human bonds between the female owner and the enslaved. Narrative chapters, enlivened by vignettes, describe the daily life of slave mistresses in the main cities of Havana and Santiago and other towns, workings of sugar mills and coffee plantations, how slaveholding women coping with slave rebellions and wartime during the Ten Years’ War, and how personal relationships could occasionally affect the balance of power.

Among the factors inhibiting development of diversified economic structures in many Caribbean and Latin American countries, the persistence of monoculture plays a crucial role. Examining Cuba as a case study, Laird Bergad uses extensive data from Cuban archival sources to analyze the social and economic structures of a country shaped by monocultural sugar production since the mid-eighteenth century. He focuses on Matanzas, the center of the Cuban slave-based sugar economy, and shows how dependence on this one product generated great wealth but ultimately produced an unstable society in which most people remained poor and illiterate. A provocative account of nineteenth-century Cuban rural society emerges from the collective portrait of the social sectors that forged the history of Matanzas's sugar production. Bergad depicts the interaction among planters, merchants, slave traders, slaves, and free blacks while showing how sugar monoculture adapted to social and economic changes. He presents a detailed study of the economics of slave labor and new data that challenges prior interpretations of Cuban slavery.