The Cuban Slave Market 1790 1880

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.

Laird Bergad presents a comparative history of slavery in Brazil, Cuba and the United States, countries in which the institutions of slavery survived long into the 19th century ; in Brazil as late as 1888. He assesses the various factors that led to these states being left behind by their more progressive neighbours.

Publisher description

The essays in this book provide statistical analysis of the transatlantic slave trade, focusing especially on Brazil and Portugal from the 17th through the 19th century. The book contains research on slave ship voyages, origins, destinations numbers of slaves per port country, year, and period.

Sugar was the single most valuable bulk commodity traded internationally before oil became the world's prime resource. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, cane sugar production was pre-eminent in the Atlantic Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Subsequently, cane sugar industries in the Americas were transformed by a fusion of new and old forces of production, as the international sugar economy incorporated production areas in Asia, the Pacific, and Africa. Sugar's global economic importance and its intimate relationship with colonialism offer an important context for probing the nature of colonial societies. This book questions some major assumptions about the nexus between sugar production and colonial societies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, especially in the second (post-1800) colonial era.

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On a late September day in 1837, shortly after sunset, a group of six slaves marched into the small Cuban village of Güira de Melena, beating African drums and singing loudly. Alarmed, villagers rushed into the streets with machetes, sabers, and spears, ready to take action against the disobedient slaves. Yet this makeshift parade never evolved into the violent rebellion the villagers expected. Though the slaves who lived on Cuban coffee and sugar plantations sometimes defied their captors by orchestrating fierce uprisings and committing murder and suicide, they also resisted in less overt ways -- by running away, feigning sickness, breaking tools, and by maintaining their own cultures. In Seeds of Insurrection, Manuel Barcia examines many largely overlooked ways in which African and Creole slaves in Cuba defied domination in the first half of the nineteenth century. Ethnic and geographic origins, as well as slaves' personal experiences, affected their resistance to bondage. Dividing resistance into two broad types -- violent and nonviolent -- Barcia examines when and why the slaves chose certain forms. Creole slaves grew up in Cuba, for example, so they learned both the language of their ancestors and Spanish, and they came to understand their Spanish masters as few African-born slaves ever could. Consequently, they cleverly used the few rights colonial laws offered them to their advantage. African-born slaves, by contrast, carried with them their memories from home, their religious beliefs, jokes, and songs, and they dealt with enslavement by incorporating this cultural heritage into their everyday activities. Barcia demonstrates the ways in which the slaves made use of the privacy of their huts and barracks and the lack of surveillance in the fields to voice their ideas and opinions -- through song, religion, gossip, folktales, and jokes -- within an acceptable degree of safety. Relying primarily on transcripts of local and central court proceedings involving slaves, free people of color, slave owners, and witnesses, Barcia reveals the slaves' view of their world. He also explores the forms of domination practiced by colonial authorities, plantation masters, and overseers, gleaning insight from innovative sources, including medical reports and diaries of rancheadores, as well as public and private correspondence, newspapers, and the contributions of contemporary scholars. In Seeds of Insurrection, Barcia expands the definition of resistance and adds an invaluable dimension to the understanding of slavery in the Americas.