Brazil and Cuba: two slave societies of the nineteenth century
News: If you are interested in the Liberated Africans in Brazil, Cuba, and Atlantic Africa, note this upcoming talk in week 8 by Jake Subryan Richards on his new book, The Bonds of Freedom. This talk will take place right after our class on Wednesday of week 8.
Seminar questions:
- What was the longer history of slavery and slaving in Brazil and Cuba? How was it different/ similar in each place by the early decades of the nineteenth century?
- How did slavery intersect with other major political developments - Brazilian independence and statebuilding? new forms of Spanish colonial rule in the nineteenth century and eventual independence movements?
- What was life like for enslaved people - in cities, in the countryside? Did forms of resistance or negotiation look different or similar?
- What areas became the centres of enslaved population over the century? When did the Atlantic trade end in each location and what replaced it?
- From your wider reading, what approaches do you think historians have taken to writing about more than one country? How are you going about this for your essays?
Class prep:
FIRST: Please take 5 mins to think about a tentative question or topic for the second long essay (due after the end of the course). We will consider these ideas together in class.
NEXT:
Brush up on your general knowledge of Brazil/Cuba history: Either: re-read Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery, Freedom and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World (2011), especially chapter 4, or: watch one of these 1-hr episodes:
Henry Louis Gates Jr, Black in Latin America: either: Brazil: A Racial Paradise OR Cuba: The Next Revolution.
NEXT: if you can,: choose EITHER:
Thomas Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, intro and chapter 3Link opens in a new window, "Revolt, Consolidation, and War, 1830-1870"
OR:
Knight, Franklin W., Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century, chapter 1, "The Transformation of Cuban Agriculture, 1763-1838" and chapter 2, "The Sugar Revolution". (Please note this is an older - though still classic - book, and it may contain outdated racial and other language.)
Further reading:
Bergad, Laird W. The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Josep Fradera, The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish and American Empires, transl. Ruth Mackay, Princeton University Press, 2018, especially Chapter 6: "Spain and its Colonies: The Survival of the Oldest"
Marquese, Rafael, and Tâmis Parron. Slavery & Politics: Brazil and Cuba, 1790-1850. Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016.
Daniel Rood, The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labour, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean, OUP 2017
Cowling, Camillia Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro, University of North Carolina Press 2013 (especially the introduction)
Graden, Dale Disease, Resistance and Lies: The Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014.