Slavery and Emancipation

[Content warning for lecture and seminar materials: racism and violence]

Slavery and emancipation PPT

Questions

Were political independence and slavery incompatible?
Why was slavery abolished so late in Brazil and Cuba (and the US South)?
Who abolished slavery? What are the political implications of how we tell the story of abolition?
How has race been thought about in Latin America (before and also after slavery)? Is it similar or different from ideas that developed elsewhere?
What was the idea of 'racial democracy'? Has it helped or hindered the quest for genuine racial equality?
And if applicable:

If you've 'adopted' a country in your seminar group: How does your adopted country fit or not fit with broader Lat Am patterns? How central was slavery to “your” country, and why/ why not?

Required Reading

This week please try to do 1 reading AND watch the film:

Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Slavery, Freedom and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World: "Simon Bolivar and the Problem of Equality," pp. 120-122; Chapter Four: Resurgence and Destruction of Slavery in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil 120-159.
Isadora Moura Mota, Freedom's Horizon: Black Abolitionism in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (University of Pennsylvania Press 2025), Introduction, pp. 1-15.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 55-min film: Black in Latin America: Brazil

Black in Latin America Student Review RD

Additional Reading:

Key primary sources

Robert Conrad, ed., Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1984), part 10: “The Abolition Struggle,” pp 418-482 (especially extracts numbers 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.8, 10.10)
García, Gloria. Voices of the Enslaved in Nineteenth Century Cuba, translated by Nancy L. Westrate. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. [e-book at library]
Katharine J McKnight and Leo J Garofalo, eds. Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550-1812. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2009.
Law, Robin, and Paul E. Lovejoy, eds. The Biography of Mahomma Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America. New Jersey: Marcus Wiener, 2001.
- Joaquim Nabuco, "We Are Seeking Our Country's Highest Interests": An Abolitionist Analyzes Slavery and Calls for a Break with the Past (1883)
- Images of Ingenios in Cuba from J.G. Cantero. Los ingenios. 1857.
- slavevoyages.org for great quantitative resources on the Atlantic slave trade
- Esteban Montejo/ Miguel Barnet, Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (testimony of one of Cuba's last surviving former enslaved people, given in the 1960s)

General

Andrews, George Reid, Afro-Latin America: Black Lives, 1600-2000. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Barcia, Manuel. Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808-1848. LSU Press, 2008
Barragan, Yesenia, Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific. CUP 2021
Bergad, Laird. The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Chapter 1: “From Colonization to Abolition: Patterns of Historical Development in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States,” pp 1-32 (scanned chapter available at Library)
Cowling, Camillia. “As a Slave Woman and as a Mother: Women and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro.” Social History, 26:3 (August 2011), 294-311
Cowling, Camillia. Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
De la Fuente, Alejandro. A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba UNC Press, 2001
Finch, Aisha. Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844. UNC Press, 2015.
Finch, Aisha, and Fannie Rushing, eds. Breaking the Chains, Forging the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Fight for Freedom and Equality, 1812-1912. LSU Press 2019.
Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited.” Law and History Review, 22:2 (Summer 2004): 339-67.
de la Fuente, Alejandro, and Ariela J. Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana, Studies in Legal History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Drescher, Seymour. “Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective.” Hispanic American Historical Review, 68:3 (August 1988): 429-60.
Robert Edgar Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-1888 (1972)
Edwards, Erika Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, The Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic. 2020, University of Alabama Press
Graham, Sandra Lauderdale. “Being Yoruba in Rio de Janeiro.” Slavery & Abolition, 32:1 (March 2011): 1-26.
Karasch, Mary. Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850. Princeton University Press, 1987. [E-book at library]
Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into white: race and nationality in Brazilian thought (1993), esp. Chapter 1: “The Intellectual Context of Abolition in Brazil,” pp 1-37.
Klein, Herbert S., and Francisco Vidal Luna, Slavery in Brazil. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Scott, Rebecca J. “Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil and Louisiana after Emancipation.” American Historical Review, 99:1 (February 1994): 70-102.
Scott, Rebecca J. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labour, 1860-1899. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Scott, Rebecca. “Explaining Abolition: Contradiction, Adaptation, and Challenge in Cuban Slave Society, 1860-1886.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26:1 (January 1984), 83-111.
Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
Camilla Townsend, “Half of my Body Free, the Other Half Enslaved: The Politics of the Slaves of Guayaquil at the End of the Colonial Era,” Colonial Latin American Review, 7:1 (1998): 105-28
Danielle Terrazas Williams, The Capital of Free Women: Race, Legitimacy and Liberty in Colonial Mexico. Yale University Press 2022.

For more bibliography on slavery and emancipation, especially in Brazil and Cuba, see the final-year module, HI3S9, Forging Slavery, Finding Freedom: Enslaved Lives in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, Cuba, and Atlantic Africa