Book contents
1 - “A Colony Worth a Kingdom”
Cuba’s Sugar Revolution in the Shadow of Saint-Domingue
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
Summary
Slavery had existed in Cuba long before the Haitian Revolution, indeed, long before Saint-Domingue had even embarked on its path as plantation power of the late eighteenth century. Yet the story of slavery in Cuba had differed significantly from that of the major slave societies of the French and British Caribbean, where in the two most productive colonies, Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, the enslaved accounted for over 85 percent of the population. There, plantations, monoculture, and slavery together formed the social and economic foundation of the colonies. In mid-century Cuba, slavery was significant, and local elites insistently called for its expansion. But in general, as Franklin Knight persuasively argued some time ago, the Spanish colony was more a society with slaves than a slave society.
That began to change gradually in the last decades of the eighteenth century. With the start of the Haitian Revolution, it changed inexorably. Cuban planters ramped up production, purchasing more and more land and mills and enslaved laborers to fill the world demand for sugar now left unfilled by Saint-Domingue. But they did significantly more than fill an abstract space created in the world market. They remade their society, profoundly transforming the economic and social life of the colony. Allied with the colonial state, they worked to expand slavery and sugar while minimizing the risks of the kind of destruction engulfing Saint-Domingue. Situated at that crossroads, Cuban planters, authorities, and the enslaved themselves felt the urgency of the moment and the place they occupied. The revolution, planters were sure, was an opportunity, a gift. But as they worked to make slavery and sugar more powerful all around them, they occasionally let themselves wonder if Saint-Domingue might not also be a harbinger of a more dangerous future that their project might help bring into being. It was with these concerns and tensions palpable, always perceptibly in the shadow of the Haitian Revolution, that the Cuban slave system was transformed at the end of the eighteenth century and functioned for much of the nineteenth.
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Freedom's MirrorCuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, pp. 17 - 43Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
References
, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970)Google Scholar
The Caribbean: Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)
, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965)Google Scholar
, Descripción de la Isla de Cuba (Havana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 1986 [1760]), 165Google Scholar
, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar
, Historia económico-política y estadística de la Isla de Cuba (Havana: Arazoza y Soler, 1831), 134Google Scholar
, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759–1789 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2003), 145–345Google Scholar
, Reflexiones sobre el comercio español a indias (Madrid, Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 1988)Google Scholar
, “Los amigos de Arango en la Corte de Carlos IV” in María Dolores González-Ripoll and Izaskun
, eds., Francisco Arango y la invención de la Cuba azucarera (Salamanca: Aquilafuente, 2009), 151–166
, Crecimiento económico y transformaciones sociales: esclavos, hacendados y comerciantes en la Cuba colonial, 1760–1840, (Madrid: Ministerio de Trabajo y Seguridad Social, 1996), 23–34Google Scholar
, Cuba, 1753–1815: Crown, Military, and Society (Nashville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986)Google Scholar
, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (Glasgow: Mundell and Son, 1804) 4: 163Google Scholar
, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 25–26Google Scholar
and , Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 231–234Google Scholar
, Colección de papeles científicos, históricos, politicos y de otros ramos sobre la Isla de Cuba (Paris: Imprenta de D’Aubusson y Kugelmann, 1858), 1: 404–408Google Scholar
, “The Wealth of Empire: Francisco Arango y Parreño, Political Economy and Slavery in Cuba,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45 (2003): 4–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Le projet cubain des grands planteurs de la Havane, jalons pour une lecture de Francisco Arango y Parreño, 1769–1839,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez, Vol. II (1974), 273–314Google Scholar
in “North American Competition and the Characteristics of the African Slave Trade to Cuba, 1790 to 1794,” William and Mary Quarterly 28 (1971): 86–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, estrategias de comercialización en la trata negrera en Santiago de Cuba, 1789–1794,” Revista de Indias v. 70, 249 (2010). 445–467Google Scholar
, Los códigos negros de la América Española (Alcalá: Ediciones UNESCO, Universidad Alcalá, 1996), 279–284Google Scholar
, Apuntes para una historia de la legislación y administración colonial en Cuba, 1511–1800 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1985), 396–412Google Scholar
, “La otra Cuba: colonización blanca y diversificación agrícola” Contrastes, 12 (2003)Google Scholar
and , eds., Mas allá del azúcar (Madrid: Doce Calles, 2009)
, De la Havana, de siglos y de familias (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2003), 294–298Google Scholar
, Cuba, la isla de los ensayos: cultura y sociedad, 1790–1815 (Madrid: CSIC, 1999), 164–169, 223–229Google Scholar
, “Merchant-Planter Cooperation and Conflict: The Havana Consulado, 1794–1832” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1980), 25–87Google Scholar
, Catálogo de los fondos del Real Consulado de Agricultra, Industria y Comercio y de la Junta de Fomento (Havana: Siglo XX, 1943)Google Scholar
Nuevo Reglamento y arancel que debe gobernar en la captura de esclavos cimarrones aprobado por S. M. en Real Orden expedida en San Lorenxo con fecha 20 de Diciembre de 1796 (Havana: Impr. de la Capitanía General)
, “Cuba en la sombra de Haití: Noticias, sociedad y esclavitud,” in et al., eds., El rumor de Haití en Cuba: Temor, raza y rebeldía, 1789–1844 (Madrid: CSIC, 2004), especially 203–214Google Scholar
Accessibility standard: Unknown
Why this information is here
This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.Accessibility Information
Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this chapter is currently unknown
and may be updated in the future.
- 1
- Cited by