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Slavery and Abolition


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Questions | Bibliography

Chapter Reference: The Encounter; Colonial Crucible; Independence; Postcolonial Blues; Progress

Latin America provides a historical laboratory for the study of African slavery and abolition. Plantations with enslaved workers of African descent existed from Cuba to Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru—not to mention Brazil, the greatest slavery-saturated society of all. In addition, slavery was also a profoundly urban phenomenon in Latin America. Even in regions like Argentina, without plantation agriculture, slaves worked as artisans and domestic servants in every colonial city founded by the Spanish and the Portuguese. In the early 1800s, a quarter of the population of Buenos Aires was made up of black slaves. Lima and Mexico City, places not associated today with inhabitants of African descent, were once full of slaves, too. In most parts of Latin America, slavery declined immediately after independence and was abolished totally around 1850. The great exceptions are Brazil and Cuba, where the importation of slaves actually accelerated during those years and abolition did not come until the 1880s. Given this panorama, historians have produced studies that allow them to compare slavery, and resistance to it—also abolition, and what followed it—in a vast variety of situations across hundreds of years. Students, too, can take a comparative approach. The literature on slavery and abolition in Latin America is vast, and the titles below constitute only an initial smattering of what students can access in a good library.

Questions for Analysis and Further Reflection:

  1. Why were the first slaves brought to Latin America? How do the numbers of slaves taken to Brazil and the Caribbean during the colonial period compare with those taken to North America?


  2. What did slaves bring with them to the New World, and what new religious traditions, social structures, and blending of cultures (not to mention gene pools) emerged out of their contact with Indians, other slaves, and people of European descent in Latin America?


  3. Many slaves were offered their freedom in exchange for participating on the patriot side during the wars of independence, although after the wars many Creole elites were slow to act on their word. What were some of the debates surrounding abolition in different regions, and in what different ways did African slavery finally come to an end in Latin America?

Bibliography: (Titles with ** are good starting places.)

** Andrews, George Reid. Afro-Latin America, 1800—2000. New York: Oxford University
           Press, 2004.

Andrews' history of Latin Americans of African descent is the ideal starting point for students interested in this topic.

Bethell, Leslie. The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave
           Trade Question, 1807—1869.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.

A thorough, scholarly treatment of abolition in Brazil and the influence Great Britain exercised in ending the slave trade in America.

Conrad, Robert Edgar. The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850—1888, 2nd ed. Malabar,
           FL: Krieger, 1993.

A concise look at the abolitionist movement in Brazil, the last country in the hemisphere to end slavery. The study also offers a short background to the history of the slave trade in Brazil.

________. World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
           State University Press, 1986.

Focuses specifically on the 1800s.

Curtin, Philip D. The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census. Madison: The University of Wisconsin
           Press, 1969.

A classic, well-written overview of the slave trade, broad, but also providing a wealth of specific detail.

Davis, Darién J., ed. Slavery and Beyond: The African Impact on Latin America and the
           Caribbean.
Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 1995.

De Queirós Mattoso, Kátia M. To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550—1888. Translated by Arthur
           Goldhammer. With a foreword by Stuart Schwartz. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers            University Press, 1986.

Comprehensive and authoritative, though not easy reading.

Inikori, Joseph E., and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on
           Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe.
Durham,            NC: Duke University Press, 1998.

Most of these essays look at the economics and demographic tolls of the slave trade. Students will benefit most from the introduction and chapters two, four, five, seven, twelve, and fourteen.

Karasch, Mary C. Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808—1850. Princeton: Princeton University
           Press, 1987.

** Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

One of the best surveys available on the slave trade.

** Mann, Mary Peabody. Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago. Edited
           and with an introduction by Patricia M. Ard. Charlottesville: University Press of            Virginia, 2000.

Mann was an abolitionist from the U.S. who visited some friends in Cuba for over a year. This novel is based on her experiences there and was written to show the evils of slavery. It wasn't published until after her death in the 1880s, but was actually written in the 1830s.

** Nabuco, Joaquim. Abolitionism: The Brazilian Antislavery Struggle. Translated and edited
           by Robert Conrad. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977.

An account by one of the main advocates of abolition in Brazil in the 1880s.

** Northrup, David, ed. The Atlantic Slave Trade, 2nd ed. With an introduction by David
           Northrup. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

This collection of essays (by many of the authors whose books are included in this list) is meant for the undergraduate classroom and for the nonspecialist.

Postma, Johannes. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Greenwood Guides to Historic Events
           1500—1900. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003.

A recent overview with useful statistical data and a short selection of primary sources.

Skidmore, Thomas E. Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. New
           York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

Surveys the debate surrounding abolition in nineteenth-century Brazil and of how race played into a sense of Brazilian identity in the first half of the twentieth century.

Vidal Luna, Francisco, and Herbert S. Klein. "African Slavery in the Production of
           Subsistence Crops: The Case of São Paulo in the Nineteenth Century." In David Eltis,
           Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff, eds. Slavery in the Development of the
           Americas.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 120—49.

A recent overview with useful statistical data and a short selection of primary sources.


Other Resources:
African Background
Quilombos and Palenques
Sugar
Labor History
Coffee