Rethinking Atlantic Empire: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s Histories of Nineteenth-Century Spain and the Antilles 9781800731219

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966–2015) His Work and His Life
Chapter 2 The First Word: Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 and the Renewal of Spanish Imperial History
Chapter 3 Not Just Spain, Not Just Colonies: Writing Transnational Histories of the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 4 “Divergent Refl ections” on Colonialism and Nationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic World: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s The Conquest of History
Chapter 5 Bonds of Affection? The Catholic Church and Slavery in New Spain
Chapter 6 Questions of Scale Spain, Latin America, and the Atlantic World in Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s Scholarship on Slavery
Chapter 7 Empire and Antislavery through a New Lens: Spanish Colonialism Seen from the Dominican Republic and Haiti
Chapter 8 Unlocking the Historical Truth of Abolitionist Literature: Beecher Stowe’s A Key in Spanish Translation
Chapter 9 Empire and Civil Rights in Franco’s Spain
Chapter 10 “To Make a Language of My Own” Fernando Blanco White’s Flight to Freedom (1815)
Chapter 11 Unexplored Connections: Spanish Prisoners of War and Political Refugees in France, 1808–1820
Epilogue: The Conquest of History and the Construction of Identitarian Discourses: An Interview with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
List of Works by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
Index

Citation preview

RETHINKING ATLANTIC EMPIRE

Studies in Latin American and Spanish History Series Editors: Scott Eastman, Creighton University, USA Vicent Sanz Rozalén, Universitat Jaume I, Spain Editorial Board: Carlos Illades, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico Mercedes Yusta, Université Paris 8, France Xosé Manoel Núñez-Seixas, Ludwig-Maximilians München Universität, Germany Gabe Paquette, University of Oregon, USA Karen Racine, University of Guelph, Canada David Sartorius, University of Maryland, USA Claudia Guarisco, FRAMESPA, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, France Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, University of Kent, United Kingdom This series bridges the divide between studies of Latin America and peninsular Spain by employing transnational and comparative approaches that shed light on the complex societies, cultures, and economies of the modern age. Focusing on the cross-pollination that was the legacy of colonialism on both sides of the Atlantic, these monographs and collections explore a variety of issues such as race, class, gender, and politics in the Spanish-speaking world. Volume 1 Metaphors of Spain: Representations of Spanish National Identity in the Twentieth Century Edited by Javier Moreno-Luzón and Xosé M. Núñez Seixas

Volume 5 The Configuration of the Spanish Public Sphere: From the Enlightenment to the Indignados Edited by David Jiménez Torres and Leticia Villamediana González

Volume 2 Conflict, Domination and Violence: Episodes in Mexican Social History Carlos Illades

Volume 6 Teaching Modernization: Spanish and Latin American Educational Reform in the Cold War Edited by Óscar J. Martín García and Lorenzo Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla

Volume 3 José Antonio Primo De Rivera: The Reality and Myth of a Spanish Fascist Leader Joan Maria Thomàs Volume 4 The Brazilian Truth Commission: Local, National and Global Perspectives Edited by Nina Schneider

Volume 7 Rethinking Atlantic Empire: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s Histories of Nineteenth-Century Spain and the Antilles Edited by Scott Eastman and Stephen Jacobson

Rethinking Atlantic Empire Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s Histories of Nineteenth-Century Spain and the Antilles

Edited by

Scott Eastman and Stephen Jacobson

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2021 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2021 Scott Eastman and Stephen Jacobson All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Eastman, Scott, editor. | Jacobson, Stephen (Stephen H.), editor. | Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, 1966–2015, honoree. Title: Rethinking Atlantic Empire: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s Histories of Nineteenth-Century Spain and the Antilles / edited by Scott Eastman and Stephen Jacobson. Other titles: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s Histories of NineteenthCentury Spain and the Antilles Description: New York: Berghahn, 2021. | Series: Studies in Latin American and Spanish History; Volume 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021015526 (print) | LCCN 2021015527 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800731202 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800731219 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Spain—Colonies—America—Historiography. | Latin America—Colonial influence. | Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, 1966–2015. | Antislavery movements—Latin America—History. | Latin America—Ethnic relations. | Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, 1966–2015. Classification: LCC F1410 .R3956 2021 (print) | LCC F1410 (ebook) | DDC 305.80098—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015526 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021015527 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-120-2 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-121-9 ebook

Contents

å List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction Scott Eastman and Stephen Jacobson Chapter 1 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966–2015): His Work and His Life Stephen Jacobson Chapter 2 The First Word: Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 and the Renewal of Spanish Imperial History Adrian Shubert Chapter 3 Not Just Spain, Not Just Colonies: Writing Transnational Histories of the Nineteenth Century Joshua Goode Chapter 4 “Divergent Reflections” on Colonialism and Nationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic World: Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s The Conquest of History Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller Chapter 5 Bonds of Affection? The Catholic Church and Slavery in New Spain Emily Berquist Soule Chapter 6 Questions of Scale: Spain, Latin America, and the Atlantic World in Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s Scholarship on Slavery Elena Schneider

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Contents

Chapter 7 Empire and Antislavery through a New Lens: Spanish Colonialism Seen from the Dominican Republic and Haiti Anne Eller Chapter 8 Unlocking the Historical Truth of Abolitionist Literature: Beecher Stowe’s A Key in Spanish Translation Lisa Surwillo Chapter 9 Empire and Civil Rights in Franco’s Spain Louie Dean Valencia-García

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Chapter 10 “To Make a Language of My Own”: Fernando Blanco White’s Flight to Freedom (1815) Joselyn M. Almeida

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Chapter 11 Unexplored Connections: Spanish Prisoners of War and Political Refugees in France, 1808–1820 Juan Luis Simal

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Epilogue The Conquest of History and the Construction of Identitarian Discourses: An Interview with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara Vicent Sanz Rozalén

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List of Works by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

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Index

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Photographs follow p. 140

Illustrations

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Figure 0.1. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara while director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute at Fordham University. Photograph courtesy of the Schmidt-Nowara family. Figure 1.1. First page of the draft introduction to Fernando Blanco White’s diary with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s handwritten notes in the margins. Image courtesy of Matthew Ehrlich and the Schmidt-Nowara family.

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Figure 8.1. “Repetinamente.” Urrabieta and Carnicero’s interpretation of Josiah Henson’s virtue, one model for Uncle Tom. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya.

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Figure 8.2. “Eppes [sic] quiso.” Urrabieta and Carnicero’s stylized image of slave owner violence, the visual preface to La llave de la cabaña del Tío Tom. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya.

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Acknowledgments

å The idea for this tribute grew out of two panels that were independently organized in the months following the death of our esteemed and beloved colleague Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966–2015). The first took place at the annual meeting of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies in San Diego on 18 March 2016, and the second at the meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in New York City on 29 May of the same year. At the first panel, a mix of scholars reviewed his work and his legacy. At the second, junior scholars paid homage to Christopher’s role as a colleague and mentor. The editors of the present volume have complemented these two groups with other authors from Spain and the United States. The goal has been to bring together a broad spectrum of scholars from different generations, countries, and area and thematic specialties in order to emphasize the scope of his interests and the breadth of his influence. We would like to thank Matthew Ehrlich, Beatrice Forbes Manz, Annette Lazzaro, Barbara Mundy, David Ortiz Jr., Enrique Sanabria, Neil Safier, Pete Schmidt-Nowara, Dale Tomich, and the history departments at Tufts University and Fordham University for sharing information and photos. We are also grateful to Vicent Sanz Rozalén, one of the editors of the Berghahn series Studies in Spanish and Latin American History and a contributor to this volume, who was an early promoter. Without his initiative and effort, this tribute would not have been possible. The anonymous peer reviewers provided invaluable suggestions to the editors as well as to the authors. At Berghahn Books, Chris Chappell shepherded the volume through the peer review and approval process and Mykelin Higham brought her even hand, enthusiasm, and expertise to production. We also want to thank Elizabeth Martinez and Rachel Shaw for their help with the manuscript. Partial funding for this volume has been provided by Creighton University and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra research project “Construcción y reforma de sociedades coloniales en el imperio español” (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España, PGC2018-096722-B100). The Fun-

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dación Legado Literario Miguel Hernández and the scholarly journal Historía y Política: Ideas, Procesos y Movimientos Sociales have graciously ceded copyrights. Most of all, we would like to express our gratitude to the many colleagues who were unable to participate in this volume but who have edited or contributed chapters to collective volumes that have been dedicated to Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Others have posted messages and images on social media or have organized sessions in his memory. Within the pages of this book, these authors appear in the narrative and in the footnotes. We hope that this tribute reflects a cross-section of the panoply of friends, colleagues, and students whom Chris touched so dearly.

Figure 0.1. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara while director of the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute at Fordham University. Photograph courtesy of the SchmidtNowara family.

Introduction Scott Eastman and Stephen Jacobson

å Many who pick up this book will have known Christopher SchmidtNowara (1966–2015) as a colleague, mentor, or friend. Others will have read his work and may have come into contact with him at conferences, lectures, classes, or other academic settings. For these readers, the volume will serve as a notice or even as a catharsis—to remind us of his early death and formidable intellectual legacy, and of our obligation to reread his books and articles so that they may continue to inform the fields of Atlantic and Iberian history. At the same time, the editors and contributors also seek to reach another audience. We hope that new and young readers will discover his work, take up his suggestions, and come away with fresh ideas. One of Schmidt-Nowara’s greatest attributes was to suggest paths forward for future researchers and to proffer new historical methods to interrogate older claims. Hopefully, all readers will be pleasantly surprised with the breadth of his oeuvre addressed in this collection. Even those most familiar with his work should discover writings and interpretations of which they were unaware. If there is one lesson that we the editors have learned, it is that Christopher addressed a multiplicity of publics, and he had an unmatched ability not only to blaze trails but also to cross fields and integrate academics of various disciplines and area specialties into a common cause. The common cause was to rethink Spain’s Atlantic empire in the nineteenth century. He embarked upon this project in the 1990s when this area of study was still the subject of speculation and generalization if not indifference. Within the field of modern European and world history, Spain’s nineteenth-century empire—centered on Cuban slavery and sugar—rarely figured in accounts. Many scholars considered it an anachronism, a holdover from previous European possessions in the Caribbean that had abolished slavery and had abandoned the plantation system. Within the field of modern Spanish history, the empire

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also received uneven treatment. While historians paid due attention to the Latin American Wars of Independence (1810–1825), they cast a blind eye to the fate of the remaining colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Within general and even specialist histories, the overseas territories generally reappeared in 1898, when the “loss of the colonies” reverberated in domestic politics and caused a crisis of conscience in intellectual life. Within the field of Cuban and Puerto Rican history, scholars had shown only a vague interest in exploring shared colonial and metropolitan spaces where politics and identity were negotiated and disputed. All in all, the Spanish empire had been deemed essential to the early modern period but peripheral to the modern one. No historian is alone when pursuing such ambitious endeavors, and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara was a dynamic participant in a worldwide academic network of scholars who were undertaking parallel projects in diverse but interrelated historical contexts. He was eager to imbibe the teachings of his mentors and older colleagues, including Rebecca Scott, Seymour Drescher, Josep Maria Fradera, Ann Stoler, Fred Cooper, and Dale Tomich. He participated in an “imperial turn” that demonstrated how a renewed focus on empire could complement colonial studies without returning to the older and stigmatized imperial histories of pith helmets, jodhpurs, and khaki shorts.1 He collaborated with scholars who showed how “second slaveries” in the southern United States, Brazil, and Cuba were not remnants from the past, but technologically advanced systems of production in a world economy driven by industrialization.2 In Spain, various historians also turned their attention to Spain’s “second empire” in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in the nineteenth century.3 Within this milieu SchmidtNowara brilliantly melded his diverse interests together into a coherent academic project and, by so doing, integrated Spain and its empire into Atlantic and world history. In collected volumes of comparative history, he was the scholar to whom many turned to contribute the requisite chapter on Spanish slavery, abolition, and empire in the liberal age.4 In the words of his colleague Pamela Radcliff, he truly was one of “our community’s most eminent scholars.”5 Above all, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara was a historian of slavery, abolition, and antislavery. His first book, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (1999), remains the best study of abolitionism (and anti-abolitionism) in Spain and its empire.6 He demonstrated how the fear of “race war” conditioned opinions on both sides of the Atlantic and explored the moral, political, and economic strands of the abolitionist movement. The chief innovation of the book was its transnational (or in this case, transcolonial) focus, a methodology that

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would characterize his work for the following two decades. Before his publication, few historians were aware that the Spanish Abolitionist Society originated in Puerto Rico, and no one had understood how the abolitionist experiment in Puerto Rico in 1873 came to reverberate from Havana to Madrid. More than a decade following the publication of the monograph, Schmidt-Nowara revisited his core subjects in a well-received volume coedited with Josep Maria Fradera, Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire (2013), published by Berghahn Books.7 Among its many virtues, the book demonstrated just how far the field had evolved since the 1990s. Even though Christopher Schmidt-Nowara was best known as a historian of slavery and abolition, his second monograph addressed a different theme and reached an even wider audience. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (2006) appealed not only to historians of modern Spain and the Antilles but it also received a great deal of attention from Latin Americanists, early modernists, and literary scholars of colonial and postcolonial studies.8 By focusing on symbols, monuments, commemorations, and exhibitions, it made contributions to diverse fields, from the history of nationalism to historiography.9 Like his previous work, Schmidt-Nowara stressed the importance of transatlantic dialogues and clashes in imperial spaces. He focused on how “history” was used and even “ransacked” in metropolitan, colonial, and postcolonial contexts. In the nineteenth century, intellectuals, aficionados, and nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic strove to commemorate and come to terms with figures such as Christopher Columbus, Ponce de León, and Bartolomé de Las Casas. Cubans and Puerto Ricans revived the precolonial history of lost Caribbean cultures as an antidote to the racially complicated world of immigration and slavery. Many contributors to the present volume have indeed chosen to focus on this book and its companion, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends (2005), coedited with John M. Nieto-Phillips.10 Because Schmidt-Nowara had seen that some innovations in the field of Spanish and Caribbean history had not reached broader academic publics, many of his articles included a historiographical component. To be sure, Spanish history has for centuries been burdened by the legacy of the Black Legend—the idea that Spaniards were racially inferior to northern Europeans due to their mixed blood and Moorish past. Accordingly, Spain’s African and “Mohammedan” legacy had been blamed for the despotic Catholicism of the Inquisition, the cruel repression of Protestants in Holland, and the bellicose evangelizing of Indians in the New World. In the nineteenth century, the “Black

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Legend” had been replaced by what Richard Kagan has labeled as “Prescott’s Paradigm,” named after the Harvard historian William H. Prescott, who had analyzed the Spanish conquest of Latin America.11 Prescott had reworked similar generalizations in order to explain the different institutional developments of North and South America. In the twentieth century, the racial elements of the Black Legend began to fade away, but the notion that Spain was different from the rest of Europe persisted. This difference also had a romantic component, popularized by Hispanic Orientalists like Byron and Bizet. To borrow a popular expression used by tourism promoters in the 1960s, many still believed that “Spain was different.” In much of his academic work, Schmidt-Nowara attempted to show how the “Black Legend” was a product of historical processes and of Anglo-American and continental political traditions that had depicted Spain as an empire in decline and a state that “failed” to develop in consonance with the rest of Europe. He took a similar critical approach to the “White Legend”—the myth that Spanish colonialism was less damaging and oppressive than its Anglo-Saxon counterpart given that its conquest was supposedly less genocidal, its slave-system presumably less exploitative and more open to manumission, and its colonial administration more tolerant of racial mixing (mestizaje).12 In 2004, he and Monica Burguera coedited a special edition for Social History, entitled “Backwardness and Its Discontents.”13 In the introduction, they observed that “backwardness” was the latest incarnation of the Black Legend and Prescott’s Paradigm. The postwar poverty and isolation of Spain during the Francoist dictatorship (1939–75) had given rise to the myth of a “backward” country that struggled to keep pace with “modern” democracies. Extended to his own research, this notion posited that a supposedly illiberal country had sustained slavery and the slave trade for decades after Great Britain and France abolished them. When Christopher Schmidt-Nowara had come on the scene, at least two or three generations of scholars had already helped rid Spanish history of both romantic and pejorative stereotypes. Most famously, Richard Herr, Raymond Carr, Joan Connelly Ullman, and Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz examined the Spanish Enlightenment, liberalism, anticlericalism, and industrialization as imbricated phenomena that developed in tandem with trends and ideologies across other European countries.14 Later, the historian Adrian Shubert (featured in the volume) performed a similar task with respect to Spanish society in his Social History of Spain.15 Schmidt-Nowara added the final piece of the puzzle by showing that Spain’s nineteenth-century empire was intertwined with similar empires in the age of abolition, free trade,

Introduction

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proconsular despotism, and second slavery.16 This was not to say that Spain and its empire did not have its “peculiarities,” but only that such peculiarities needed to be understood in their proper historical and geographical contexts rather than be subjected to a measuring stick of modernity. Although Chris contributed to many comparative volumes, he preferred a transnational approach. As he noted on the second page of his first book, he sought to explain “how transatlantic political struggles” affected both colony and metropole. His goal, he continued, was to show “how the actions and ideas of locally situated historical actors intersected with and transformed the broader political economy of slavery and colonialism in the Atlantic world.”17

Colleague, Teacher, and Friend One might assume that a scholar who was so intent on questioning assumptions and embracing novel approaches might have had to fight many intellectual battles. However, Schmidt-Nowara showed great respect for academic traditions and trenchant scholarship. For the most part, his publications did not digress into extended debates, nor did he single out scholars to criticize. To take an illustrative example, SchmidtNowara frequently cited Raymond Carr’s magisterial work Spain 1808– 1975. Even though Carr had brilliantly demonstrated the similarities and differences between Spanish and British liberalism, Carr barely mentioned slavery, abolitionism, and empire. Rather than pointing out this glaring omission, Schmidt-Nowara let his work do the talking by tacitly showing the necessity to reconsider early approaches and adopt different emphases and methods. Another example of this was a cogent essay from 2010, in which he explained how George Reid Andrews had come to reexamine questions of popular participation in revolutions and independence movements, especially by enslaved people. Social and cultural history, he wrote, had offered a generation of historians the opportunity to establish a new paradigm in place of earlier structural explanations of continuity between the late colonial and early national periods in the Americas.18 With dependency theory and Marxism losing explanatory power, a consensus had emerged that early nineteenthcentury politics had indeed, in many cases, fostered revolutionary ideals and practices.19 He elegantly quoted Reid Andrews at different points in his academic career to highlight the significant historiographical disruptions that had undermined older theoretical constructs. To cite a good example of just how insightful even passing references in a Schmidt-Nowara publication are, it is worth taking a look

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at Luis A. Figueroa’s book on sugar and slavery in Puerto Rico. Toward the end of Chapter 4, Figueroa notes that Schmidt-Nowara had written about the presence of black men and women in abolitionist rallies in Madrid and Seville in the 1870s.20 Figueroa concludes that the events represented a microcosm of the entire Atlantic system and speculates as to who these Afro-Hispanics might have been. Although we likely never will know, he insists that their very presence must have spoken loudly, showing for all to see the transatlantic ties and solidarity of the movement. Throughout the present volume, many of the contributors make similar comments, noting how many of Chris’s brilliant observations, casual asides, and suggestions for further research avenues piqued their curiosity and in fact inspired their research. In her chapter in this volume, Elena Schneider has poignantly observed that historians—who strive toward “objectivity”—are reluctant to talk about how personality affects scholarship. However, as she notes, it is worth breaking down this taboo with regard to Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Like many scholars in the field, the contributors and editors got to know Chris in the archives, libraries, and cafés of Madrid and at annual meetings of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (now the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies or the ASPHS) or the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). There, he would chat about the discipline of history, sports, or novels. The dates of the ASPHS would often coincide with the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, and Chris could be found in the hotel bar watching his graduate alma mater, Michigan. Still, his greatest passion was history, and he would eagerly take time out to urge fellow Hispanists and Latin Americanists to adopt a more nuanced and globalized history of Spain and the Antilles. Younger contributors came to know him as a senior scholar in the field but would meet him at the same places and chat about similar themes. All came to hold him in the highest regard not just as a mentor and colleague but also as a friend and teacher. Many of the contributors to the present volume include personal anecdotes to show how his insights and generosity helped inspire their work. His sociability made all of us better and more collaborative scholars. In one of the many tributes written in memoriam, Josep Maria Fradera has observed that Christopher’s greatest attribute was empathy—the quality most important for any historian.21 He understood the preoccupations and pressures of others, be they historical actors, colleagues, or students. In this volume, students and younger colleagues—now accomplished scholars—comment on his qualities as a mentor. Louie Dean Valencia and Anne Eller share how Chris person-

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ally helped them, through his open-mindedness, unconventionality, encouragement, and careful, critical readings, with their dissertations. He influenced many from afar. Emily Berquist Soule stresses that her entire “career as a historian and an academic” changed after reading Schmidt-Nowara’s Empire and Antislavery for a graduate seminar. Many of the contributors and readers of this volume have used Professor Schmidt-Nowara’s books in their graduate seminars, but it must be stressed that he loved and thrived at undergraduate teaching. He dedicated one of his most ambitious books to his students—Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World (2011). Although the book is perfect for undergraduate surveys, it also stimulates seasoned scholars to rethink earlier constructions of slavery, freedom, and abolition. It brilliantly succeeds in inserting the diversity of experiences in the Iberian world into discussions that have often been dominated by historians of French and British plantation societies. Combining his knowledge of the Lusitanian and Hispanic Atlantic worlds with the latest research on entangled histories, he demonstrated a tremendous ability to tie together disparate stories and blend the political, social, and cultural into one seamless, lucid narrative. Many of the “great scholars” of the field of imperial history have lauded Schmidt-Nowara’s achievements. If his life had not been tragically cut short, there is no doubt that he would also have come to be included in their ranks. These scholars have not only relied on his work but have also frequently thanked him for helping them integrate the Spanish empire into broader narratives. The foremost expert on British abolition, Seymour Drescher writes of his “deep appreciation” to Chris and his colleague Josep Maria Fradera “for providing me with the opportunity to participate in analyzing the process of Spanish imperial abolition in comparative perspective.”22 Frederick Cooper has spoken of his former graduate students, including Schmidt-Nowara and Ada Ferrer, as “influential contributors” to the field of colonial history “in its key stage of development.”23 Chris had extended contact with the editors and the contributors to the volume, as well as numerous other colleagues, right up to his passing in 2015. One of the editors, Scott Eastman, met him for a panel on the Age of Revolution for a conference in North Carolina that year. While the presentation did not draw a large crowd, his discussion of the intriguing figure of George Dawson Flinter impressed those who did attend, showing the breadth and depth of his understanding of the dissolution of the Spanish Monarchy within a transnational framework.24 He always presented cutting-edge scholarship in terms of method and subject, whether the backdrop was nineteenth-century

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Cuba or British-occupied Curaçao. In the summer of 2015, Scott had made plans to meet him in Madrid to chat about life and to discuss some recent promising findings in the foreign affairs archive outside the Puerta de Sol. Scott had received an encouraging email from him: Hi Scott: cool. I’m sure that material will be rich. I might be in Madrid for a couple of days in June. Will keep you posted. Chris

Later that month, Christopher sent a number of emails out to colleagues explaining that he was ill and could not travel from Paris to Madrid where he was to attend a conference. Shortly thereafter, at the age of forty-eight, he tragically passed away in Paris.

Organization of the Volume The book begins with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s life and work, then moves to chapters inspired by his oeuvre, including his posthumous publications. Stephen Jacobson sets the stage with a biographical exploration of Chris’s intellectual roots and how they affected his later work. He includes his formative family background, his upbringing in New Mexico, his doctoral studies at the University of Michigan, and his travels in Spain and Latin America. Specialists in modern Spanish history, Adrian Shubert and Joshua Goode tackle his major publications, beginning with his most cited work, Empire and Antislavery, then moving to the one that reached the most diverse audience, The Conquest of History. Shubert reminds us that Schmidt-Nowara truly was ahead of his time, anticipating some of the historiographical turns that have defined the field in recent decades. His essay in the collective volume Más se perdió en Cuba is a testament to this and to the fact that he already had made a name for himself in Spanish academic circles in the late 1990s.25 Goode argues that Chris truly practiced what he preached in terms of reading sources against the grain. He explains how Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends brought Spanish colonial studies squarely into larger conversations on imperial histories. Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller illustrates the continued resonance of the revisionist Conquest of History with regards to the origins and trajectory of nineteenth-century Hispanism. The ensuing chapters consist of thematic essays, organized chronologically. Emily Berquist Soule asserts that Chris inserted himself into debates with significant ramifications when he criticized Frank Tannenbaum for minimizing the cruelties and brutality of slavery in

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Latin America. Drawing on his intervention, she expands on the role of the Catholic Church and the Jesuits in particular vis-à-vis slavery and antislavery during the early modern period. Elena Schneider assesses Spain’s transformation into a slave-trading empire in the lateeighteenth century, an era marked by the Bourbon Reforms. While many historians point to this period as a watershed in Spanish imperial history, reformist measures tend to be placed within the framework of a growing reaction against the metropole, the beginnings of separatist sentiments, and the coming of free trade. Anne Eller discusses how Spain’s “special laws” and imperial policy, described by SchmidtNowara, explain the broader Caribbean context for her study on the Spanish reoccupation of Santo Domingo (1861–65). Lisa Surwillo contributes a fascinating essay on the influence in Spain of the translated versions of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s defense of her use of fiction to depict the evils of slavery. As Surwillo shows, the Spanish “translation” removed all mention of Spain, but Stowe’s passionate denunciation of slavery and accompanying Spanish illustrations nonetheless reverberated among readers inclined to abolitionism. In the last chapter of the second section, Valencia-García shows how Schmidt-Nowara’s analytical framework has become foundational for students of twentieth-century Spain and Francoism as well as for those who work on earlier periods. The last two chapters concern his posthumous work. In 2018, Louisiana State University Press published A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire: The Diary of Fernando Blanco White’s Flight to Freedom with an introduction by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Chris had unearthed and transcribed the diary and had nearly finished the introduction; he was in the process of hunting down accompanying illustrations. His graduate student, Matthew Ehrlich, and his colleague from Tufts University, Beatriz Manz, finished these tasks with elegance and precision and dedicated much time and effort to get the book into print. The diary and the introduction are important contributions to the history of the Napoleonic Wars and the Iberian world in general, as well as a welcome addition to the growing literature on captives and expatriates. This publication was to be the first installment in his new research project on Spanish prisoners of war and captives on both sides of the Atlantic during the age of revolution. In the present volume, the literary scholar Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge analyzes Flight to Freedom with respect to the genre of travel and captivity narratives. She supplements the text by discussing Fernando’s letters, including those to his more famous brother, Joseph Blanco White, the Spanish abolitionist.26 In the ensuing chapter, Juan Luis Simal reframes the

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study of prisoners of war and refugees during the early nineteenth century, taking the diary of Fernando Blanco White as a case in point. Our volume concludes with a translated transcription of an interview conducted by Vicent Sanz Rozalén in 2014 for the radio program Hablemos de Historia. We also include a bibliography of Schmidt-Nowara’s works. In one of the various tributes published, Mónica Burguera emphasized that Christopher Schmidt-Nowara was ahead of his time. Beginning with his early work, he pointed to “truly transnational conceptions of national narratives, while placing race at the heart of that mutual historical interconnectedness between the metropole and its Antillean colonies.”27 Thus this book series, which has been designed to address transnational issues and place Spanish and Latin American histories into a globalized historical framework, serves as a perfect home for a book honoring this memory. Professor Schmidt-Nowara served on the board of advisers for this series and had a strong influence on its creation and its historiographical direction. We all are in his debt for his collaboration and commitment to disciplined, stimulating, and pathbreaking scholarship. Scott Eastman is professor of transnational history at Creighton University. He is the author of A Missionary Nation: Race, Religion, and Spain’s Age of Liberal Imperialism, 1841–1881 (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) and Preaching Spanish Nationalism Across the Hispanic Atlantic, 1759–1823 (LSU Press, 2012). He coedited The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World: The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812 (University of Alabama Press, 2015). He has published articles in European History Quarterly and Historia y Política, among other journals, and has received major funding from the Latin American Studies Association and the Fulbright Commission. A member of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies since 2003, he served as the president of the organization from 2018–20. His research interests focus on the intersection of identity, colonialism, and culture across the nineteenth-century Hispanic Atlantic World. Stephen Jacobson is associate professor of history and the former director of the Institut d’Història Jaume Vicens Vives at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). He is the author of Catalonia’s Advocates: Lawyers, Society, and Politics in Barcelona, 1859–1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and the coeditor of Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

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Notes 1. Schmidt-Nowara, “After ‘Spain’: A Dialogue with Josep M. Fradera”; and Jacobson, “Empire: Rises, Falls, Returns, and Divergences.” 2. The trailblazer in this regard was Dale Tomich who in 1988 published the influential “The Second Slavery.” For Schmidt-Nowara’s take, see “A Second Slavery?” 3. Notable early works in this regard include: Roldán de Montaud, La hacienda en Cuba; Maluquer de Motes, Nación e inmigración; Naranjo Orovio and García González, Racismo e inmigración; and Fradera, Gobernar colonias. 4. See, for example, Schmidt-Nowara, “Continuity and Crisis”; “Slavery, Antislavery, and Christianity”; “Spain and the Politics of the Second Slavery”; and “From Aggression to Crisis.” 5. Radcliff, Modern Spain, xvii. 6. Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery. 7. Fradera and Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery and Antislavery. 8. See, for example, the reviews of the Conquest of History, authored by Fritze, Kapcia, and Unzueta. 9. Lisa Surwillo has pointed out his contribution to cultural studies in her Monsters by Trade. 10. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism. 11. Richard Kagan, “Prescott’s Paradigm.” 12. Schmidt-Nowara, “‘This Rotting Corpse’”; and “Specter of Las Casas,” in Conquest of History, 130–60. 13. Schmidt-Nowara and Burguera, “Backwardness and Its Discontents.” 14. Herr, Eighteenth-Century Revolution; Carr, Spain, 1808–1939; Ullman, Tragic Week; and Sánchez Albornoz, Economic Modernization. 15. Shubert, Social History. 16. In this respect, his research dovetailed with scholars of the British Empire who were also demonstrating that Britain’s supposedly liberal empire was not so different than its continental counterparts given that it was also characterized by proconsular despotism and featured much forced and semi-forced labor. See Bayly, Imperial Meridian. 17. Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 2. 18. Schmidt-Nowara, “Politics and Ideas.” 19. See, among many other works, Guerra, Modernidad e independencies; Rodríguez O., Independence of Spanish America; and Guardino, Peasants, Politics and Time of Liberty. 20. Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom, 119. 21. Fradera, “Christopher Schmidt-Nowara.” 22. Drescher, “From Empires of Slavery to Empires of Antislavery,” 312. 23. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, x. 24. A related article was published posthumously: Schmidt-Nowara, “Entangled Irishman.” 25. Schmidt-Nowara, “Imperio y crisis colonial.” 26. For Chris’s work on Joseph, see Schmidt-Nowara, “Wilberforce Spanished.” 27. Burguera, “Christopher Schmidt-Nowara.”

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Bibliography Bayly, C. A. Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830. London: Longman, 1989. Burguera, Mónica. “Christopher Schmidt-Nowara.” Social History 40, no. 4 (2015): 425–26. Carr, Raymond. Spain, 1808–1939. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. Cooper, Fred. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Drescher, Seymour. “From Empires of Slavery to Empires of Antislavery.” In Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, edited by Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, 291–316. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Figueroa, Luis A. Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Fradera, Josep M. “Christopher Schmidt-Nowara: historia de una amistad colectiva.” Illes i Imperis 18 (2016): 228–29. ———. Gobernar colonias. Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1999. Fradera, Josep M., and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds. Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Fritze, Ronald H. Review of The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century, by Christopher SchmidtNowara. Sixteenth Century Journal 39, no. 1 (2008): 307–8. Guardino, Peter F. Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State: Guerrero, 1800–1857. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. ———. The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750–1850. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Guerra, François-Xavier. Modernidad e independencias: Ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánica. Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992. Herr, Richard. The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958. Jacobson, Stephen. “Empire: Rises, Falls, Returns, and Divergences.” Il·les i Imperis 10/11 (2008): 31–59. Kagan, Richard. “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain.” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996): 423–46. Kapcia, Antoni. Review of The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century, by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Journal of Latin American Studies 40, no. 1 (February 2008): 141–43. Maluquer de Motes, Jordi. Nación e inmigración: los españoles en Cuba (ss. XIX y XX). Oviedo: Ediciones Jucar, 1992. Naranjo Orovio, Consuelo, and Armando García González. Racismo e inmigración en Cuba en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Editorial Doce Calles, 1996. Radcliff, Pamela Beth. Modern Spain 1808 to the Present. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2017. Rodríguez O., Jaime E. The Independence of Spanish America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Roldán de Montaud, Inés. La hacienda en Cuba durante la Guerra de los Diez Años, 1868–1880. Madrid: Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, 1990. Sánchez Albornoz, Nicolás, ed. The Economic Modernization of Spain, 1830– 1930, translated by Karen Powers and Manuel Sañudo. New York: New York University Press, 1987. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “After ‘Spain’: A Dialogue with Josep M. Fradera on Spanish Colonial Historiography.” In After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, edited by Antoinette Burton, 157– 69. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. ———. “Continuity and Crisis: Cuban Slavery, Spanish Colonialism, and the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth-Century.” In The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, 199–218. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. ———. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. ———. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. ———. “Entangled Irishman: George Dawson Flinter and Anglo-Spanish Imperial Rivalry.” In Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1830, edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, 124–41. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. ———. “From Aggression to Crisis: The Spanish Empire in the 1860s.” In American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s, edited by Don H. Doyle, 137–58. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. ———. “Imperio y crisis colonial.” In Más se perdió en Cuba: España, 1898 y la crisis de fin de siglo, edited by Juan-Pan Montojo, 31–89. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1998. ———. “Politics and Ideas in Latin American Independence.” Latin American Research Review 45, no. 2 (2010): 228–35. ———. “A Second Slavery? The 19th-Century Sugar Revolutions in Cuba and Puerto Rico.” In The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, edited by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano, 333–46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. ———. “Slavery, Antislavery, and Christianity: Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.” In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity, edited by Lamin Sanneh and Michael J. McClymond, 142–52. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. ———. “Spain and the Politics of the Second Slavery.” In The Politics of the Second Slavery, edited by Dale W. Tomich, 57–82. Binghamton: SUNY Press, 2016. ———. “‘This Rotting Corpse’: Spain between the Black Atlantic and the Black Legend.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 5, no. 1 (2001): 149–60. ———. “Wilberforce Spanished: Joseph Blanco White and Spanish Antislavery, 1808–14.” In Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, edited by Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, 158–75. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013.

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Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, and Mónica Burguera. “Backwardness and Its Discontents.” Social History 29, no. 3 (2004): 279–83. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, and John M. Nieto-Phillips, eds. Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, Legends. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Shubert, Adrian. A Social History of Modern Spain. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Surwillo, Lisa. Monsters by Trade: Slave Traffickers in Modern Spanish Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Tomich, Dale. “The Second Slavery: Bonded Labor and the Transformation of the Nineteenth-Century World Economy.” In Rethinking the Nineteenth Century: Movements and Contradictions, edited by Francisco O. Ramirez, 103–17. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988. Ullman, Joan Connelly. The Tragic Week: A Study of Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875–1912. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Unzueta, Fernando. Review of The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century, by Christopher SchmidtNowara. The Americas 66, no. 1 (2009): 131–32.

Figure 1.1. First page of the draft introduction to Fernando Blanco White’s diary with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s handwritten notes in the margins. Image courtesy of Matthew Ehrlich and the Schmidt-Nowara family.

Chapter 1

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966–2015) His Work and His Life Stephen Jacobson

å Christopher Schmidt-Nowara died in Paris on 27 June 2015 as a consequence of an undiagnosed illness that prematurely ended the life of a healthy man.1 He had occupied the Prince of Asturias Chair in Spanish History at Tufts University since 2011. He had assumed the chair at the young age of forty-five, and he maintained the prestige of the previous holders José Álvarez Junco and Felipe Fernández Armesto. Previously, he had been the Magis Distinguished Professor of History at Fordham University, where he directed the Latin American and Latino Studies Institute. Destined to turn the Chair into a center for the study of Spain and the Atlantic world, he will be remembered not only for what he left behind but also for what he left unfinished. An unfortunate death deprived our field of its most dynamic scholar. Christopher was best known as an expert on slavery and antislavery in Spain’s nineteenth-century empire, although he also worked on a number of related subjects such as the legacy of the Spanish empire in Latin America and the southwestern United States, and the entangled histories of the Anglo-Saxon and Iberian Atlantics. He had recently turned to the subject of Spanish prisoners of war in Napoleonic Europe and the Latin American wars of independence. With a sharp comparative eye, he crossed fields between Spanish and Latin American history, and his books and articles appealed to scholars of various disciplines—history, Hispanic and colonial studies, and literature. He possessed a remarkable capacity to integrate methodologies, and to bring together scholars who addressed similar themes even though they heralded from different disciplines and focused on different countries.

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He even succeeded in wedding approaches that emphasized materiality and long-term historical change with postcolonial studies. Openmindedness, attentiveness, and the disposition to engage in meaningful dialogue were his chief virtues as a scholar, teacher, and friend. An avid reader, his prose was elegant and unpretentious, even when entering the waters of theory, so often muddied by jargon. His intellectual and academic interests were a result of his life as well as his studies.

His Life Christopher was born in Cleveland in 1966, although he was to have an itinerant childhood as the family followed the medical and academic career of his father Wolfgang. While still an infant, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts until the Vietnam War altered the family’s plans. In 1971, his father was drafted into compulsory military service as a physician and sent to Fort Bliss, and the Schmidt-Nowaras moved to El Paso. The academic year 1973/74 brought them back to New England, this time to Dartmouth and Hanover, New Hampshire. By the summer of 1974, however, they settled permanently in Albuquerque where Wolfgang taught pulmonary medicine at the University of New Mexico. Chris grew up, forged lifelong friendships, and played varsity baseball there. His mother, Betsy, and sister, Molly, a criminal defense lawyer, still live and work in Albuquerque today. Throughout his life, he visited them and his childhood friends frequently.2 Subsequently, Chris lived in various parts of the United States and the world. From a youth in the Southwest, he became an adult in the Midwest. He attended Kenyon College, an outstanding small college dedicated to the liberal arts, where he graduated in 1988 as a history major. As an undergraduate, he spent an academic year at New York University’s study abroad program in Madrid, housed at the famous Instituto Internacional on Miguel Ángel 8, where so many Hispanists became seduced by the allures of Spain. After Kenyon, he earned a scholarship to undertake a doctorate in history at the University of Michigan. There, he realized that the history of modern Spain had not properly integrated the colonies. In order to undertake the research for his dissertation, he returned to Madrid on a Fulbright Fellowship from 1991 to 1993, and also spent months in Cuba and Puerto Rico as a graduate student. A Mellon Fellowship allowed him to write up his dissertation. To be sure, Chris belonged to a privileged generation of graduate students who came into maturity in the 1990s. Previously, two out-

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standing generations of historians of modern Spain—Gabriel Jackson, Richard Herr, Edward Malefakis, Stanley Payne, Joan Connelly Ullman, Temma Kaplan, Carolyn Boyd, and Adrian Shubert to name a few—had brought the field into the North American academic mainstream.3 Upon graduating, we were fortunate enough to have the winds of a favorable job market at our backs. History departments looked to diversify their European section by complementing their core focuses on France, Germany, and Britain. Upon completing his doctorate in 1995, Schmidt-Nowara undertook a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University from 1995 to 1998. In 1998, he began his professorial career at Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus. While in New York City, he spent much time with his brother Pete, a high school social studies teacher. He took advantage of sabbaticals to enjoy stays as a visiting scholar at the University of Puerto Rico, the University of São Paulo, Princeton, and the University of Arizona. He spent many a summer in Madrid and Barcelona. In addition to his nuclear family, his maternal grandparents were a major influence. His grandfather Robert H. Ebert was a towering figure in the medical and academic world of New England. A Rhodes Scholar, Dr. Ebert served as Dean of the Harvard Medical School from 1965 to 1977, during which time he bucked prevailing currents of professorial conservatism by supporting student protests and by joining antiwar demonstrations. As a medic in the Marine Corps in World War II, he had been one of the American physicians who had treated Japanese patients in Nagasaki suffering from radiation poisoning. In 1969, he was one of the founders of the Harvard Community Health Plan, the first HMO in the country.4 Chris’s grandmother, Emily Ebert, née Hirsch, was a woman ahead of her time with a colorful family history. She descended from a German-Jewish family who had founded a whisky label in the 1870s and helped start a “frontier synagogue” in Leadville, Colorado in the 1880s.5 Born in 1916, she graduated from Radcliffe, went on to work toward a graduate degree in Oxford in the 1930s where she met Robert Ebert and later got married. She died in 1986 after having returned to graduate school where she was studying for a PhD in English literature at Princeton. Chris spent much time in and around Princeton where his grandparents lived from 1977 to 1990, where his brother was an undergraduate, and where he spent a sabbatical mining the Blanco White Family Collection. Chris’s middle name was Ebert, and he signed his dissertation and one of his first articles, “Christopher Ebert Schmidt-Nowara.”6 One does not have to be a historian to assemble these pieces of youth to understand much of what motivated Christopher. He came from a

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family of academics and spent time around the university campuses of Harvard, Dartmouth, New Mexico, and Princeton. In Albuquerque, he became exposed to Hispanic culture; at Kenyon, he embraced history and the humanities; and in Madrid, he became enamored with Spain. His grandparents instilled a spirit of intellectual progressivism and activism in the family that drew him to the subject of slavery and abolition, much like his brother was drawn to intercity public-school teaching and his sister to criminal defense. As a child in Hanover, and during summers visiting his extended family in Boston, Chris became a fan of the New England sports teams, particularly the Red Sox. Still, his patria was always New Mexico. He enjoyed stints as a Madrid expatriate, a Bay-Area postdoc, a Brooklyn young professional, and a Bostonian, but his heart was always in Albuquerque. He published two books with the University of Mexico Press, the edited volume Interpreting Spanish Colonialism (2005) and his magisterial Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World (2011).7 If his impeccable manners, attentiveness, and amiability came from his family’s patrician and progressive history, his characteristic irreverence was a product of a New Mexico youth.

His Influences and His Work As is the case with most every scholar, it is possible to link SchmidtNowara’s orientations to his upbringing, but his academic interests and ambitions grew out of the fertile intellectual atmosphere of graduate school. When Chris attended Michigan in the early 1990s, a number of young professors—Rebecca Scott, Frederick Cooper, Jane Burbank, Thomas Holt, and Ann Stoler—were injecting new life into the old study of empire.8 At the time, many departments in literature and social sciences had been dominated by “colonial studies,” inspired by intellectual giants such as Edward Said, Clifford Geertz, and the Subaltern Studies School. Influenced by poststructural critiques, many scholars had dismissed much imperial history as reflective of the power relations inherent in empire itself and infected by the legacy of Orientalism. Yet, some suspected that such a critique had gone too far. In an effort to “deconstruct” grand narratives, some historians had abandoned the archives for the libraries, had neglected the social history of the lower classes (while claiming otherwise), and had paradoxically inserted “culturalism” into the study of non-Western peoples.9 For their part, the Michigan historians learned many lessons from colonial studies and saw the need to address critically themes

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and categories such as race, gender, bondage, and freedom; however, they chose not to deconstruct narratives but to reconstruct histories. They did not go back to the grand imperial histories, modernization theories, or Marxist paradigms, but returned to the archives to study metropolitan policies, colonial dynamics, capitalism, labor, and biopolitics. They took administration and commerce seriously, used microhistory to give agency to those left out of the historical record, and re-examined subjects from a cultural and materialistic perspective. Another major influence on Chris at Michigan was the historian Geoff Eley, who codirected his thesis in tandem with Rebecca Scott. At the same time that many of his colleagues had turned to empire, Professor Eley was busy undertaking a sweeping revision of nineteenthcentury German history. In the 1990s, David Blackbourn and Eley’s Peculiarities of German History (1984) was making waves across history departments everywhere.10 As is well known, these authors had debunked one of the dominant orthodoxies in modern European history—the Sonderweg thesis. This school of thought held that Germany had gone down a “separate path” toward modernity given that its twentieth-century history differed from that of England. Instead, Eley and Blackbourn posited that German liberalism—like all liberalisms—possessed its particularities, but none so striking as to predetermine the coming of Nazism and the Holocaust. Following this work, Christopher and other scholars sought to debunk Spanish history’s own Sonderweg of backwardness and illiberalism, a historiographical legacy of the Black Legend, Prescott’s Paradigm, romantic Hispanism, and the repression, poverty, and illiteracy associated with the postwar Franco regime.11 Applied broadly, the political culture of liberalism in all of Europe was a messy garden, tolerating massive deviations from its philosophical principles in the metropole and in the colonies. With these influences in mind, it is possible to appreciate the underpinnings of his first book, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (1999).12 On one level, his dissertation grew out of the intellectual project of his adviser, Rebecca Scott. Her Slave Emancipation in Cuba (1985) remains a classic. 13 In the same year that he published his book, Ada Ferrer—his colleague from Michigan and another Rebecca Scott student—published Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (1999).14 Together, these three monographs helped renovate the study of Cuba within Spanish history in the Anglo-Saxon academy.15 On another level, Empire and Antislavery profited from the “peculiarities of liberalism” thesis. Although Spanish liberalism was renowned for a peculiarity known as caciquismo, another feature was its tolerance of slavery. As was well known, Spain had a

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dismal comparative record with respect to abolition. No significant Enlightenment scholar posited the abolition of slavery, nineteenthcentury governments regularly flouted international treaties prohibiting the slave trade, and Spain was the last major European country to abolish slavery in its Atlantic colonies. Slavery was not abolished definitively in Cuba until 1886, decades after the British and French had abolished the heinous institution in 1833 and 1848 respectively. In Empire and Antislavery, Schmidt-Nowara explained how the rise of sugar plantations in Cuba was not an exception but in fact part of a hemispheric phenomenon—a “second slavery” that also took place in the southern United States and Brazil.16 Instead of measuring Spain to the records in Britain and France, Schmidt-Nowara showed how transnational influences shaped what went on in the Spanish empire. On the one hand, he demonstrated how debates on the reform or the abolition of slavery took place in a “bourgeois public sphere” on both sides of the Atlantic. Spanish, Cuban, and Puerto Rican liberals incorporated economic and moral ideas developed elsewhere and molded them to their present realities. Many Spanish progressives and republicans embraced the British and Protestant ideal of a “free trade—free labor empire” while others were influenced by French philosophical doctrines on the Rights of Man. To be sure, European powers also provided negative models in the Caribbean. Spanish antislavery debates overlapped with efforts to stimulate immigration in order to “whiten” Cuba and Puerto Rico. The goal was to avoid the creation of plantation societies such as Martinique, Barbados, or Jamaica, and to prevent a race war as had occurred in Haiti. Outside of Michigan, two other scholars were tremendously influential during this formative period. The first was Seymour Drescher, the dean of abolitionist studies of the British Empire, and like Eley, another smasher of paradigms. Ever since his Econocide (1977), Drescher had dedicated his life’s work to debunking the Marxist orthodoxy on slavery, famously established by Eric Williams and Eugene Genovese.17 These latter scholars contended that the abolition of slavery was caused by faceless economic forces, which mandated that “capitalist” free labor replace “feudal” forced labor. In contrast, Drescher credited political ideas and social movements for ending this heinous institution, which, at the time of its abolition, produced sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee, and rice on plantations more cheaply and efficiently than free-labor systems. Drescher’s work not only influenced Schmidt-Nowara’s, but he personally took an interest in Chris’s career. As a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, he encouraged SchmidtNowara to publish his first article in Cuban Studies, a journal edited

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by the university’s press.18 He later convinced Chris to publish his first book in Pittsburgh’s prestigious Latin American Series. Drescher and Schmidt-Nowara later collaborated in the edited volume, Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire (2013).19 The last crucial formative influence was Josep Maria Fradera, a professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, a colleague of Rebecca Scott, and later the coeditor with Chris of Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire. At the time that Schmidt-Nowara was a graduate student, Fradera had turned to the fiscal, juridical, and institutional foundation of Spain’s nineteenth-century empire. Their projects cross-fertilized one another, especially since the stability of Spain’s “second empire” depended on the institution of slavery. The ability of the metropole to provide for the defense and administration of Puerto Rico and Cuba, while ensuring a steady stream of tax revenues, depended upon the export of sugar and the expansion of the plantation system. Economic debates over forced, semi-forced, and free labor—addressed by Christopher—concerned the future of the plantation system and the fiscal-military sinews of empire as analyzed by Josep Maria.20 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s second monograph, The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (2006) was cast within the field of postcolonial studies, and, for this reason, proved attractive in history and literature departments. In this work, he brought “the empire back into” another popular subject of inquiry—the study of nationalism. In 2001, José Álvarez Junco, the first Prince of Asturias Chair at Tufts, had published the seminal Mater Dolorosa. La idea de España en el siglo XIX.21 This in turn had spawned multiple studies on the subject. While many scholars looked inward, exploring the relationship between the region and the nation, Schmidt-Nowara looked outward.22 The book examines how the writing and commemorating of the early modern empire helped forge national histories in both Spain and the former colonies. Parallel to this project, Schmidt-Nowara teamed up with John M. Nieto-Phillips to edit the engaging, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends (2005).23 In a conference held at Fordham in 2001, Christopher gathered together some of the finest scholars of Spanish America, including Jeremy Adelman, Dale Tomich, Astrid Cubano-Iguana, and Antonio Feros. He asked them to reflect on the legacy of Spanish colonialism within the context of their own research. Schmidt-Nowara’s fourth book, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World (2011), may become his most influential over time. It is a laudable accomplishment, the work of a vet-

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eran scholar, who after spending years in the archives, the library, and the classroom, published a sweeping and insightful synthesis. If his early work “brought the empire back in” to Spanish history, this book helped “bring the Spanish empire in” to discussions of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world.24 If his early work was influenced by his mentors at the University of Michigan and their colleagues, his later scholarship was the fruit of his participation in what could be called the “Second Slavery Group.” This coterie of experts from around the world collaborated and frequently met at the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University where Dale Tomich was its deputy director.25 Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition is primarily a teaching volume. It is eminently readable and handsomely edited, endowed with striking images and illustrative maps and charts. One of Christopher’s greatest skills was his ability to write clearly, cogently, and synthetically. In just over two hundred pages, he succeeded in analyzing the history of American slavery from its beginnings with Columbus to its definitive abolition in Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s. In other words, he included both the “first” and “second” slaveries in addition to the story of abolition. Experts have also lauded its remarkable scope and sweep: the account of the diversity of slave experiences; the descriptions of the various roads to bondage and freedom; and the exploration of the links between the overlapping spheres of the different European powers in the Caribbean—Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Holland, and Denmark. Schmidt-Nowara also drew vivid distinctions between the Hispanic and Lusophone world, on one hand, and British colonies and the United States, on the other. The balance sheet was mixed. In the Iberian Atlantic, slave experiences were more diverse, life expectancies shorter, manumission more common, and nonviolent abolitionist movements less consequential. Schmidt-Nowara’s last published volume during his lifetime was his Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire (2013), which he edited with Josep M. Fradera.26 It brings together many Spanish and Latin American scholars who had not previously published synthetic summaries of their work in English. Among some of the most interesting essays in the volume is Josep Maria Delgado’s work on the asiento system of the Habsburg and Bourbon Spain, the primary purpose of which was to serve the subsidiary needs and diplomatic interests of an empire that was highly dependent on Indian (as opposed to slave) labor and had little presence on the west coast of Africa until the nineteenth century. Another fascinating essay is Alejandro de la Fuente’s exploration of how slaves created their own jurisprudence and system of legal rights in Cuba that gave many access to manumission, an ac-

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complishment impossible in the North Atlantic where chattel slavery existed in a legal void within the English common law. Juan Carlos Garavaglia’s work on Argentine slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth century demonstrates that slaves were not only domestic servants in the Río de la Plata. They were more important to wheat and livestock production on the pampas than many had previously thought, even if such activities were not so labor intensive. Slave labor existed in places such as Cuyo (in the Andean province of Mendoza) where they were key to the production of wine, cereal, and fruit, products not associated with slavery elsewhere. Martín Rodrigo’s essay on the financial fortunes of Spanish slavers, many of whom returned to Spain where they displayed their fortunes in Catalonia and along the Cantabrian coast as indianos. These are some of the contributions, but there are others by Drescher, Fradera, and Ferrer. Schmidt-Nowara was also a prolific author of articles and reviews in collected volumes and scholarly journals. Many of these concerned his central themes. However, he also published a number of articles that explored interesting biographies within the entangled AngloSaxon and Hispanic worlds and empires. During his various trips to the Southwest, he took time out to work on Charles F. Lummis, the leading North American Scholar of the Spanish Empire in the early twentieth century, who did much to rehabilitate and romanticize the image of Spain and Hispanic patrimony in the Southwest.27 Another fascinating figure that caught his attention was Esteban (Steve) Bellan, a Cuban-born student at Fordham University who played in the first nine-man team college baseball game in the United States when Fordham Rose Hill took the field against St. Francis Xavier College on 3 November 1859. Bellan went on to play professional baseball in what became the National League and helped found Cuban professional baseball in Havana in the 1870s. To Chris, the borders of “America’s” national pastime extended to the Caribbean and the history of baseball in the Bronx transcended the Yankees.28 Within his work on entangled empires and histories, Christopher also discovered the colorful George Dawson Flinter, a Hispanized Irishman who was almost always on the wrong side of history and whose fascinating biography ran counter to many a grand narrative. Flinter served as a junior officer during the British occupation of Curaçao in the Napoleonic Wars, and later became an agent of Spanish loyalists in Britain where he carried out a propaganda campaign and thwarted the recruitment of mercenaries for Bolivar’s armies during the Latin American Wars of Independence. Married into a prominent Spanish family, Flinter became a pro-slavery advocate in Puerto Rico in the

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1820s and 1830s, and then returned to Spain to serve as a colonel in the liberal army in the First Carlist War. After escaping from imprisonment, he committed suicide by slashing his throat in 1838.29 Schmidt-Nowara was also fascinated with another figure who bridged the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic worlds—the liberal abolitionist, Joseph (or José) Blanco White. Unlike Flinter, Blanco White was on the right side of history, and, although he died impoverished and forgotten in Liverpool, he has received significant scholarly attention posthumously. Born into an ennobled mercantile family of Irish descent in Spain in 1775, he left his native Seville for London, abandoned the priesthood, became a Minister in the Church of England, and wrote extensively about Spain. To some, his most famous work, Letters from Spain (1822), confirmed British stereotypical visions of Spaniards. To others, he represented an Anglo-Saxon route to modernity abandoned by many Spanish liberals in the nineteenth century. Christopher’s interest in this well-known author, however, was due to his famous antislavery pamphlet Bosquexo del comercio en esclavos (1814). In this work, Blanco White adapted the arguments of the British abolitionist William Wilberforce and applied them to the peculiarities of the Spanish empire.30 At the time of the death, Chris was preparing an English translation and commentary of the Bosquexo. Christopher’s last published book was a posthumous one. While working in the Blanco White Family Collection at Princeton University, he stumbled across a gem. He found a handwritten diary penned by Fernando Blanco White, Joseph’s brother. The account tells of his escape from a French prison in Chalon-sur-Saône during the end of the Napoleonic War, and his subsequent flight to England through Germany, Austria, and Holland. The diary ends in London where he is reunited with his brother. At the time of his death, Christopher had transcribed the diary, written an introduction, and was preparing an edition that contextualized the many interesting persons, soldiers, officials, and diplomats that Fernando met along the way. A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire: The Diary of Fernando Blanco White’s Flight to Freedom (2018) is a fascinating document and a great read.31 Scholars of the Blanco White brothers and post-Napoleonic Europe have found it revealing. It also offers insight into the direction of Christopher’s future work. The discovery of the diary had led him to develop a new line of research on Spanish prisoners of war in Napoleonic Europe and during the Latin American wars of independence. This was to be the subject of his next monograph. Indeed, Chris’s introduction and footnotes in A Spanish Prisoner reveal that he had made some initial progress at the Archivo Histórico Na-

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cional in Madrid. There, he had found the dispatches of Spanish ambassadors and other “officials on the spot” who were dealing with the refugee crisis upon Napoleon’s defeat. Christopher had already published a chapter on the subject.32 His turn to Napoleonic Europe was influenced by the fact that his daughter, Althea Rose, who was only four years old at the time of his death, was growing up in France. Chris wished to spend more time with his daughter and sought to carry out research in France. If his family and ancestry were his formative influences, Althea was the light destined to carry him forward.

His Memory In the academic year following his death, colleagues sought to overcome their grief by paying homage to his life. On 23 September, his friend James Amelang, an early modern historian of Spain, delivered a beautiful eulogy at a seminar at the CSIC in Madrid, which was later reprinted in the newsletter of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS).33 On 3 October, Tufts University held a memorial service in his honor, attended by family and friends. Tufts history graduate students sponsored a conference on global history in his memory on 5 March 2016. I coordinated and participated in a panel overviewing his scholarly work at the ASPHS annual conference sponsored by the University of San Diego on 18 March. From 29 to 30 April, members of the Second Slavery group gathered at the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University for a conference in his memory.34 On 28 and 29 May, the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) dedicated two panels to him in its annual conference held in New York City. Because Chris was such a prolific scholar, he had submitted many articles to collected volumes that were still in the production stage upon his death. These articles have been published posthumously in books that have been dedicated to him.35 All in all, the roster of scholars who have delivered addresses, given papers, or published online memories paying tribute to Chris is outstanding.36 In eulogies, tributes, and memorials, colleagues have stressed his qualities, and they have shared anecdotes. Jim Amelang first recalled Chris as graduate student steeped in high theory whose edge became blunted once he spent time in the archives. Josep Maria Fradera remembers Chris as a graduate student in Barcelona who “arrived to stay forever, to form part of a personal network that has permitted its beneficiaries to support the weight . . . of the profession.”37 Ada Ferrer,

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his colleague from Michigan, recalls the early morning treks they enjoyed as graduate students together up the hill to the Alcázar to consult the Archivo General Militar in Segovia; she notes that Chris’s work sat “at the intersection of European and American History (in the) Atlantic long before that was fashionable.” She lauds his “openness and warmth, his generosity and vitality, his intellect and his curiosity.”38 Others have emphasized his qualities as a mentor, teacher, and colleague. His graduate student from Fordham, Louie Dean ValenciaGarcia, wrote of “his kind, inquisitive, and insightful hand,” and thanked him for bequeathing to him a vast support system of scholars throughout the globe. “He challenged my thinking, was my staunch advocate, and kept me on track.” In a similar vein, Peniel Joseph, a Tufts colleague, described him as an “accessible teacher, mentor to junior faculty and intellectual thought leader on campus.”39 Dale Tomich noted that “curiosity, irony, and sense of humor creatively engaged students, as he simultaneously challenged them.”40 His colleague from Fordham, the art historian Barbara Mundy, stressed that Chris was such an active member of the Institute of Latin American and Latino Studies that he assembled a fascinating history of the Institute. Quoting Habermas, she stressed that his deft handling of sources and writing of history was directed at “reaching a deeper level of solidarity with those bearing a human form.”41 Another quality was his love of books, food, and drink. He read everything—contemporary novels, crime novels, nineteenth-century English literature, postwar American literature, the Generation of 1898, Spanish literature of the transition, the Latin American boom, Galdós and Clarín, Flaubert and De Maupassant, Thomas Mann and Hemingway, and so much more. Dale Tomich commented that Chris would get to know the rhythms of a city by exploring “its neighborhoods, cafés and bars as well as libraries and museums” and recalls that he would always see things more clearly after enjoying a meal with Christopher. Josep Maria Fradera remembers sharing “tapas, vinos y cafés,” Ada Ferrer recalls a frequent “caña or a fino” and of sharing “croquetas and patatas bravas” and Peniel Joseph chatted with him about “sports, his daughter, food, beer, travel.” Jim Amelang recalled that Chris once took on the charge of hunting down the perfect patata brava by sampling many of the most renowned in Madrid. I recall sharing cordero in Castile, butifarra in Catalonia, tortellini in Modena, lobster in Cape Cod, Junior’s Cheesecake in Brooklyn, and oysters followed by whisky in the Grand Central Oyster Bar in Manhattan. We looked up glassy eyed at the Guastavino tiled ceiling and began discussing Richard Kagan’s research and recent presentations on the Spanish Craze.42

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Surely, the descriptions of the food and drink in the Diary of Fernando Blanco White, whet Christopher’s appetite when he was engaged in the arduous task of transcribing more than four-hundred pages of barely legible handwriting in error-filled English. Fernando eats “a little bread and cheese with wine and brandy” at in Inn near Chalon, and when he traverses the Jura mountains, he enjoys “Gruere [Gruyère]” cheese, which he describes as “excellent.” In Murten, he tastes a soup in which the “broth is black and as thick as pap,” though a few days later empties a bottle of wine with a Freemason in Soleure. In Liestal, he samples a “liquor distilled from plums, of a very bad flavour.” In Basel, he feasts on “some boiled beef, soucrout [sauerkraut] and cheese” and some Kirsch waser, a “spiritous liquor extracted from cherries.” Upon arriving in Frieburg, the innkeepers “drank very good wine . . . (and) gave us very bad beer.” In Bietigheim, dinner was “sour milk . . . (with) some bread blacker than my hat.” In Limburg, he converses with the Canon whose “wine was very good and our Latin conversation so interesting.” In Wahlrod, he found a rich peasant and “engaged him to drink a bottle of wine in the public house.” In Dusseldorf, he drank beer out of a “high cylinder of glass” (“the oddest I ever saw”). In Nijmegen, he found a coffee house “to drink punch” and in Rotterdam he had “beefsteaks” with “potatoes” (“much better than the English”) and “melted butter.”43 Christopher Schmidt-Nowara wrote one academic obituary—that of the great Cuban historian of slavery Manuel Moreno Fraginals, who died as an active academic at eighty-one years.44 One can only wonder just how influential Schmidt-Nowara would have become if he had also lived an additional three decades. Having completed what he believed to be about half an academic career (and having produced more than what a full one would entail for most of us), the best of his scholarship was yet to come. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s academic legacy leaves a clear message to those of us who dedicate our professional lives to the history of nineteenth-century Spain. We realize that it is wrong to teach Spain independent of the Atlantic world. Nor can one teach Latin America or the United States without understanding the colonial legacies of Spain. Most of all, we realize that it is malpractice to ignore empire and slavery. This is true not only because Spaniards lived and worked “in both hemispheres”—to borrow the expression from the Constitution of Cádiz; not only because migrants, goods, capital, labor, and ideas flowed between the islands and the Peninsula; but it is also true because the governance of the colonies rested upon slavery and other forms of coerced labor, upon the denial of political representation to

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even those who possessed judicial rights, and upon the exclusion of free blacks, mulattos, and mestizos from citizenship. It is no longer logical—or even moral—to teach a history that includes Spaniards and excludes other residents of the empire, hence reproducing the discriminatory distribution of rights consecrated in one Spanish constitution after another. In concrete terms, it is no longer permitted to teach a history of whites and to exclude the castas pardas, free blacks, and slaves. Professor Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s greatest gift was to recuperate, at least in part, the plight and lost dignity of the many souls who for centuries had been left out of the historical record. Stephen Jacobson is an associate professor of history and the former director of the Institut d’Història Jaume Vicens Vives at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). He is the author of Catalonia’s Advocates: Lawyers, Society, and Politics in Barcelona, 1859–1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and the coeditor of Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

Notes 1. Some paragraphs in this chapter were previously published in Jacobson, “Bringing the Empire Back in.” 2. Biographical information courtesy of Peter Schmidt-Nowara, Chris’s brother, who I interviewed on 5 March 2019. 3. Jacobson, “North American Approaches.” 4. Noble, “Robert H. Ebert.” 5. For the whisky label, see http://pre-prowhiskeymen.blogspot.com/2011. For the synagogue, see http://www.jewishleadville.org/ 6. Schmidt-Nowara, “The Problem of Slavery,” and “Borders and Borderlands.” 7. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism; and Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition. 8. Some of their notable collaborative works include: Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire; Cooper, Holt, and Scott, Beyond Slavery; and Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History. 9. For these critiques, see Eaton, “(Re)imag(in)ing Otherness”; and Cooper, “The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Colonial Studies.” 10. Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History. 11. This subject is treated with greater detail in the “Introduction” to this volume. 12. Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery. 13. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba. 14. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba.

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15. A fourth could also be added to the list: Casanovas, Bread, or Bullets! 16. For “second slavery,” see Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery, 56–71. 17. Drescher, Econocide; Genovese, Political Economy; Williams, Capitalism and Slavery. 18. Schmidt-Nowara, “‘Spanish’ Cuba.” 19. Drescher, “From Empires of Slavery.” Drescher was also the editor of the Berghahn book series, “European Expansion and Global Interaction,” in which the volume appeared. 20. Fradera, Gobernar colonias, and Colonias para después de un imperio. 21. Álvarez Junco, Mater Dolorosa. 22. For a similarly “outward glance,” though addressing the early modern period, see Herzog, Defining Nations. I later attempted to look inward and outward, addressing both the region and the empire: Jacobson, “Identidad nacional en España, Cataluña y el Imperio.” 23. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism. 24. For other syntheses, see Klein and Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America; Bergad, Comparative Histories of Slavery; and Blackburn, American Crucible. It is important to note that the Schmidt-Nowara book differs from these fine volumes. The Klein and Blackburn volumes are written from the perspective of historians of Brazil and the British Empire. Bergad’s book focuses on three countries and chiefly concerns the nineteenth century. In contrast, Schmidt-Nowara takes on a broader chronological, comparative, geographical sweep. 25. For some of their collective work, see Tomich, Politics of the Second Slavery, and New Frontiers of Slavery. 26. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery and Antislavery. 27. Schmidt-Nowara, “Spanish Origins,” and “Broken Image.” 28. Chris carried out this research with his graduate student Mari-Claudia Jiménez. Mundy, “Remarks.” 29. Schmidt-Nowara, “Continental Origins,” and “Entangled Irishman.” 30. Schmidt-Nowara, “Wilberforce Spanished.” 31. Schmidt-Nowara, Spanish Prisoner. 32. Schmidt-Nowara, “Spanish Prisoners.” 33. Amelang, “Remembering Christopher Schmidt-Nowara.” 34. This was recently published as a volume: Tomich, Atlantic Transformations. 35. Volumes dedicated include: Tomich, Politics of the Second Slavery, and Atlantic Transformations; Doyle, American Civil Wars; Cañizares-Esguerra, Entangled Empires; Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman, Atlantic in Global History; Shubert and Álvarez Junco, History of Modern Spain. 36. They include: Joselyn Almeida-Beveridge, José Álvarez Junco, James S. Amelang, Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, Edward E. Baptist, Robin Blackburn, Mónica Burguera, Geraldo Cadava, Benjamin L. Carp, Celso T. Castilho, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Christopher DeCorse, Anne Eller, Matthew Ehrlich, Ada Ferrer, Elizabeth Foster, Josep M. Fradera, Renaldo Funesa, Albert Garcia Balañà, Luis Miguel García Mora, Joshua Goode, Stephen Jacobson, Peniel E. Joseph, Kris Manjapra, David A. Messenger, Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller, Barbara E. Mundy, Jeanne Penvenne, José Antonio

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37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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Piqueras, Elena A. Schneider, Adrian Shubert, Dale Tomich, and Louie Dean Valencia García. This list is by no means exhaustive. Fradera, “Christopher Schmidt-Nowara.” For a collection of these memories, see Parr, “Remembering Christopher Schmidt-Nowara.” Parr, “Remembering Christopher Schmidt-Nowara.” Tomich, “Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966–2015).” Mundy, “Remarks.” Later published as Kagan, Spanish Craze. Schmidt-Nowara, Spanish Prisoner, 49, 61, 72, 78, 82, 87, 104, 119, 121, 130, 142, 156. Schmidt-Nowara, “Manuel Moreno Fraginals.”

Bibliography Álvarez Junco, José. Mater Dolorosa: la idea de España en el siglo XIX. Madrid: Taurus, 2001. Amelang, James S. “Remembering Christopher Schmidt-Nowara: In Memoriam C.S.N.” ASPHS Newsletter 6 (2015): 29–34. Bergad, Laird W. The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Blackbourn, David, and Geoff Eley. The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Blackburn, Robin. The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights. London: Verso, 2011. Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, ed. Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1830. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, and Erik R. Seeman. The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2018. Casanovas, Joan. Bread, or Bullets! Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850–1898. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. Cooper, Frederick. “The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Colonial Studies.” In Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 32–58. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Cooper, Frederick, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Laura Stoler. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Doyle, Don H, ed. American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

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Drescher, Seymour. Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977. ———. “From Empires of Slavery to Empires of Antislavery.” In Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, edited by Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, 291–316. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Eaton, Richard M. “(Re)imag(in)ing Othernesss: A Postmortom for the Postmodern in India.” Journal of World History 11, no. 1 (2000): 57–78. Ferrer, Ada. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Fradera, Josep M. “Christopher Schmidt-Nowara: historia de una amistad colectiva.” Il·les i Imperis 18 (2016): 228–29. ———. Colonias para después de un imperio. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2005. ———. Gobernar colonias. Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1999. Fradera, Josep M., and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds. Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Genovese, Eugene D. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. New York: Vintage Books, 1965. Herzog, Tamar. Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Jacobson, Stephen. “Bringing the Empire Back in: Christopher SchmidtNowara (1966–2015).” Historia y Política 36 (2016): 341–51. ———. “Identidad nacional en España, Cataluña y el Imperio: una perspectiva comparada.” In Pueblo y nación. Homenaje a José Álvarez Junco, edited by Javier Moreno Luzón and Fernando Del Rey, 263–82. Madrid: Taurus, 2013. ———. “North American Approaches to Spanish and Portuguese History during Academic Apertura: Richard Herr, Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, Joan Connelly Ullman, and Douglas Wheeler.” Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Bulletin 38, no. 2 (2003): 18–23. Kagan, Richard L. The Spanish Craze: America’s Fascination with the Hispanic World, 1779–1939. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Klein, Herbert S., and Ben Vinson, III. African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2nd. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Mundy, Barbara E. “Remarks.” Paper presented at the panel, “Chris SchmidtNowara in Memoriam (1966–2015). Pioneer of Atlantic Empire and Antislavery Studies,” Annual Meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, New York City, 28 May 2016. Noble, Holcomb B. “Robert H. Ebert, 81, Who Led Harvard Medical School, Dies.” New York Times, 31 January 1996. Parr, Jessica. “Remembering Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, 1966–2015.” The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History, 10 July 2015. https://earlyamericanists.com/2015/07/10/remembering-christopher-schmidt-nowara1966-2015/. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Borders and Borderlands of Interpretation.” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1226–28. ———. “The Broken Image: The Spanish Empire in the United States after 1898.” In Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s De-

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cline, edited by Alfred W. McCoy, Josep M. Fradera, and Stephen Jacobson, 160–66. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. ———. “Continental Origins of Insular Proslavery: George Dawson Flinter in Curaçao, Venezuela, Britain, and Puerto Rico, 1810s–1830s.” Almanack 8 (2014): 55–67. ———. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. ———. “Entangled Irishman: George Dawson Flinter and Anglo-Spanish Imperial Rivalry.” In Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1830, edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, 121–41. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. ———. “Manuel Moreno Fraginals: An Appreciation.” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 1(2002): 125–27. ———. “The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Capital: Abolitionism, Liberalism, and Counter-Hegemony in Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico.” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1995. ———. Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011. ———. “‘Spanish’ Cuba: Race and Class in Spanish and Cuban Antislavery Ideology, 1861–1868.” Cuban Studies 25 (1995): 101–22. ———. “Spanish Origins of American Empire: Hispanism, History, and Commemoration, 1898–1915.” International History Review 30, no. 1 (2008): 32–51. ———. “Spanish Prisoners: War and Captivity in Spain’s Imperial Crisis, 1808– 1824.” In Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World, 1808–1898, edited by Akiko Tsuchiya and William B. Acree, 131–47. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2016. ———. “Wilberforce Spanished: Joseph Blanco White and Spanish Antislavery, 1808–1814.” In Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, edited by Josep M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, 158–75. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. ———, ed. A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire: The Diary of Fernando Blanco White’s Flight to Freedom. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2018. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, and John M. Nieto-Phillips, eds. Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Scott, Rebecca J. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899, 2nd ed. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2000. Shubert, Adrian, and José Álvarez Junco, eds. The History of Modern Spain: Chronologies, Themes, Individuals. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Tomich, Dale W. “Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966–2015).” Hispanic American Historical Review 97, no. 1 (2017): 135–37. ———. Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy. Landham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. ———, ed. Atlantic Transformations: Empire, Politics, and Slavery during the Nineteenth Century. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020.

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———, ed. New Frontiers of Slavery. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016. ———, ed. The Politics of the Second Slavery. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

Chapter 2

The First Word Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 and the Renewal of Spanish Imperial History Adrian Shubert

å Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s first book, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1999, was short—only 176 pages of text—but it hit way above its weight, or its length.1 (Chris would have appreciated a basketball metaphor more but I cannot think of one.) It made a fundamental contribution, one which I think can be expressed in a very few words: it brought the empire into the heart of Spain’s nineteenth-century history and offered the prospect of a more transnational approach to it. This might not seem like much now, when empire is a powerfully hot topic and categories like “transnational History” and “Atlantic history” are commonplace—even if truly transnational and Atlantic works are less so—but in 1999, and especially in the world of Spanish history, it was. It was not merely a matter of individual myopia that the survey that I edited with José Álvarez Junco, Spanish History since 1808, which was published in 2000, did not have a chapter on empire.2 The new version, The History of Modern Spain: Chronologies, Themes, Individuals, which came out in 2018, does.3 Chris was going to write it; he was writing it. In fact, the last communication I had from him was an email in which he said he had been at work on his chapter and had just had a brainwave. Unfortunately, I never learned what it was. Stephen Jacobson took on the daunting task of writing this chapter, and I am certain Chris would approve of the result.

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Today, transnational and global approaches still remain largely absent from the writing of Spanish history, although Sasha Pack’s 2019 book on the Strait of Gibraltar is a notable exception.4 The reverse is also true: Spain is but a fleeting presence in the magisterial global histories by Christopher Bayly and Jurgen Osterhammel and is essentially ignored by recent major works of the history of empire.5 In a crucial, recent article in the Journal of Global History, Jorge Luengo and Pol Dalmau make the case, one that Chris would have endorsed wholeheartedly, that “despite losing most of its American territories in the 1820s,” throughout the nineteenth century, Spain retained a global presence that extended far beyond the contours of the Iberian Peninsula. The remaining overseas colonies in America and Southeast Asia, colonial ambitions and footholds in Africa, and its relational framework with Europe made Spain a major crossroads for the processes, interactions, and entanglements that shaped it as much as it shaped other parts of the world. These elements formed a vast network of planetary interactions, involving a myriad of geographies, actors, and structures.

Spain, they write, had “two elements [that] make it particularly valuable from a global historical perspective: a robust, centuries-long connection with the Americas and Southeast Asia, and a condition as ‘contact zone’ with northern Africa.”6 Luengo and Dalmau choose to focus on two “‘big’ topics”: one is liberalism, the other is empire. They cite Chris’s work for both, although his work on the latter, and especially Empire and Antislavery, dominates.7 Empire and Antislavery appeared the year after the centenary of the Spanish-American War. Even though the colonial territories taken by the United States were only a fraction of those Spain lost in the independence wars of the early nineteenth century, the domestic impact of the Desastre as it was widely called in Spain at the time, was much greater. The best known are the intellectual consequences, the emergence of the “Generation of 1898,” but there was also a significant economic impact, especially from the loss of Cuba, and political consequences, especially in Catalonia, where regionalism now became a major political movement. Transcending all these—or perhaps enveloping them—was a widespread emotional impact, a kind of national trauma. At a time when these things truly mattered, the Desastre was definitive proof that Spain was no longer a great power; it even called into question Spaniards’ status as a “masculine” people and a “superior race.” In a famous speech on 4 May 1898, Lord Salisbury told the Primrose League of Tory rank-and-file that the world was divided into

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living and dying nations and that the former “will gradually encroach on the territory” of the latter, which included Spain.8 Domestic critics were much harsher. Joaquín Costa, the leading voice of the Regenerationist movement, denounced Spain as a “nation of women,” a “country of eunuchs,” with a “castrated public opinion.”9 The 1998 centenary provoked a sea of publications, as such historical anniversaries habitually do, but this was a traditional topic that was, for the most part, treated in a traditional way. One of the exceptions was Más se perdió en Cuba, a collection edited by Juan Pan-Montojo that included a long piece by Chris, “Imperio y crisis colonial.” (It is telling that even as a junior scholar he was one of only six people invited to contribute to a volume that featured such heavy hitters as Manuel Pérez Ledesma, Carlos Serrano, and José Álvarez Junco.) Here Chris announced one of the key themes of his future book, and one that would become a central part of the revitalized and revisionist historiography of the Spanish empire in the nineteenth century, which he, along with Josep Fradera and others,10 would produce: “in the Caribbean and the Pacific,” Spain’s empire “was not the empty shell of some past imperial grandeur but a new colonial project on a scale without precedent in the long history of Spanish colonialism.”11 Such a heterodox position inevitably drew criticism. For example, in a lengthy survey of the literature, Antonio Santamaría García and Consuelo Naranjo Orovio airily dismissed his argument that “post-Ayacucho Spanish imperialism was a large-scale, modern project” as “unconvincing” but did not engage with it nor give the slightest indication of where, in their view, it fell short.12 Empire and Antislavery, which came out the following year, was a pioneering work. It emerged from the doctoral dissertation on Spanish abolitionism that Chris wrote at the University of Michigan. It is intriguing that although he wanted to study modern Spain, Chris chose to do his PhD in a history department that did not have a specialist in the field. Is there a message here? Instead he worked with Rebecca Scott, a historian of Cuba and slavery; Fred Cooper a historian of empire and Africa; Ann Stoler, a historian of race and empire; and Geoff Eley, the historian of nineteenth-century Germany who challenged the orthodoxy of that country’s supposed peculiarities. He also took courses on Colonial Latin American history and on comparative postemancipation societies. These were important influences and would help Chris refine his thinking, but he already understood, much more than was generally recognized, that Spain’s nineteenth-century history was not bounded by the country’s peninsular borders: Spanish history in the nineteenth century was an Atlantic history. It was also an imperial history, and in this it was far from unique.13

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Empire and Antislavery focuses on the rise of abolitionism, the goals and strategies of abolitionists in Spain and in the two Caribbean colonies, and the challenge they posed to economic and political power in the imperial system. In telling this story, Chris makes four inter-related arguments. First, throughout the nineteenth century, Spain was able to undertake a renewed colonial project, a “second empire,” which made it what he called “an active player in refashioning Atlantic slavery.” This included importing more slaves to Cuba in the eighty years between 1791 and 1870 than in the 360 years between 1521 and 1780. Spain remained, as he put it, “an effective colonial power.” There is one thing that Chris mentions only in passing but which, explored at greater length, would further strengthen his argument about Spain being an active player involved in “refashioning” the Atlantic world. (It would also contribute to a more global approach to Spain’s nineteenth-century history.) This was the significant involvement of Cuba in a new form of unfree labor that the British had pioneered to replace the trans-Atlantic slave trade: indentured laborers from Asia, or “coolies” as they were called.14 At almost the very moment that they were banning the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the British were sending the first load of indentured laborers from India to Trinidad. This was a precocious foray into a trade that, starting in the 1830s, would become a major movement of unfree labor. By 1920, some two million Indians and Chinese had been shipped to meet the demands of the expanding plantation economies of Mauritius, the British Caribbean, and Cuba, as well as the booming Peruvian guano trade. Between 1847 and 1874, when the coolie trade was banned due to pressure from the government of China, 347 ships took 124,813 indentured Chinese to Cuba.15 (This is virtually the same chronology covered in the book.) Spanish entrepreneurs and planters and members of leading Cuban families, some of them former slave traders, had a key role in the business. Only four years before the first cargo of Chinese was sent to Cuba, Pedro José de Zulueta, a scion of the powerful Zulueta clan, was tried at London’s Old Bailey—and ultimately acquitted—on charges of kidnapping for his involvement in the illegal slave trade.16 The Zuluetas were a truly multinational enterprise, with offices in London, Manila, Macao, and Amoy as well as Havana.17 So too were the Drakes, a prominent Anglo-Cuban merchant and planter family operating out of Havana and Matanzas, the growth area for sugar production in the nineteenth century. The founder, James Drake, had gone to Cuba in the 1790s and married into the del Castillos, one of the leading families on the island. The Drakes were also close collaborators of wealthy New York businessman Moses L. Tay-

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lor.18 Early entrants in the coolie trade, the Drakes would end up as the third largest player, importing a total of 5,638 coolies before the trade was shut down in 1874.19 The family’s wealth and influence reached across the Atlantic: Carlos Drake y Núñez del Castillo was the permanent representative of the city of Havana in Madrid and would sit in the Spanish Senate from 1858 to 1868 where he assiduously defended the interests of the planters.20 The Spanish-run coolie trade quickly became notorious for its brutality. “Recruitment” was characterized by what the Spanish Consul in Amoy called “deceit, fraud, and violence.”21 Recruiting was done by agents known as crimps—the Chinese term was chu chai tau (swineherds)—who spoke the local dialects and—in many cases—were connected to organized crime,22 and were paid by the piece.23 Coolies who testified to the Chinese government’s 1874 commission of inquiry to Cuba agreed: “Spanish vessels come to China and by suborning the vicious of our countrymen, by their aid carry away dull cargoes of men, of whom 8 or 9 of every 10 are decoyed.”24 The “colonists,” as they were officially called, signed a contract that was printed in Spanish and Chinese and supposedly read to them in the appropriate Chinese dialect. Angtau Mauricio, a 26-year-old native of Fukien, signed his contract with A. R. Ferrán in Swatow, as Europeans called Shantou then, on 24 November 1857. Angtau agreed to work for eight years, which would start eight days after arriving in Havana, “on the condition I arrive in good health.” If he were ill, the work period would begin eight days after his release from hospital. He would travel on the ship that Ferrán chose and when he arrived in Cuba he would “be at the orders of Mr. Rafael R. Torices or the person to whom he transfers this contract.” He would work “in the fields, in towns or anywhere they send me,” which could range from a “private home” to a “sugar mill or cafetero.” He would work the hours his employer (patrono) determined, “so long as I get my hours of rest every 24 hours as well as the time required for meals.” On Sundays he could only be made to perform “the essential tasks done on that day for the type of work at which I am employed.” He would be under the “order and discipline” of his place of employment and would “submit to the [employer’s] system of punishment.” “Under no circumstance” would he withhold his labor “from the patrono who takes me or try to escape from his power.” For his part, Ferrán would give him: an advance of 8 gold and 6 silver pesos to equip him for the voyage; feed him during the voyage; pay a salary of 4 pesos per month once Mauricio began working; provide a daily ration of 8 ounces salted meat and two and one-half pounds of sweet potato “or other healthy and nourishing food”; provide medical attention if he

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fell ill; give him two outfits of clothing, a woolen shirt and a blanket each year, as well as four sets of “ropa colcha”; and other necessities worth four pesos that, together with the advance already mentioned, would be taken from his monthly salary by “the person to whom this contract is transferred.” Finally, Mauricio declared that he was happy with the agreed to salary even though “free workers and slaves on the island of Cuba earn much more because the difference is made up for by the other advantages my patrono has to provide and which appear in this contract.”25 One consequence of the abusive nature of the coolie trade from Swatow to Cuba was captured by the Hong Kong Daily Press in February 1860. The atrocities attending the Havana slave trade (for which foreigners generally are held in great odium by the natives) and the swindling nature of the contracts, are so well known in the neighborhood of Swatow, that slave coolies can only be procured with great difficulty. The [US ship] Staghound has been some months in loading, and is still many short of her complement. It must not be supposed that there is any scarcity of laborers, or that there is any aversion to emigrate in a bona fide manner. Quite the contrary—so much so that a Siamese ship of scarcely 900 tons was on the point of sailing for Bangkok with upwards of 1500 Chinese on board, who had paid six dollars per month for their passage. So crowded were the decks that lying down was out of the question. The sailors have to work the ship on the rail, and the cooking for the master and officers had to be done in the cabin.26

Once recruited, the laborers were housed in barracks in the port of departure until a ship was ready. Spanish companies hired ships from a number of countries, including Great Britain and the United States, although the former had imposed strict regulations through the 1855 Chinese Passengers Act27 and in 1862 the latter prohibited its ships from carrying coolies. The ships were often refitted for a coolie voyage. The American ship Norway arrived in China from New York in 1857 carrying coal for the US naval squadron. Its next cargo was 1037 coolies bound for Cuba. Down the whole length of both lower decks were built tier on tier of berths, or rather shelves—for they were without sides or dividing partitions. . . . Over every hatchway save one were set iron gratings to prevent too free access from below to the upper deck . . . The gratings were made of bars of iron, arched in the centre, and having a circular

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opening of eight or nine inches diameter at the summit of the arch. . . . In addition to these preparations on the spar deck a barricade was built running athwart ship, from rail to rail, a short distance in front of the captain’s cabin, twelve feet wide, two feet high, and arranged so that a guard of armed men could, from their station, command the whole deck, while within it were accommodations for their sleeping.28

Given these conditions, it is no surprise that mortality rates were high. According to official figures, 16,576 died on the voyage to Cuba, for a death rate of 11.7 per cent.29 (The figure for the Peru trade were double or higher.)30 Nor that mutinies were frequent: 68 have been recorded for the 700 voyages to Cuba and Peru. The Norway was among them.31 When they arrived in Havana, the coolie’s contract was put up for sale. Until this happened, the Chinese were put in depósitos (holding cells) near the slave market and subjected to being examined naked by potential employers and beatings for misconduct.32 The similarity to slavery extended to coolies being given new, European names by their employers.33 While the importation of coolies may have solved the planters’ problems, it created new ones for Spanish imperial authorities. Initial legislation treated Chinese as colonists who would be able to remain in Cuba as free men once they had completed their indenture. However, the start of the coolie trade came at a difficult moment for Spain: on the one hand, there had been a slave revolt scare in 1844; on the other, authorities were increasingly concerned about the possibility of a revolt by whites who wanted to join the United States.34 (That the Americans coveted the island was also becoming increasingly clear in the 1850s.)35 Spanish administrators who had built their control of the colony on the “balancing the races”36 were soon asking what the importation of Chinese meant for this policy, and the powerful Council of State took the question up. “Would the steady and undefined Chinese immigration that has been proposed alter the equilibrium?” it asked. “As there are conspiracies from the enemies of Spain on this island and as, unfortunately, its residents are divided in opinion and faction, which of them will the new race, or Asian population, join in days of conflict and danger?”37 After lengthy debate the Council decided that, because they were not Catholic and because the essentially all-male migration would lead to interracial marriage with Afro-Cuban women, the Chinese, not white but a “new race,” which, if allowed to settle, would “upset the equilibrium [and] expose the country to disturbances and shocks that could turn it into

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ruins.” Since, however, “the sugar industry imperiously clamors for a work force,” the answer was to treat the Chinese as temporary workers who, while not technically slaves, were in many ways indistinguishable from them.38 The very success in sustaining the plantation economy created the conditions for the emergence of antislavery and anticolonial political activities. Slavery was a political space. This is the second argument. As Spain’s liberal revolution proceeded, and its public sphere was transformed, especially after 1854, new kinds of mobilization against slavery and the political status quo became possible. Here I want to highlight an aspect of Empire and Antislavery that I believe has not been sufficiently noted: the emphasis Chris put on the development of the public sphere in the middle decades of the century, what he described as “the proliferation of public institutions and the new inflection of the term public.” The creation of the Sociedad Abolicionista Español [Spanish Abolitionist Society] in 1864 was one landmark in this process; the Moret Law of 1870 and the abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 were others. At the same time, its Spanish and Cuban defenders were able to preserve slavery on that island, in large part because they too organized. Spain’s public sphere included associations that defended slavery as part of a so-called national economy against the advocates of abolition and free trade. Chris never denied the importance of economic and other structural factors in these distinct outcomes, but he never lost sight of the centrality of human agency. As he put it, “in the last instance, the actions of people throughout the Spanish colonial empire for and against slavery determined that institution’s fate.”39 He was also aware of the complexities of human motivation. Spanish Abolitionists, even Republicans, were not anti-imperialists; rather they saw abolition as a way of strengthening imperial ties. Third, questions of slavery and antislavery were always viewed through the lens of race. Following the Haitian Revolution and the emancipation of slaves in the British Caribbean between 1834 and 1838, Creole elites on the two islands were haunted by “dread and a sense of permanent crisis and conflict.” This led some, like the Cuban José Antonio Saco, to cling to Spain as the “bulwark against race war.” On the other side, while abolitionists had initially conceived of a transatlantic Spanish nation grounded in “whiteness,” the Cuban revolt of 1868 forced them to accept, and the leaders of the First Republic to try and create, a more expansive imagining of the nation; Spain would now become a “transatlantic nation that incorporated all members of colonial society, regardless of race.”

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Fourth, antislavery movements were the product of the interaction between metropolis and colonies; they were a “trans-Atlantic phenomenon.” This approach is reflected in the very structure of the book, as chapters alternate between a focus on Spain and a focus on Cuba and Puerto Rico. Chapter 5 is titled “The Colonial Public Sphere”; its subtitle is “The Making of the Spanish Abolitionist Society, 1861–1868.” The impetus for the Abolitionist Society came from Puerto Rico and members of its Creole elite, who saw abolition and the transition to free labor as the cure for the island’s economic stagnation, played a key role in founding it. The Sociedad Abolicionista Española was, then, “essentially a hybrid form of political organization,” not simply a metropolitan one. As one reviewer put it, he “blurs the distinction” between metropolitan and colonial actors and “forces us to concentrate on the dialectical relationship between agents who moved easily between the Peninsula and the Antilles and events feeding on each other,” such as the domestic “Glorious Revolution” that began in September 1868 and the insurrection in Cuba that began a few weeks later.40 Empire and Antislavery was important to the historiography of nineteenth-century Spain, but its significance was much broader than that. It spoke—and contributed—to the international historiography about abolitionism, to debates connected with historians like Seymour Drescher and David Brion Davis about the relationship between abolitionism and capitalism and abolitionism as a new form of social mobilization. This also meant that Empire and Antislavery was immediately read and valued by people who were not particularly interested in modern Spain per se. For example, in a highly laudatory review in The International History Review, Franklin Knight, the eminent historian of the Caribbean and comparative American slave systems, described Empire and Antislavery as “a most engaging study and praised it for “achiev[ing] three laudable aims. making a signal contribution to the history of slavery and abolition in the Americas . . . provid[ing] a sophisticated context in which to explain the parameters of possibility for both Spanish and Colonial abolitionists” and going “a long way to explain how abolition and emancipation became divorced from race.”41 (This review appeared in the September 2000 issue, an unusually short time between the publication of a book and the publication of a review.) Writing in Slavery and Abolition, Félix V. Matos Rodríguez praised the book’s “sophisticated multi-layered approach” with its focus on “the agency of many groups—political, economic, social” on both sides of the Atlantic.42 It is also telling that Chris’s book was included in review essays on slavery, antislavery, and freedom outside the Hispanic world. Empire and Antislavery was also reviewed

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alongside works by such major figures as Seymour Drescher, Stanley Engerman and Frederick Cooper, and Rebecca Scott in one case,43 and David Eltis and Herbert S. Klein in another.44 This is a kind of recognition and impact few historians of Spain ever achieve. Chris was ahead of his time, a pathbreaker. Empire and Antislavery was a truly transnational and trans-Atlantic book. In the context of the historiography of nineteenth-century Spain this not only means that he saw imperial questions, and slavery in particular, as an integral part of Spain’s history in these central decades of the liberal revolution; it also means that he saw empire and metropolis as acting upon each other reciprocally, with the influences travelling eastwards across the Atlantic being as important as those that travelled in the other direction. Empire and Antislavery was a first word, and a particularly powerful one. As we all know, it was followed by a body of work that was as stimulating as it was prolific. Chris left some unpublished manuscripts at least some of them have been published,45 which means we have yet to hear his last word, but when we do, we will be hearing it far too soon. The historiography of nineteenth-century Spain and the Atlantic world will be much poorer, as will all of us who had the privilege of engaging with him as a colleague and counting him as a friend. Adrian Shubert is University Professor in the Department of History at York University. A historian of Spain in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, he has published articles and books in both English and Spanish. His most recent book is Espartero, el Pacificador (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2018). His current project, Vessel of Globalization: The Many Worlds of the Edwin Fox, 1853–1905, uses the career of one British merchant vessel to write a microhistory of the intense globalization of the years between 1850 and 1914. Professor Shubert has received the prestigious Killam Research Fellowship (Canada) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (USA). He has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and named Commander of the Order of Civil Merit (Comendador de la Orden de Mérito Civil) by the king of Spain.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery. Shubert and José Álvarez Junco, Spanish History since 1808. Jacobson, “Empire and Colonies,” 195–213. Pack, The Deepest Border. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914; Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World; Darwin, After Tamerlane; Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History.

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

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Luengo and Dolmau, “Writing Spanish History in the Global Age,” 425–26. Luengo and Dolmau, 427. Pall Mall Gazette, 5 May 1898. Cited in Varela, “El Desastre de la literatura de la literatura del Desastre,” 13. Fradera and Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery and Antislavery. Schmidt-Nowara, “Imperio y crisis colonial,” 32. Santamaría García and Naranjo Orovio, “El 98 en América.” Fradera, La nación imperial. The abridged, English version is The Imperial Nation. There are four, very brief references to indentured Chinese in SchmidtNowara, Empire and Antislavery. See pages 28, 37, 45 and 104. Evelyn Hu De-Hart, “La Trata Amarilla,” 166–83. “Pedro de Zulueta,” proceedings of the Old Bailey. He immediately published the massive self-justification, The trial of Pedro de Zulueta on a Charge of Slave Trading, (London, 1844), https://archive.org/details/trialpedrodezul 00zulugoog/page/n7. Yun, The Coolie Speaks, 15. Ely, “The Old Cuba Trade,” 476. Pérez de la Riva, Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847–1880, 86. “Carlos Drake y Núñez Del Castillo,” Senado de España; Informe del Excmo. Señor Conde de Vega Mar, 1868. Hu De-Hart, “La Trata Amarilla,” 170. Yun, The Coolie Speaks, 40–41. Young, Alien Nation, 42. Cited in Ng, “The Chinese Commission to Cuba (1874),” 45. “A Contract between Mauricio, a Chinese Settler, and A. R. Ferran and Rafael R. Torices,” James and Ana Melikian Collection. Both Torices and Ferrán were partners in the powerful Empresa de Colonización. Moreton Bay Courier, 31 May 1860. Chinese Passengers Act, 1855. Hu De-Hart, “La Trata Amarilla,” 173. Hu De-Hart, 171. Lai, “Chinese Overseas,” 244. Lai, “Coolie Trade,” 244. For the details of one, see Plowman, “The Voyage of the ‘Coolie’ Ship Kate Hooper.” López, Chinese Cubans, 27. Young, Alien Nation, 53. Regué-Sendrós, “Chinese Migration to Cuba,” 281. Gleijeses, “Clashing over Cuba.” Fradera, Colonias para después de un imperio, 299–322. Cited in Regué-Sendrós, “Chinese Migration,” 282. Cited in Regué-Sendrós, “Chinese Migration,” 290. In addition to the Chinese, coolies were also imported from the Philippines, another Spanish colony, and Vietnam, which Spain, along with France had invaded in 1858. Jacobson, “Empire and Colonies,” 208. Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 173.

48 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Brereton, “Slavery, Antislavery, Freedom,” 100. Knight, Review of Empire and Antislavery. Matos Rodríguez, “Book Review.” Brereton, “Slavery, Antislavery, Freedom,” 97–103. Kraay, “Transatlantic Ties,” 178–95. Schmidt-Nowara, A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire; “Entangled Irishman,” 124–41.

Bibliography “A Contract between Mauricio, a Chinese Settler, and A. R. Ferran and Rafael R. Torices,” 1857. James and Ana Melikian Collection, Arizona State University. Retrieved 3 February 2021, https://repository.asu.edu/items/19666. Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. Brereton, Bridget. “Slavery, Antislavery, Freedom.” NWIG: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 76, no. 1–2 (2002): 97–103. Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. “Carlos Drake y Núñez Del Castillo.” Senado de España, n.d. Retrieved 5 April 2020, http://www.senado.es/web/conocersenado/senadohistoria/senado18 341923/senadores/fichasenador/index.html?id1=3086. Chinese Passengers Act, 1855. Retrieved 3 February 2021, http://oelawhk.lib .hku.hk/items/show/1038. Darwin, John. After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. Ely, Ronald T. “The Old Cuba Trade: Highlights and Case Studies of CubanAmerican Interdependence during the Nineteenth Century.” Business History Review 38, no. 4 (Winter 1964): 456–78. Fradera, Josep M. Colonias para después de un imperio. Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2005. ______. The Imperial Nation. Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. ———. La nación imperial. Derechos, representación y ciudadanía en los imperios de Gran Bretaña, Francia, España y Estados Unidos (1750–1918). Barcelona: Edhasa, 2015. Fradera, Josep M., and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds. Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Gleijeses, Piero. “Clashing over Cuba: The United States, Spain and Britain, 1853–55.” Journal of Latin American Studies (May 2017): 215–41. Hu De-Hart, Evelyn. “La Trata Amarilla: The ‘Yellow Trade’ and the Middle Passage, 1847–1884.” In Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker, 166–83. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

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Informe del Excmo. Señor Conde de Vega Mar, senador del reino, en contestación a los interrogatorios hechos por el Gobierno de S.M. sobre la información de las leyes especiales para las Islas de Cuba y Puerto Rico. Madrid: 1868. Jacobson, Stephen. “Empire and Colonies.” In The History of Modern Spain: Chronologies, Themes, Individuals, edited by Adrian Shubert and José Álvarez Junco, 195–213. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Knight, Franklin. Review of Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874, by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. International History Review 22, no. 3 (September 2000): 652–54. Kraay, Hendrik. “Transatlantic Ties: Recent Works on the Slave Trade, Slavery, and Abolition.” Latin American Research Review 39, no. 2 (2004): 178–95. Lai, Walton Look. “Chinese Overseas: Coolie Trade.” Encyclopedia of Modern China. New York: Scribner, 2009. López, Kathleen. Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Luengo, Jorge, and Pol Dalmau. “Writing Spanish History in the Global Age: Connections and Entanglements in the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of Global History 13, no. 3 (2018): 425–45. Matos Rodríguez, Felix V. “Book Review.” Slavery & Abolition 21 no. 3 (2000): 169–72. Ng, Rudolf. “The Chinese Commission to Cuba (1874).” Transcultural Studies 2 (2014): 39–62. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Pack, Sasha D. The Deepest Border: The Strait of Gibraltar and the Making of the Modern Hispano-African Borderland. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. “Pedro de Zulueta.” Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 23 October 1843. Retrieved 3 February 202,1 https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t184310 23-2895&div=t18431023-2895&terms=Zulueta#highlight. Pérez de la Riva, Juan. Los culíes chinos en Cuba, 1847–1880: contribución al estudio de la inmigración contratada en el Caribe. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2000. Plowman, Robert J. “The Voyage of the ‘Coolie’ Ship Kate Hooper, October 3, 1857–March 26, 1858.” Prologue Magazine 33, no. 2 (summer 2001). Retrieved 3 February 2021, https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/ 2001/summer/coolie-ship-kate-hooper-1.html. Regué-Sendrós, Oriol. “Chinese Migration to Cuba: Racial Legislation and Colonial Rule in the Mid-nineteenth Century Spanish Empire.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 24, no. 2 (2018): 279–292. Santamaría García, Antonio, and Consuelo Naranjo Orovio. “El 98 en América. Últimos resultados y tendencias recientes de la investigación.” Revista de Indias 59, no. 215 (1999): 203–274. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. ———. “Entangled Irishman: George Dawson Flinter and Anglo-Spanish Imperial Rivalry.” In Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500–1830,

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edited by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, 124–41. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. ———. “Imperio y crisis colonial.” In Más se perdió en Cuba: España, 1898 y la crisis de fin de siglo, edited by Juan Pan-Montojo, 31–90. Madrid: Alianza, 1998. ———. A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire: The Diary of Fernando Blanco White’s Flight to Freedom. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2018. Shubert, Adrian, and José Álvarez Junco, eds. The History of Modern Spain: Chronologies, Themes, Individuals. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. ———, eds. Spanish History since 1808. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Varela, José. “El Desastre de la literature de la literature del Desastre”: Intelectuales y nacionalismo. Madrid: Instituto Ortega y Gasset, 1997. Young, Elliot. Alien Nation: Chinese Migration in the Americas from the Coolie Era through World War II. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Yun, Lisa. The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.

Chapter 3

Not Just Spain, Not Just Colonies Writing Transnational Histories of the Nineteenth Century Joshua Goode

å I want to begin a discussion of Chris Schmidt-Nowara’s two books on Spanish colonialism from a decidedly personal perspective. Influential as both books are, what has always struck me about Chris’s work was his effort to bring Spanish historiography to a wider audience and his insistence in demonstrating Spain’s important place within broader, transnational historical topics. My first experience with Chris’s approach came long before he published these two works on history writing and Spanish colonialism. I met him at an annual meeting of what was then the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies in Minneapolis in 1997.1 He was in the audience for a paper I was presenting on the concepts of hispanidad and hispanismo. This paper was my first trepidatious venture away from a topic related to my dissertation research. To add to the moment of standing at the virtual end of a high diving board, I thought I was attempting a new read on these two ideas. I was arguing that one had to read these concepts in relation to what the thinkers and writers who were my subjects were reading, writing, and discussing when they were not necessarily writing about hispanidad and hispanismo. In other words, I wanted to update the traditional readings of these concepts treating them not as discrete, self-contained units of analysis. Rather I suggested one see them as the product of a wide range of ideas floating about in the early twentieth century. I was striving to provide a fuller portrait of Spanish intellectual exchanges between Miguel de Unamuno and Pío Baroja and many others as embedded in a wider frame of reference, as part of a scientific and cultural reading of Spain’s condition that emerged from

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a sense of these authors’ overall worldview. In particular, I asserted one could not read them without knowing what they were reading about hispanidad and hispanismo. As I finished, the floor was opened for the audience to ask questions. The first hand up was Chris’s. Although we had a few mutual friends, I had just met Chris that morning; we had in fact just had our first of many friendly conversations about baseball and football. But, we had not really discussed our scholarly work until then. He had been described to me then as well-read, very smart, and very much engaged by histories of imperialism. I assumed he would agree with my assertion that reading the entirety of a writer’s oeuvre was the only path to understanding the writer and their ideas. After all, I was advocating for reading what Unamuno, Maeztu, and others were reading, and given that much of this reading was coming from authors in former colonies and was in response to the Spanish loss of empire, I figured Chris would at least agree with my approach. Instead, he said quite succinctly that he thought it would have been more profitable to read Unamuno, Maeztu, and some others, “against the grain.” I did not understand then what he meant, and I felt an immediate sense of defensiveness. It sounded too theoretical a suggestion, to read a document for what it did not say rather than for what it did. After rereading Chris’s books on Spanish colonialism for this solemn but celebratory commemoration of his work, I was reminded how much that comment reflected his own approach: not of a theoretical speculation but of a sensitivity to the entirety of the imperial project as it haunted the Spanish imagination in that era. It was that approach, so novel in Chris’s own work, that has continuously spoken to me over the years. He was not sending me to do an exercise in the deconstructive excess that I first surmised. Rather, Chris offered an injunction to see the topic not just from the perspective of the five or six Spanish writers I was discussing or the hermetic and unchanging Spanish historiography that framed my understanding of their work. He was suggesting I consider the worldview of these writers, but a worldview in two senses of the word: not just the explicit and idiosyncratic perspective of the individual, or their particular formulation of hispanidad or hispanismo but also the views they held that were the product of a much wider intellectual world than the one I saw them inhabiting. Yes, read what they read but also reconstruct their intellectual habitat. A worldview requires a very wide lens; it is present not just when a figure was writing explicitly about the idea but also when they were cogitating on all topics. And, here, Chris was suggesting that the empire was always a part of Unamuno’s work as it was of Baroja’s, or any of the

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writers working in that period. Spain was immersed in empire, lost or imagined, faded or recoverable. The diagnosis of the loss of the Spanish overseas empire and the desire to revive it resided in all aspects of their thinking, not just when they explicitly discussed Hispanidad and hispanismo. Social and economic relations were haunted by the empire or the needs of the metropole and the colonies. These hauntings emanated from their surroundings, whether in the foods they ate, the images they saw in the newspaper, or the ideas they discussed. Reading “against the grain” meant unpacking the prejudices and subterranean influences on people’s thoughts. It was a basic approach that Chris brought with him throughout his career. He always wanted historians like us to be conscious of the myriad influences that served to define our subjects’ thinking. Importantly, and in an ongoing testament to Chris’s sensitivity and maturity as a scholar, he applied this approach to his own work. What prejudices, hidden assumptions, and preconceptions define our own approaches, questions, and conclusions? To read against the grain was to read our subjects and ourselves from a variety of vantage points, from a variety of influences and sources. Considering the two works that Chris devoted to Spanish colonialism, first his edited volume produced with John M. Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism (2005), and his subsequent volume, The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (2006), one sees at least three major themes driving Chris’s intellectual project, themes that he was already expressing in his comments to me at the conference in 1997. I must add that these are the themes that leap out at me when I read Chris’s work. They represent my idiosyncratic and self-reflexive understanding of Chris and his work. These themes spring from what I believe to be the impulse to compare across national boundaries, a trait shared among our cohort of Hispanists who wanted to move beyond the internecine battles of Spanish history that defined much of Franco and post-Franco Spain. We strive to include Spain in broader historiographies of Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere. Other scholars might remember or reflect on the influences differently. They might want to add to or subtract from these three themes as they approach Chris’s work. One of the lasting testaments of Chris’s work is the fact that readers can extract from it a variety of historical meanings and historiographical uses. Overall, Chris left a portrait of Spain as a node in a colonial network and his example offered new modes of tracing the contours of this network. In Interpreting Spanish Colonialism and The Conquest of History, Chris demonstrated his first efforts to identify this network. Historio-

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graphically, his desire was 1) to insert and attach a clear role for the colonies and colonialism into our understanding of Spanish/Iberian intellectual and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; 2) to insert Spanish colonialism into the broader historical discourse on colonialism, postcolonialism and nationalism; and, 3) to demonstrate why this reinsertion of Spanish colonialism and colonial history into these larger, transnational historiographies of colonialism, which generally ignored the Spanish case for the better known French, British, and Dutch ones, would help reorient and reinvigorate not just Iberian and Latin American history. Such a widened reading would fill out in new and important ways colonial and postcolonial studies and would force a reconsideration of the White and Black Legends about Spain that pervaded the past and lingered in the present of colonial historiography. In Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, Chris noted (he contributed three separate introductory essays for different sections of the book) that the goal of the volume was to follow the new historiography of empire that marked the work of his teachers, Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, in their Tensions of Empire.2 Their focus had been on empires as networks, interconnected entities that required the study of the ways in which colony and metropole interacted and possessed ongoing links, connections, and history that lingered long after the moment of political independence. In Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, Chris and Nieto-Phillips, wanted to present Spain’s history of colonialism as unique only in that it began and ended earlier than it did for other European nations. But, colonialism’s impact on nationalism and identity, while “peculiar and specific” in each historical context, was not fundamentally different across the panoply of imperialist nations and their colonies.3 What more recent historiography of empire showed for other countries, that the new nationalisms of the late nineteenth century were inflected with imperialism and conquest, and that race and ethnicity underwrote new conceptions of identity in the late nineteenth century, Chris wanted to demonstrate for Spain as well. Spain was neither an outlier nor absent from this broader historiographical reappraisal of colonialism and nationalism; in Spain, these ideas played equivalent roles. As in other European empires, Spanish colonial knowledge “crossed the conventional physical and temporal boundaries created by empire and nation builders.”4 Perhaps the disposition of these early books in Schmidt-Nowara’s career began as mild acts of rebellion against his advisors, or the naturally maturing voice that wanted to insert Spanish colonial history into a less rigid and more inclusive historiographical framework.

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In Interpreting Spanish Colonialism and in The Conquest of History, Schmidt-Nowara was troubled by the fact that this new European historiography of colonialism left out Spain and Spanish colonialism. The nine separate essays that Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips edited—culled as they were from a wide roster of current and important Latin American and Spanish historians—served to confront this absence. Spanish difference in nationalism and colonialism might have seemed obvious: it was supposedly older, historically more complex, defunct before others, unmodern, backward, and rooted in a belief in mestizaje and integration, not segregation and fear of mixture. Schmidt-Nowara demonstrated instead that Spanish colonialism followed the same broad historical lineage as its European and US counterparts. First, he showed nationalist and colonialist rhetoric traversing both time and space in Spain’s former and continuing colonies, from the Philippines to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Argentina, New Mexico, and Spain. “The flow of colonial knowledge was not one-way: Spain and its former colonies were exporters, not just importers.”5 Nor were the origins of this flow bound by Spanish historiographical dating of 1898 as the primary pivot or originary moment of colonial demise. The impact of colonial decline was a fraught topic already well-rehearsed in the Spanish colonial imagination long before 1898. What mattered was that inclusion of Spanish colonialism—a topic that in its historical moment of the mid- to late-nineteenth century and the twentieth century was viewed as delayed, backward, unmodern, and, at the very least, different from other colonialism—would have to do away with the idea of difference and peculiarity in the first place. Suggesting Spanish colonialism upset these paradigms would undo the traditional Spanish historiography of decline and decay after 1898, or 1492, for that matter. It would also undo the larger interpretive frames of colonial historiographies. Backwardness or modernity, ossification versus dynamism, tradition/hierarchy/obedience versus Enlightenment and Reformation ideals were all “tidy dichotomies” that historians had used to differentiate Spanish and Latin American colonial experiences from their northern European counterparts. And these dichotomies were false constructs, legacies of an historical paradigm that now needed revision.6 In fact, they argued, the Spanish colonial enterprise mimicked and modeled other colonial regimes, offering the same “contours,” ambitions, and strategies of regulated economies and civilizing missions for the subject populations as other European powers.7 In addition, the essays in this volume introduced a wider array of people from a larger assemblage of professions participating in the

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Spanish colonial project than the usual cast of intellectuals and political voices who had usually served as characters in this discussion. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips tracked the discourse of nationalism and imperialism across a variety of fields and discourses, from humanist sciences to linguistics, history, and economics. In the end, the essays demonstrated that the results of Spanish colonialism were neither different from nor outliers in the European imperial world. Rather, the same tensions of identity, politics, and nation-building that occupied all colonial contexts were embedded in the Spanish project just as equally. As Cooper and Stoler had written: the continuing challenge is to bring these scholarships together. Focus on the contingencies and contradictions of colonial rule emphasizes that political possibilities do not just lie in grand oppositions but in the interstices of power structures, in the intersection of particular agendas, in the political spaces opened by new and renewed discourses and by subtle shifts in ideological ground.8

Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips responded in agreement to this call for comparison and complexity in understanding the nature of colonial rule. Their sense was that the Spanish case neatly inserted into this more open and fluid model. Spain was not different; the same questions that were operative in other colonial contexts worked just as well in the Spanish context. Schmidt-Nowara noted that what was essential to contemplate was how history is written in each colonial context, what is commemorated, what is forgotten or rejected, and “when and why scholars are sometimes willing to look beyond national borders and why at other times they cleave more closely to nation-building projects.”9 In other words, read against the grain occasionally to ferret out the tensions that produce the ideas. Also, reject the historiographical assumptions that leave certain nation-states out of the discussion. In The Conquest of History, published in 2008, one year after Interpreting Spanish Colonialism and only five years after the conference that produced the first book, Schmidt-Nowara investigated these themes more deeply on his own. He brought the same comparative historiographical apparatus to the discussion, but he expanded the frame of his historical sources to include the work of economists, politicians, anthropologists, intellectuals, poets, and historians, and to include objects like monuments and events like anniversaries and colonial fairs. He showed how the institutionalization of history through academies and archives fueled a writing of the colonial past that allowed not just Spanish nationalists to define the contours of Spain’s national past, but

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it also provided a former colonial audience the same historical tools to distance themselves from Spain. As he had written in Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, Chris wanted to see Spain and Latin America as one large field of analysis, or, to put it another way, he wanted to write truly transnational history. He wanted to move beyond a comparative history of separate lineages and trajectories and offer instead a history of shared symbols and dynamic networks of ideas moving across time and space.10 Everyone on either side of the Spanish Atlantic had the same bag of symbols, histories, prehistories, icons, and casts of victims and conquerors from the past to use to construct nationalism and to differentiate their nations from others. Rather than view these histories as particular and local, the product of specific local circumstances and traditions, Chris presented them as a “single analytic field.”11 Everyone ransacked the past, as Chris wrote, but the tools they used to plunder the past were surprisingly similar.12 Writers turned to the ancient, prehistoric past or they turned to a history of intermixture and transculturation to separate or distinguish the local from the imperial, or to tether the ancient to the modern. Only their conclusions and political purposes differed. Rather than an insistent and stubborn segregation of historical narrative and detail in different national settings, Schmidt-Nowara pointed to a constant interconnection and interpenetration of ideas, a “crucible not a dustbin” of historical understanding and shared ideas.13 Historical writing was never the purely local and particularist phenomenon that we historians assumed it to be. Schmidt-Nowara chose one example of this crucible, where one set of shared imagery was reconfigured and represented differently depending on context. The construction of memorials to Christopher Columbus, which all began to appear around the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s landing and at a moment of colonial unrest, was a good case in point. Examining the monuments dedicated to Colón in various contexts, Spain, the Dominican Republic, or Cuba, and noting the differing chronological context of their construction, Schmidt-Nowara traipsed over all three of the themes that defined much of his work: Spaniards sought to construct a national identity that folded the colonies into the metropolitan historical narrative. But patriotic creoles, despite the frequent collaboration with the colonial regime, always resisted those efforts, either by countering with their own version of Spain’s history in the Caribbean and Pacific or by crafting their own national histories and spaces that excluded Spain altogether. Contesting the commemoration of Columbus proposed by the Spanish state was an important moment in this process, one that

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demonstrated the increasing divide that separated national identity in metropolitan Spain from the patriotic sense of self and nation in las provincias de Ultramar.14

Spanish nationalists were constantly reframing Columbus. The Dominican Creole patriots also redefined him. But, as Chris showed through his appropriation of postcolonial theory from other colonial settings, the myriad depictions of nation in the myriad contexts in which he studied them, were each constituted in relation to each other; one could not have one history of Spain or a history of a former colony without invoking, appropriating, or rejecting the other. Another case in point from The Conquest of History was the turn toward finding prehistoric roots of the contemporary nation. Chris remained focused on the purpose of this turn rather than on its accuracy. Chris clearly outlined how Cuban and Puerto Rican historians and other intellectuals explored the prehistoric roots of their (new or struggling to be free) national histories, they never formally escaped their clear impulse to reflect on their present moment. The present was always defining the contours and subjects of the past: Responding to the retrenchment of Spanish colonialism in the early nineteenth century and to the simultaneous escalation of the African slave trade and plantation slavery, Antillean elites, even while investing in slavery and sugar, working in the colonial bureaucracy, or writing expert treatises on technological innovation in the sugar industry, articulated national origins located in the supposedly simple societies of prehistory.15

This interconnection between colonial positionalities brings us to the last theme that dominated these works. Understanding the peculiarity of Spanish colonialism and national history writing would help put in bolder relief the actual tensions and themes of European colonialism and postcolonialism. Chris wrote of imaginaries that explained why certain intellectuals thought a certain way, made their associations of ideas in conflictive, novel, or unique ways, even if the vocabulary they all used was confusingly common. Mestizaje did not mean the same to the Spanish intellectual as it did to the Puerto Rican nationalist. Here, Chris was an excellent synthesizer: he was by no means the first to show that mestizaje was not a purely unifying idea (Peter Wade and Ada Ferrer had done that already)—but a discourse that was flexible and context driven.16 The Creole elite, the peninsular intellectual, or the anticolonial rebel, all rallied around the concept and discourse of mestizaje in all its complexity.

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The point is not to collapse mestizaje into contemporary theorizations or celebrations of hybridity. Rather it is to suggest that mestizaje, while peculiar and specific is not necessarily incomparable to hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses and lived processes in other colonial and postcolonial societies. Thus, one might emphasize the strategic uses of mestizaje as a form of identity and as an ideological paradigm to make claims about peculiarity, abnormality and incomparability.17

Thus, Spanish colonialism was European colonialism, and postcolonial theory could work in Spain as it had worked elsewhere. Chris would make serendipitous pairings of intellectuals across time and place, finding nuanced similarities even if their subject matter was not exactly the same but the raw or fundamental themes they were discussing were. He paired Raymond Williams with Fernando Ortiz in The Conquest of History to demonstrate that social and economic change had cultural impacts on the historical imaginations of people living amid the transformations. Whether it was the industrial revolution in England or the effects of transformations of production on the plantation and the end of slavery in Cuba, Chris saw that the social theories created and deployed by Williams and Ortiz demonstrated that antinomies framed historical imaginations regardless of the particularities of discrete contexts.18 Informed by Williams’s and Ortiz’s works, the sections that follow will map out patriotic representations of the nation’s past and identity in Cuba and Puerto Rico . . . Primitive liberty versus chattel slavery, the Indian versus the Spaniard and the African, tobacco versus sugar, peasant production versus the plantation, and the colonized versus the colonizer were among the oppositions that informed these representations of the nation and national history.19

In Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, Schmidt-Nowara’s introduction ranged from the work of Serge Gruzinski and Jorge Klor de Alva to Wachtel and Wallon and Stuart Hall’s work on postcoloniality.20 Schmidt-Nowara saw, for example, that former Spanish colonies and the intellectuals resident in them who constructed new national imaginaries were engaging in postcolonial theorizing long before subaltern studies caught up with them in the 1970s and 1980s. Après Hall, Schmidt-Nowara noted that such postcolonial theorizing in their historical moments was being done in the nineteenth century in the Philippines, in Cuba, in Puerto Rico, and elsewhere. Hence, hybridity or the imagined fusing of different groups together to form a national

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entity that accommodated differences rather than silenced them was less a reflection of a reality on the ground as much as it was a political strategy. Hybridity did not always mean there was an actual melting pot. For those celebrating hybridity, the ingredients mattered as much as the mere fact of mixture. And, this strategy, the idea of defining hybridity worked differently and for different purposes in colonial settings, among different colonial intellectuals, in “their inner darkness of exclusion” from European culture, as Peter Hulme had written.21 The Spanish peninsular populations were also overdetermined by myriad colonial forces and constructs. The ideological constructs appeared across fields of discourse and across geographical locations. The constitution of these constructs, the particular ideas that resided in them, differed in time and space depending on local need and social context. What Schmidt-Nowara offered in this volume was a defense not just of a more complicated view of Spanish history but a strong defense of transnational history as opposed to mere comparative history. Transnational history required a knowledge of multiple historiographies and, really what I think lay at the heart of Chris’s work, a desire to bridge these historiographies and connect them, to lose their essentialism and provincialism. [T]he islands, continents, peninsula and archipelago . . . , while unique and exceptional, were not and are not a world apart though for the most, they have formed distinct historiographic traditions. The causes for that apparent isolation lay not only in the neglect by scholars of US and northern European colonialisms but in the active construction of difference, in a variety of ways and for many motives, by scholars of Spain and its former colonies.22

Even more, such contemporary essentialism and provincialism were anachronistic. The thoughts and attitudes of the nineteenth-century historical actors that Chris studied were not formed in an isolated vacuum, so they did not justify or bear out such the sequestered assumptions left behind by earlier scholars. To bridge these historiographies for US, European, Latin America, and Spanish historians, SchmidtNowara showed the mechanisms, the received wisdom we otherwise called historiography, that created these divisions. Ideas traveled, units of analysis were not bounded or caged in solely by national borders. “Colonial knowledge,” that is the shared influence and impact of empire and imperial relations, whether current or in the past, shaped national identities in messy, interconnected ways that historians were charged to dredge up. For Schmidt-Nowara, studying the writing of

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national histories helped deconstruct the historiographical pigeonholes that had calcified in Spanish history and also helped fill out the transnational mapping of colonialism and the tensions of empire. That Spain had been left out of this transnational history of colonialism was one of the lingering effects he hoped to correct. Indeed, the legacies of these historical prejudices remained in Spanish historiography. Schmidt-Nowara demonstrated that even in the most recent and cutting-edge historiography of colonialism, there still lingered the effects of the White and Black Legend, of Prescott’s Paradigm, of viewing Spanish colonialism as something apart, retrograde and unmodern compared to its European counterparts.23 Again, all nationalists ransacked the past in Chris’s words; how was a different matter, and this question formed the very basis of his historical inquiry. What language historians used, what elements they preferred to pull out of bygone eras, what groups of people they wanted to celebrate or demonize, all depended on historical contexts and political purposes. But in the milieu of colonialism, the process was always dialectical, relational, and interactive.24 To see this process in action in his work, read the introduction to The Conquest of History. Chris argued that trying to write about the development of national histories in Spain in the nineteenth century, and assuming that Spain deserved its discourse of failure, denied the role that colonialism played not just in effort to define the postcolonial nation, but also in the development of Spanish nation-building. This work on nineteenth-century efforts to reconcile local interest and historians with Madrid-based state formation invites us to look more seriously at nation building without adumbrating failure. I would take this insight a step further and argue that it also allows us to reconsider the process of empire building. The persistence of colonial rule in the Caribbean and Pacific brought together the disparate regions of metropolitan Spain.25

His conclusion about what compelled figures writing in the nineteenth century to write as transnational actors was just as apt an explanation to understand the impact of scholars of Iberian, Latin American, European, and even US histories of colonialism to make a more comparative, translational approach to colonialism: “the nation was simply not broad enough for some intellectuals to comprehend the array of cultural and economic relations that comprised a people’s society and history.”26 A wider lens would upset the older historiographies and clarify the true complexity of empire and its aftermath.

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Importantly, Chris cautioned that the dynamic of writing about colonialism and the nation relied on archives and knowledges about the people that inhabited the empires. Whether they lived in the metropole or the countryside, or were part of the conquered, enslaved, or the colonialist, colonial archives controlled the interpretive access to the people who actually inhabited this past. Resurrecting the image of Shakespeare’s Caliban, Chris recognized that the core of the imperial project was controlling the image and modes of how the colonized were seen, which lead invariably and ineluctably to “the misinterpretation of the lives and languages of the native [populations].”27 Yet, the struggle to unearth the cultures and lives of those hidden within and by the colonial archive was not always easily won by sensitive historians hoping to find silenced voices “along the grain.” Following again Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, Chris noted that occasionally the colonial patriots hoping to define their own nation by writing its history in contradistinction to their former imperial nation often hid populations as well. As much as the metropolis sought to recreate the colonies either in its own image or in the image it held of the colony, colonial patriots struggled to define a sphere of authentic culture and history protected from what they considered external influences. Thus, the battles over empire and nationality were not limited to direct armed violence. Speaking through the jíbaro, retrieving and interpreting Indian artifacts in the Cuban countryside, or rewriting early Spanish chronicles of the Philippines were efforts to stake out independent national cultures and to debunk metropolitan ambitions to dominate not only the present but also the past . . . patriots were acutely sensitive to the pervasiveness of Spanish colonialism; as they tried to define the boundaries of the nation, they often feared that they were too tenuous and fragile to withstand the burdens of history.28

And here remains one of Chris’s greatest contributions. He remained acutely attuned not just to the pitfalls of asserting truths about his historical actors, but also assuming the present-day day historian was somehow immune to the prejudices born of our own scholarly project. Historians are always susceptible. His sensitivity to his historical subject and to his own historical sensibility remains a model; here he always read against the grain. Reviews of Chris’s works testified to the success he had in scraping away at the historiographical boundaries that had isolated Spain from the larger, critical histories of colonialism written elsewhere. His work

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was positively received by scholars in each of the subfields of history he was hoping to communicate with and to bind together. Historians of Spain, of Latin America, and of colonialism all saw the great value of Schmidt-Nowara’s work as transcending boundaries of historical study. And, they argued, Chris offered a template to do this sort of transecting and connecting. For example, one historian of Spain wrote: “the relationship between the history of the (absolutist) imperial past and the (liberal) imperial present would seem to be a fruitful avenue for future research and one that may shift the debates over nationalism and colonialism in the nineteenth century onto a new terrain.”29 The historians of Spanish colonialism in Latin America celebrated Schmidt-Nowara’s “open dialogue with different historiographies” and wanted his work to be valued for “weaving together of various literatures that had never before been placed in conversation with each other.”30 The Latin Americanist extoled Chris for uniting not just Spain but providing a pathway for uniting all colonial histories together: This book fills a historiographical gap in Latin American intellectual history, which remains a poorly developed field. It connects European, Asian, and Latin American history, which are all too often separated by geographic designations, and provides an important intervention for studies dealing with nineteenth-century nationalism and empire, which have privileged Britain and other European powers to the marginalization of Spain.31

It is difficult to think about the loss of Chris Schmidt-Nowara, our friend and collaborator, and talking about his work seems like thin gruel in the maw of his absence. But, talking about his work is a reminder of his generosity and his inspiration; we can be grateful he left us with so much of his work, and left so many good signposts that we can use to follow his lead. Joshua Goode is an associate professor in the departments of History and Cultural Studies and the director of the Museum Studies Program at Claremont Graduate University. He has recently contributed to Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016) and Spain, The Second World War, and the Holocaust: History and Representation (University of Toronto Press, 2020). He is also the author of Impurity of Blood: Defining Race in Spain, 1870–1930 (Louisiana State University Press, 2009).

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Notes 1. In 2010, the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies changed its name to the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies. 2. Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire. 3. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, 8. 4. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, 5. 5. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, 11. 6. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, 12–13. 7. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, 12. 8. Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire, 18. 9. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, 137. 10. The first step is defining how historiographical traditions form—what interests are served in an historical explanation—in order to understand where the differences and similarities can be identified. “In conceptualizing knowledge of Spanish colonialism and postcolonialism in relationship to a broader history of colonialism and decolonization, this volume does not intend to stand the hierarchy of colonial and postcolonial studies on its head by simplistically claiming that Spain created the template for subsequent conquests and colonial societies.” From Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, 13. 11. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, 4 12. Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History, 13. 13. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, 11. 14. Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History, 55. 15. Schmidt-Nowara, 103. 16. See Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 4; and Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. 17. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, 8 18. Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History, 99–101. 19. Schmidt-Nowara, 103. 20. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, 5–8. 21. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, 8. 22. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, 13 23. Richard Kagan’s essay remains the best introduction to this discussion of the Black Legend and its historiographical impact, see Kagan, “Prescott’s Paradigm,” 423–46. 24. On ransacking the past, again see Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History, 3. 25. Schmidt-Nowara, 8. 26. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, 2. 27. Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History, 11–12. 28. Schmidt-Nowara, 14. 29. Radcliff, “Review,” 546. 30. Tenorio-Trillo, “Review,” 701–2. 31. Childs, “Review,” 795.

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Bibliography Childs, Matt D. Review of The Conquest of History, by Christopher SchmidtNowara. The American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 795. Cooper, Frederick, and Ann Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Ferrer, Ada. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation and Revolution, 1868–1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Kagan, Richard L. “Prescott’s Paradigm: American Historical Scholarship and the Decline of Spain.” American Historical Review 101, no. 2 (1996): 423–46. Radcliff, Pamela. Review of The Conquest of History, by Christopher SchmidtNowara. European Historical Quarterly 39, no. 3 (July 2009): 546. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, and John M. Nieto-Phillips, eds. Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Tenorio-Trillo, Mauricio. Review of The Conquest of History, by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Journal of Modern History 30, no. 3 (September 2008): 701–2. Wade, Peter. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America. London: Pluto Press, 1997.

Chapter 4

“Divergent Reflections” on Colonialism and Nationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic World Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s The Conquest of History Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller

å Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century is a chronicle of the author’s “divergent reflections” on nation-building in Spain and its colonies during the nineteenth century. Demoralized by the early nineteenth-century loss of Spain’s great empire, metropolitan Spaniards compared themselves unfavorably to an ascendant and expansionist Great Britain. Spanish colonial subjects in the Americas in turn puzzled over why they alone had remained subject to an archaic colonial power. In response, both colonizer and colonized embarked on a process of nation formation under the pall of failure and decline. Metropolitans sought to weave a narrative of Spain’s cultural greatness and beneficence. They took credit for the independence of the fledgling Hispanic republics figuring them as grateful children who had been guided through adolescence and into adulthood by beneficent parents. They imagined Spain and la españa ultramarina (overseas Spain) as one nation that, together with Spain’s former colonies in Spanish America, formed a single, united transatlantic Hispanic family. Meanwhile, colonial subjects in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines rejected the suffocating embrace of this hispanismo, convinced that their claims to independence rested on their ability to disrupt metropolitan

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narratives and forge a unique identity distinct from not only Spain but from the Hispanic World as Metropolitan Spaniards were rendering it. Chris’s research brilliantly illustrates how both sides feverishly “ransacked” the past, how metropolitans and colonials alike turned to a shared imperial/colonial archive to build the foundation for very different national narratives, because “imperial history furnished the material for new national histories.” As he eloquently observed, “it was in the worlds created and destroyed by colonialism that metropolitan and colonial historians found the beginnings of nations.”1 This argument was and remains a substantial contribution to Spanish history and historiography. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara proved that the colonies were not only economically, strategically, and administratively important to Spain, but were politically and intellectually significant as well. In particular, Schmidt-Nowara demonstrated that hispanismo was the cornerstone of Spain’s nineteenth-century nationbuilding and not a reaction to Spain’s defeat in its war with the United States of America in 1898. Historians who did not make this connection saw Spain’s nineteenth-century efforts to forge nationalism as half-hearted and a failure.2 In contrast, by reframing Spain’s nation-building project as trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific, SchmidtNowara revealed how Spain in fact mapped the nation onto the empire articulating a broad-based nationalist project that had colonialism at its core.3 The chapters of The Conquest of History are dedicated to exploring the intellectual evolution of nationalism in Spain, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In Chapter 1, “Spain between Decolonizations,” Schmidt-Nowara explored the apparent paradox between the divergent political opinions that Spanish liberals and conservatives held regarding the governance of the colonies, and their agreement on historical representations of Spain as an imperial power. Nineteenth-century liberals and conservatives alike saw no separation between Spain’s colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines and the metropole and understood colonial history as a chapter of national history. Defending Spain against those who propagated the Black Legend of Spanish degeneracy, they proudly celebrated Spanish colonialism as civilizing and humanitarian, and thus, superior to British or French colonialism. Its unique colonialism was not an expression of how Spain acted in the world, it was the essence of Spain itself as a nation. The factions might differ as to whether Spain’s liberal institutions or its Catholicism were responsible for the nation’s colonial greatness, but all agreed that Spain recreated itself overseas.4 One of the crowning moments in this chapter is Chris’s description of the Spanish play “Muerte de Maceo”

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(1898) in which Antonio Maceo, the mixed-race Cuban insurgent general is figured as the ultimate embodiment of the legacies of Spanish colonialism: Maceo’s mixed race and his genius are depicted as evidence of Spain’s culture of inclusion through miscegenation and its success in civilizing “inferior” races. The playwright presents Maceo as distinctly/integrally Spanish. The play is a paradigmatic example of the efforts of Spanish intellectuals to re-envision colony and metropole as one, and to subsume the former into the later. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s revisionist argument about Spanish nationalism was and continues to be historiographically important, but I would argue that his ability to show us the nuances in the colonial response to Spain’s century-long reframing of colonialism is no less so. If, in Chapter 1, Chris charts how Spaniards worked tirelessly to intellectually suture the colonies to the metropole, his second chapter examines how colonial historians worked desperately to distinguish their incipient nations from Spain. The central problematic of the second chapter of The Conquest of History, “Columbus’ remains, Columbus in Chains,” illustrates this struggle over the writing of History. Spanish intellectuals and politicians who organized the quincentenary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas claimed the Admiral for Spain, downplaying the very real tensions and disagreements that existed between Columbus and the Crown. Yet, colonial intellectuals challenged Spanish intellectuals’ revisionist history by making their own physical and conceptual claims to Columbus. The most striking example was the Dominican announcement of the discovery of Columbus’s remains in the cathedral of Santo Domingo rather than the Cathedral of Havana where they were supposed to have been transferred. The “discovery” was threatening because the Spanish state had developed a cult around Columbus in the later nineteenth century. The mistaken location of his internment suggested a troubling carelessness or indifference on Spain’s part with a national hero’s remains. Chapter 3, “The Problem of Prehistory in Puerto Rico and Cuba,” concerns the ways that colonial intellectuals endeavored to break free from the dictates of Spanish nationalism by crafting an autochthonous history rooted in the people who encountered Columbus. Spain’s conception of nation emphasized the humanitarian and civilizing influence of Spain in America, a position that required that the Indian be figured as a barbarian awaiting salvation. Colonial intellectuals endeavored to counter Spain’s narrative by drawing attention to the sophistication of Indigenous ancestors. The absence of native peoples in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the nineteenth century, however, meant that colonial intellectuals did not have to contend with the presence of living communities

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with claims to the land. As Schmidt-Nowara astutely noted, colonial historians enacted exclusions of Black subjects as they embraced the idea of Indigenous ones. Spaniards may have subsumed colonial histories and erased colonial particularities including Indigenous contributions, but colonial historians in Cuba and Puerto Rico were complicit in silencing Black and African histories and in representing colonial societies vis-à-vis their Spanish and Indigenous roots alone. While colonial intellectuals lifted up native societies as peaceful and pastoral communities whose worlds were torn asunder by the arrival of the Europeans, their own deeply embedded racism forced them to concur with Spaniards when it came to people of African descent: it was Spain’s civilizing power that saved Africans.5 Spaniards, they agreed, were responsible for the greatness of figures like Antonio Maceo. Black subjects like Maceo were safe so long as they agreed to subordinate themselves to white rule in the imagined future independent states. The last two chapters of the book highlight not only the ways that colonial historians rejected Spanish interpretations of Spanish American history by creating their own autochthonous counterpoints but also how they also proposed alternative readings of Spanish history. Like Columbus, Bartolomé de Las Casas, the subject of Chapter 4, is a figure over which metropolitan and colonial historians wrestled. Metropolitan historians either ignored Las Casas altogether or depicted him as the best representative of Spain’s humanitarian instincts. Historians in the colonies, on the other hand, used Las Casas’s narrative to draw attention to the torture and violence brought to the “new world” by the Spanish conquistadores. Indeed, Las Casas had long been a powerful symbol of anticolonial defiance used by early and late nineteenthcentury patriots alike.6 However, Schmidt-Nowara focuses the chapter on the particularly complex reading of Las Casas by Cuban intellectual José Antonio Saco. Saco used Las Casas to support not independence but a reform agenda in the colonies. While Saco drew attention to the ways Las Casas denigrated the conquistadores for their abuses of native peoples, he emphasized that the friar still supported the larger colonial enterprise insisting that reform could mitigate the worst instincts of individual barbaric men. Thus, rather than use Las Casas to argue against the system as anticolonial separatists did, Saco used Las Casas to advocate for reform within the empire. In the final chapter of The Conquest of History, “Spain in the Philippines,” Christopher Schmidt-Nowara shows how Filipino intellectual José Rizal also turns Spanish historical narratives on their head, but with a much more radical intention than Saco. Rizal offered a counternarrative of the degeneration of Filipino society caused by the Spanish presence in the

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archipelago that fully discredited Spanish colonialism. Ironically, like Maceo, Rizal was reclaimed (consumed/cannibalized) by metropolitan intellectuals who argued that Rizal’s claims to civilization, like those of Shakespeare’s Caliban, cursed as he was with his master’s tongue, could only be credited to Spain. At the heart of The Conquest of History is the tension between the inherently unstable efforts of Spanish metropolitan intellectuals to shape and control interpretations of the past in order to forge a nineteenthcentury national self that had colonialism at its core, and the subversive and disruptive claims made to and about imperialist-nationalist historical narratives by colonial intellectuals in Spain’s overseas colonies. The book renders a complex dance between colonizer and colonized that leaves the reader with a deeper appreciation of the intellectual intimacies of empire in the nineteenth century and a keener understanding of the evolution of nationalism in Spain, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

The Legacy As this collection of tributes confirms beyond a doubt, Chris’s work has been, and continues to be widely influential for many scholars. The Conquest of History was particularly important to me at a key point in the development of my book, Cuban Émigrés and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (2017), which explores the international dimensions of Cuba’s late nineteenth-century anticolonial struggle against Spain.7 Drawing on Schmidt-Nowara’s brilliant revisionist history of hispanismo wherein he argues that hispanismo is not a product of the disaster (el desastre) of 1898, but rather a long nineteenth-century nationalist project that encompassed the colonies and the metropole, I argue for the expansion of the field of analysis to include Hispanic America as well. Indeed, Spanish statesmen’s conceptualization of Spain as a transatlantic and transpacific nation was inextricably bound up with their interest in stabilizing Spain’s remaining colonies and also in becoming the heart center of a broader Hispanic world. In short, it became clear to me reading The Conquest of History and pursuing my own research that Spanish America must also be included in this analytic field if we are to truly understand the international dimensions of the Hispano-Cuban conflict (1868–1898) and its impact in/on the Hispanic world. Predicated as it was on the “conquest of history,” Spain’s unique conception of nation required the rehabilitation of its image across the Hispanic world in its former and its existing colonies.

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The Hispanic world was a world that Spanish intellectuals intentionally and painstakingly cocreated after 1870 in part to affirm Spain’s greatness and, in part, to combat rising US influence in the Americas. As the United States’ expansionist and imperialist impulses increasingly threatened Spanish American sovereignty, and as the likelihood of Spain’s reconquest of its lost colonies receded over the course of the nineteenth century, Spanish American intellectuals and statesmen increasingly found common cause with Spanish counterparts in a new conflict: one between the so-called Anglo and Latin Races. Hispanismo was the ideology at the core of Spanish nationalism as Christopher Schmidt-Nowara argues, but Spanish nationalism and the Spanish nation existed as part of an imagined and cocreated, race-based supranational community taking shape at the end of the nineteenth century that was the brainchild of intellectuals throughout the Hispanic world. Looking at Spanish American intellectuals’ engagement with hispanismo in the wake of the early nineteenth-century independence movements and throughout the nineteenth century is outside of the scope of Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s work in The Conquest of History, but his insights open the way for a broader intellectual reflections that have the potential to reshape not just the histories of Spain and its nineteenth-century colonies but the nineteenth and early twentiethcentury Hispanic world as a whole. Indeed, I argue in Cuban Émigrés that colonial historians in Cuba and in exile engaged with not only Spain as they envisioned a national future for Cuba but also with their independent sister republics in Spanish America.8 Colonial historians in the Americas had only to look north, south, and east to see examples of what the future might hold if their aspirations for independence were realized. Numerous historians have underscored how the early nineteenthcentury Spanish American revolutions both inspired rebellion and cemented loyalty in Spain’s remaining colonies.9 We now know how in the wake of Haitian and Spanish American independence, Spain not only reinforced its presence in its existing colonies, but Spaniards fleeing war-torn Spanish America relocated to Puerto Rico and Cuba, swelling the islands’ population and lending further constancy to the colonies. However, this internal migration quelled the rebellious spirit of some but not all colonials. Those who doubled down on separatism worked to mount challenges to Spain, entering into collaboration with Spanish American partners eager to dislodge their former colonizer from America for the safety of their fledgling republics.10 Spanish metropolitan historians’ efforts to evolve a nationalist narrative that laid claim to, and rewrote the histories of Spain’s former colonies

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and subsumed those of its existing colonies was deeply threatening to Spanish Americans, colonized or not, especially in the early nineteenth century. While everyday men and women defended their homes and communities with arms, intellectuals worked feverishly to create national histories that would serve to disavow any claims their Spanish counterparts might make that would justify bellicose policies toward the new independent nations. As Spanish American historians and historians in Spain’s remaining American colonies worked to disentangle themselves from Spain and articulate unique national identities across the nineteenth century, there were numerous moments when they became conjoined in their intellectually and politically subversive work. The 1890s in Mexico provides one such time, place, and example. The connection that Cuban revolutionaries in exile living in Mexico forged with like-minded Mexicans between 1895 and 1898, during the final war of Cuban independence, were certainly anchored in a shared and critical understanding of Spanish colonial history and a rejection of Spanish colonialism generally, but that is not all they were about. In addition to sharing the conviction that Spanish colonialism must be eradicated, Cubans and Mexicans as well as other Spanish American sympathizers came together over their rejection of a fundamentally conservative and authoritarian, imperialist pan-Hispanism emanating from the metropolis. As the third of three anticolonial wars erupted in Cuba in 1895, Spaniards demanded solidarity from their Hispanic brothers across the sea. The nature of the demand for pan-Hispanic solidarity and the fact that solidarity required Spanish Americans to turn their backs on the revolutionaries in Cuba with whom they sympathized, revealed to some Spanish Americans that Spain’s hispanismo was merely imperialism in another guise. But to understand the complex responses of both Cuban revolutionary exiles and their Mexican supporters to Spanish nationalist imperialist discourses in the 1890s we need to go back several decades. During the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and other Spanish Americans evolved an America-centric historical and political narrative in response to Spain’s efforts to aggressively reclaim its lost colonies. In a context where Spain actively sought to reconquer territory, Spanish American politicians and intellectuals displayed virulently anti-Hispanist perspectives depicting Spain as culturally backward. In the most extreme cases, they aspired to emulate the United States and other industrializing nations and purify themselves of colonial legacies. In other words, over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, as colonial historians that Christopher Schmidt-Nowara studied in Cuba and Puerto Rico were working to

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develop historical narratives that could undergird a separate nation, newly liberated Spanish American intellectuals were doing the same in an effort to establish the foundation for modern and prosperous nations. From the late 1860s onward, relations between Spain and independent Spanish America began to change from antagonistic to amicable. For example, after decades of hostilities between 1810 and the 1860s an alliance between the Mexican and Spanish states was formed during the presidency of Benito Juárez. The opportunity came as a result of the revolutionary upheaval in Spain ignited by Spain’s Glorious Revolution of 1868. The situation of political instability on the peninsula and the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War in Cuba, as well as the abortive uprising in Puerto Rico made Spanish officials keen to forge solidarities where they could. The Spanish state agreed to forgive Mexico’s foreign debt in exchange, in part, for the country’s loyalty: Mexico promised to stay out of the Cuban conflict. The possibility that Mexico would lend military support to the Cuban rebels was not unthinkable: Benito Juárez had been the first Spanish American statesman to publicly recognize the Cuban insurgents as legitimate belligerents. However, by 1872 he had reversed his position, trading inter-Spanish American solidarity for Mexico’s national interests. This became a position that the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz would inherit when he came to power in 1876. But the turn from transnational solidarity to national interests was paralleled by a move from classic liberalism with its focus on republicanism and democracy, to conservative liberalism with its focus on order and economic progress. By the 1890s, the Díaz administration in Mexico and that of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in Spain shared a fundamental disdain for revolution and popular sovereignty, and they viewed democracy skeptically. This alignment made it easier for the Mexican administration and its politicos to sympathize with Spain’s imperial interests and criticize the Cubans’ revolutionary aspirations. Indeed, Díaz courted the wealthy and influential Spanish immigrant community in Mexico and willingly persecuted Cubans and their sympathizers at the behest of the Spanish minister throughout the 1890s. If Spanish and Mexican statesmen shared an intellectual and political alignment deeply suspicious of revolution, they also agreed that the greatest threat that the “Latin race” faced was an expansionist United States. In the face of the “Yankee menace,” the Cuban insurgency seemed a minor conflict, but by weakening Spain, it offered a critical advantage to the United States, which was desperate to clench Cuba in its grasp. It is no surprise then that the Mexicans who most ferociously defended Cuba and maligned Spain

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were those who also opposed the Díaz regime. The early anti-Porfirian opposition became deeply allied with Cuban revolutionary exiles in Mexico because they recognized that, like the Cubans, they too struggled against a pro-authoritarian conservatism that masqueraded variously as “order and progress” and as “hispanismo.” These individuals saw Spanish and Mexican official rhetoric against the United States as nothing but scare tactics used to conceal their nefarious reactionary and colonialist agendas.11 Cuban revolutionary exiles residing in Mexico recognized quickly that to gain traction they would need to spend a lot of their time countering Spanish propaganda in whatever form or shape it manifested itself. In what amounted to a guerrilla war for Spanish American loyalties, Cubans worked desperately in the press, in assemblies, in theaters and bars, and on street corners to convince Mexicans that they should be in solidarity with insurgent Cuba rather than colonial Spain. Their repeatedly failed efforts to gain the attention of the Díaz administration confirmed that they would receive no formal support from the Mexican state. Gradually Cubans and their Mexican counterparts realized that they faced one common enemy: conservative, anti-republican and antidemocratic regimes. Cuba’s freedom was at stake, but so was the future of republicanism and democracy in Mexico. Scholars have generally noted how the mending of relations between Spain and her former colonies in the 1870s was a death knell for Cubans seeking Spanish American support for their independence cause and so it was at the official level.12 But the lens of traditional diplomatic history has obscured a vibrant solidarity movement that evolved below the level of official politics. Cubans and Spanish Americans across the continent stood together against the rising tide of conservatism that accompanied the period of export-driven exploitative economics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The reconceptualization of the Cuban independence movement as part of a broader story of resistance against late nineteenth-century political conservatism and economic exploitation has been hard for scholars to see because they have remained focused on Cuba and Spain. Most Cubanists have tended to focus closely on dynamics as they evolved on the ground in Cuba during the wars, ignoring a wider Spanish American frame.13 Indeed, most scholars see the Cuban independence movement as entirely separate from the independence movements that unfolded during the Age of Revolution even though the protagonists themselves endlessly spoke of their struggle as a continuation of the early nineteenth-century wars of liberation.14 However, by consigning Cuba to a separate box and isolating it from Spanish America, scholars miss

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a critical opportunity. I suggest that it is not only important for us to recognize how the Cuban independence movement drew critical inspiration from the Spanish American past, but also how it formed part of a broader late nineteenth-century pro-republican, liberal, democratic, and sometimes antiracist movement in Spanish America.15 In sum, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s revelation that hispanismo was not a twentieth-century creation but rather the very bedrock of Spanish nationalism during the nineteenth century made it possible for me to see nineteenth-century hispanismo as an imperialist ideology that became a key point of contact and conflict between Cubans and Spanish Americans during the late nineteenth century. It is for this reason that I advocate studying Cuban independence not only in an extended Age of Revolutions context, but in the context of the late nineteenth-century rise of conservative liberalism, authoritarianism, and its accompanying ideology of hispanismo. In this context, Cuba’s struggle against Spain is as much about the protection and defense of liberal, republican, and democratic traditions that were perceived to be under threat in newly consolidating, conservative, and modernizing nation-states as it was about liberation from colonial rule. But Christopher Schmidt-Nowara was careful not to fall into the trap laid by his most radical colonial informants. Taking a careful look at figures like José Antonio Saco, Schmidt-Nowara recognized that rejections of imperialist hispanismo didn’t always mean wholesale rejection of Spain, especially in Cuba and Puerto Rico. Neither was this rejection total in the minds of Spanish American critics of Spanish colonialism. As Schmidt-Nowara boldly and insightfully notes, for example, the Cuban insurgent rhetoric of raceless nation was not unlike that of certain Spanish intellectuals who figured Spain as a mixedrace nation and used this idea to draw the peninsula and the colonies together conceptually. Certainly the Cuban insurgent rhetoric was a response to the efforts of Spaniards to portray the revolutionaries as mounting a race war between Blacks and whites. But, following Schmidt-Nowara’s logic, the Spaniards accusing the Cubans of race war might also be seen as defending the integrity of their own “raceless nation.”16 In other words, even Cuban insurgents’ distinctive claim to national uniqueness as a raceless nation was appropriated by Spanish intellectuals who noted that Spain, a nation and a people with a long history of race mixing, was ultimately responsible for Cuba’s racially mixed population. Eschewing simple explanations, Schmidt-Nowara invites us to dive headlong into the complexities of nineteenth-century Spanish and

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Spanish colonial intellectual and political history. The result is a rich and complicated engagement with Spain, Spanish history, and hispanismo. While there were Cubans and Spanish Americans who in the 1890s vehemently rejected everything Spanish and positioned themselves as pan-Americanists, it was much more common to see fitful engagements with hispanismo and efforts to redefine elements of the ideology in more or less radical ways. For example, some Cubans argued that if Spain took steps to liberate Cuba, Cubans would be indebted to Spain, and Spain and Spanish America could finally come to constitute one united Hispanic family. This argument was a radical rereading of the foundations of Spain’s hispanista ideology, which made the continuation of Spanish colonialism key to the future of the Hispanic world. Others argued that the liberation of Cuba would have a salutary effect on Spain by helping the state shed its crippling imperial habits and desires and ignite a revolution that would ultimately restore the beleaguered Spanish republic. In other words, the colony would save the metropole. A couple of examples of this line of thinking from Mexico stand out. The first example is a debate in the Mexican press over the Cuban question in 1897. The debaters were two Mexican intellectuals. At first glance, it seemed that they were discussing the merits of Cuban independence and the responsibility of Mexico toward Cuba in the struggle. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that what was at the heart of the debate was the relationship between Spain and Spanish America—in other words hispanismo. In fact, as the debate raged, it came to focus on one central question: was it possible for Spanish Americans to “shed” their Spanish traits referred to by one debater as “superorganic characteristics”?17 The author who defended Cuba’s right to independence did so on the basis that Cubans had already shed these characteristics due to a half century of trade-based and cultural connections with the more “civilized” United States. Rejecting this argument outright, his Hispanist opponent insisted that this was impossible and that [white] Cubans due to said “superorganic characteristics” would always be Spaniards. The defender of Spain in the debate posited a zero-sum game between the Hispanic and Anglo races and painted Cubans who wished to separate from the Spanish family as traitors to the race. Was Cuba’s fate of such great importance to Mexico that these two Mexican intellectuals should come to verbal blows over it? It was. At stake for the Hispanist was the future of the Hispanic world and hispanismo as a unifying ideology that might serve as a bulwark against an Anglo influence from the north. For the Amer-

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icanist supporter of Cuban insurgency, however, it was Mexico’s future as a member of the community of modern nations that was in jeopardy. Assuring this future would require that Spanish America shed its Spanish colonial legacies and throw its support behind any remaining colonies who sought to do so in the present. It was Spanish America that would pave the path to modernization, not Spain. The second example is a political cartoon in the Mexican anti-Porfirian newspaper El Hijo del Ahuizote. Cuban revolutionary leaders Antonio Maceo, Máximo Gómez, and Calixto Garcia appear together in a forge beating the Spanish crown, the symbol of royal authority in Cuba, into a new shape. Uncle Sam is in the background working the bellows fanning the flames of revolution. There are two posters in the foreground that are identified as models: one an image of the “república cubana” and the other the “república Española.” Notice the decision not to figure the United States as a model here even as Uncle Sam is acknowledged as playing a background role supporting the Cuban revolution. Equally significant is the fact that the Spanish republic does figure as inspiration for the revolutionaries. In this context, the reshaping of the Spanish crown is a not-so-subtle reminder that the liberation of Cuba has the power to help Spain recover her lost republican self.18 The position of the cartoonist and the paper is more subtle and nuanced than that of the Americanist debater in the 1897 debate. That debater was deeply anti-Hispanist, whereas the cartoonist illustrating for the Hijo del Ahuizote captured the complexity of pro-Cuban independence advocates’ perspectives on Spain, Cuba and the future of the Hispanic world. The cartoon, and especially the image of Maceo hammering at the crown with the Spanish republic looming in the foreground, recalls “Muerte de Maceo,” the Spanish play that Christopher Schmidt-Nowara described in The Conquest of History. In this image, as in the play, Maceo is rendered as fully within a Spanish tradition and is claimed for Spain. It is possible to argue that the cartoon, although anti-Hispanist, claims Maceo for Spain even more fully than the play as it depicts him fighting not only to rebuild Cuba but Spain as well. Ultimately, the problem was Spanish colonial culture and imperial habits, not Spain itself. The cartoonist seems to hold out hope that revolution in Cuba could ignite revolution in Spain.19 In Chris’s examples as well as mine we find a richly complicated story of domination, resistance, and engagement that is anything but straightforward. We are still too tempted by the lure of heroes and villains. But Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s historical subjects, generously painted as they are in their full complexity, are both and neither.

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Postscript I first met Christopher Schmidt-Nowara through my advisors at Berkeley when I was in the early stages of conceptualizing a dissertation on nineteenth-century Cuban history and desperately in need of guidance. I had done significant research but was looking to make sense of early patterns and getting a bit lost in the process. That was in 2004. But the day I remember most clearly is a grey and cloudy Friday afternoon some years later in 2007. I was standing on the steps of the New York Public Library with a copy of The Conquest of History in hand nervously waiting for Chris to emerge. I planned to ask him to sign my book and was searching for the least awkward way to articulate my request when he arrived. The Conquest of History had been so influential to me and I wanted him to know that. I just couldn’t find the right words to express myself. Chris sensed this and he smiled. I extended the book and a pen, and he took both. Without a word, he started writing. As I stood there watching him and anticipating what he would say, I thought about how much I had changed as a scholar and what a large role he played in that change. The countless intellectual exchanges, the recommendation letters written, the drafts of conference papers, articles, and dissertation chapters selflessly read all flited across my mind as I waited. I wanted him to know how thankful I was. He handed me back the book still smiling. To my surprise, the dedication was not a humble wish that his book might make a contribution to my intellectual evolution, but rather an earnest statement of his certainly that my future work would shape his: “For Dalia, with fond memories and anticipation for the work that will change how I look at Spain and Cuba, un abrazo, Chris.” One of my greatest regrets is that I was never able to place a copy of my finished book in his hands. Had Chris been able to read the work I would produce, one that he was so confident would be capable of changing the way that he looked at Spain, he would have found something more than vaguely familiar. As I returned to my copy of The Conquest of History and to Chris’s inscription while writing this piece, I found myself wondering if what I had read in those words was not only an affirmation of his confidence in me but rather an invitation to continue to engage with the very work he placed in my hands with his customary wry smile on the steps of the NYPL that grey day in November. Because if there was something Chris valued deeply it was the collective life of the mind, the backand-forth exchanges, the unearthing of clues and the making sense of them together—in short, the cocreation of history with trusted and

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esteemed colleagues near and far. His contributions echo through the works collected in this volume and those of all who shared in his quest to understand the history of Spain and its colonies. While heartbroken that we could not continue this conversation in person, I take solace in returning to his written words as ongoing inspiration for a dialogue that continues in the pages of my work and in those of so many more scholars deeply indebted to his support, insight, and elegant prose. Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller is the author of Cuban Émigrés and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World (UNC Press, 2017), which resituates the Cuban Independence movement in a “Gulf World” rather than a US imperial framework. Her appraisal of the potential of the “Gulf World” for reconsidering US, Mexican, and Cuban history broadly can be found in “The Gulf World and Other Frameworks” in The American Historian (2018). Notes 1. Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History, 10. 2. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s work is a direct engagement with that of Carolyn Boyd, Carlos Serrano, José Álvarez Junco, and Stephen Jacobson among others. 3. Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History, 3, 19. 4. Schmidt-Nowara, 41. 5. Schmidt-Nowara, 129. 6. Schmidt-Nowara, 135. 7. Muller, Cuban Émigrés and Independence. 8. Muller, 132–67. 9. The historiography on this subject is vast but these are a few key texts: Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic; Rodriguez O., The Independence of Spanish America; Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism; Eastman and Sobrevilla Perea, The Rise of Constitutional Government; Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba; Sartorius, Ever-Faithful; Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror; Eller, We Dream Together. 10. For example, collaboration between Cuban and Mexicans to invade and liberate Cuba in la Conspiración Aguila Negra. 11. Muller, Cuban Émigrés and Independence, 222–30. 12. Guerra Vilaboy, Los gobiernos hispanoamericanos y la Guerra del 98; Guerra Vilaboy and Santana, Benito Juárez y Cuba; Pulido Llano, Desde Cuba; Morales Pérez, Espacios en Disputa; Muñoz Mata, Geopolítica, seguridad nacional y política exterior and Mar Adentro. 13. The historiography on this topic is robust: Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba; Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba; Guerra, The Myth of José Martí, among others.

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14. The clearest evidence of this is the dearth of studies that treat Cuban independence and Spanish American independence in the same text. Textbooks generally separate them treating Cuban independence in relation only to US imperialism. 15. There were also anarchist strains within the Cuban revolutionary movement present in exile, and anarchist solidarities also formed between Cubans and Spanish American counterparts although this is an underdeveloped area of scholarship. See: Casanovas, Bread or Bullets!; Shaffer, Anarchist Cuba; Shaffer and Lafourcade, In Defiance of Boundaries; Gómez, “Cubans and the Caribbean South.” 16. Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History, 44. 17. Muller, Cuban Émigrés and Independence, 195–207. 18. This is not an entirely novel perspective as Spanish liberals and republicans saw the same revolutionary potential in the early nineteenth-century revolutions in the Americas, which they hoped would ignite change in Spain. See Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History, 29. 19. El Hijo del Ahuizote, 27 September 1896.

Bibliography Adelman, Jeremy. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Casanovas, Joan. Bread or Bullets!: Urban Labor and Spanish Colonialism in Cuba, 1850–1898. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. Childs, Matthew D. The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009. Eastman, Scott, and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea. The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. Eller, Anne. We Dream Together: Dominican Republic, Haiti and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Ferrer, Ada. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. ———. Insurgent Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1999. Gómez, Andrew. “Cubans and the Caribbean South: Race, Labor and Cuban Identity in Southern Florida, 1868–1928.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2015. Guerra, Lillian. The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Guerra Vilaboy, Sergio. Los gobiernos hispanoamericanos y la Guerra del 1898. Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, servicio de publicaciónes, 2000. Guerra Vilaboy, Sergio, and Adalberto Santana. Benito Juárez y Cuba. Puebla: Secretaría de Cultura, 2007. Morales Pérez, Salvador. Espacios en Disputa: México y la Independencia de Cuba. Centro de Investigación Científica “Ing. Jorge L. Tamayo”: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 1998.

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Muller, Dalia Antonia Caraballo. Cuban Émigrés and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Muñoz Mata, Laura. Geopolítica, seguridad nacional y política exterior: México y el Caribe en el siglo XIX. México, DF: Instituto Mora, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, 2001. ———. Mar Adentro: Espacios y relaciones en la frontera México-Caribe. México, DF: Instituto Mora, 2008. Pulido Llano, Gabriela. Desde Cuba: escenas de la diplomacia porfiriasta 1887– 1901. México: Instituto Mora, 2000. Rodriguez O., Jaime E. The Independence of Spanish America. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Sartorius, David. Ever-Faithful: Race, Loyalty and the Ends of Empire in Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2006. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, and John M. Nieto-Phillips. Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations and Legends. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Scott, Rebecca J. Slave Emancipation in Cuba. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Shaffer, Kerwin R. Anarchist Cuba: Countercultural Politics in the Early Twentieth Century. Gainesville: University of Florida, 2005. Shaffer, Kerwin R., and Geoffroy Lafourcade. In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015.

Chapter 5

Bonds of Affection? The Catholic Church and Slavery in New Spain Emily Berquist Soule

å In September of 2016, the president of Georgetown University offered a public apology for the campus’s formal involvement in slavery since its founding in 1789. His statement centered on the 1838 sale of 272 men, women, and children that garnered the Jesuit brothers of the university half a million dollars—a sum roughly equivalent to 3.3 million dollars today. Although in recent years, universities such as Brown and scholars like Craig Wilder have brought increased attention to the troubling ties that bind higher education and slavery in the United States, the Georgetown admission exemplifies an even deeper entanglement of slavery in North America—its long-lasting ties to religious institutions, especially the Catholic Church. Georgetown is a Catholic, Jesuit university, and its President John DeGioia has specifically framed its attempt to apologize for the wrongs of the past “within the framework of the Catholic tradition.” Although they have yet to be discussed in such frank terms, these links between the Catholic Church and slavery were even more extensive in the Spanish territories of colonial North America, and South America as well.1 Scholars have long been interested in how Catholicism shaped the lives of slaves in Spanish America. In 1947, Frank Tannenbaum famously compared slavery in North and South America, concluding that slavery was “better” in Catholic Latin America because slaves in Spanish and Portuguese territory had more opportunities for manumission, a factor that he decided was “strongly influenced by the Church.” Theology mattered here: in the eyes of the Catholic God, Tannenbaum contended, slave and master were the same. Furthermore, the Church strongly exhorted masters to bring their African slaves to Mass “to

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learn the doctrine and participate in communion.” He also pointed out that most slaves were baptized in Africa before being boarded onto the ships that would carry them through the Middle Passage. This “gave the slave’s family a moral and religious character unknown in other American slave systems,” he argued. On Latin America’s many plantations owned by religious orders, Tannenbaum concluded, slaves were “especially well treated and protected, their moral and religious training was looked after, and they were almost never sold.”2 More than fifty years later, Tannenbaum’s assertions about what made slavery “better” in Latin America have been largely overturned. As Christopher Schmidt-Nowara wrote in Law and History Review, Tannenbaum promoted a “totalizing vision” that homogenized slavery and abolition across time and space, overlooking the very real connections that slaves made with other slave communities outside of their own “American” or “Spanish American” contexts.3 And there are also the facts: we now know that the Catholic Church was one of the largest slaveholding institutions in colonial Spanish America. Scholars recognize that despite official prescriptions for masters to bring slaves into the Catholic religious environment, very few did so in a substantive way. Perhaps most telling is that the Catholic Church actually lacked a defined program for evangelizing slaves, even though it cited African captives’ conversion to Catholicism as a central validation for the slave trade. Presently in the United States, scholars like Herman Bennett, Sherwin Bryant, and Nicole von Germeten are enriching our understanding of how slaves participated in Catholic traditions and rituals as a way to maintain a semblance of cultural autonomy and self-determination. Since the 2003 publication of his first book, Africans in Colonial Mexico, Bennett has shed new light on the complex relationship of Afro-Mexican slaves to Catholicism and the Church. He argues that in the cities of colonial New Spain in particular, “Christianity, rather than race or slavery, provided the cultural contours of blackness.” His work shows how everyday practices of Catholicism became essential opportunities for “persons of African descent . . . to shape their lives in a manner meaningful to them,” because “Catholicism enabled both blacks and mulattos to achieve a modicum of personal autonomy.”4 Bennett’s scholarship stands at the center of a veritable renaissance in understanding how slaves participated in, and gained agency from, their Catholic practices. He argued in his 2009 Colonial Blackness that choosing a partner for Catholic marriage became a way for African slaves who had been ripped from their homelands to forge social and cultural ties with their new communities in Mexico. Selecting godparents served a similar purpose for new generations. At the center of

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these relationships among slaves, and between slaves and the Catholic Church, stands affection: kindness, love, friendship, and respect. As Bennett argues, the context of Catholic sacraments allowed slaves a modest amount of control over their marriage and the future of their children—a rare opportunity for those held as human chattel. In this context, it is clear that the Catholic religion confirmed, produced, and honored relationships of affection and love in the lives of slaves. Another place we can find religious affections among slaves in colonial New Spain are the religious brotherhoods, or confraternities, that African slaves and free people of color formed throughout colonial Spanish America. Confraternity members paid fees in order to participate in the saint’s holiday that their group celebrated. The festivities typically included parades, feasts, and the decoration and display of religious images. In addition to the social outlet the confraternities offered the enslaved, they also brought a most important assurance—the combined funds of the brotherhood would pay for a funeral mass and proper Catholic burial for members, something that was typically otherwise inaccessible to slaves. Nicole von Germeten has argued that the existence of African confraternities in colonial New Spain proves that slaves and their descendants were not always opposed to participation in Catholic traditions—in some instances, they freely accepted Catholicism and made it their own. The confraternities provided them with officially sanctioned social outlets and gave them a chance to cultivate an Afro-Mexican version of what specialists in the history of colonial Spanish American Catholicism refer to as “Baroque piety”—the sensedriven mode of worship in which Catholics were meant to be overwhelmed by the miraculous sights, sounds, and smells of churches, Cathedrals, and religious festivals.5 Von Germeten argues that AfroMexican baroque piety most notably celebrated humility through public self-flagellation—a paradoxical practice for those who met at-will punishment from slave owners but then created their own carnivallike inversion of the social order by causing their own pain as a way to honor God.6 In this context, we can locate multiple “religious affections”: the social ties between the confraternity members, and those more limited affections the Spanish and Creole population displayed when they permitted the confraternities to proceed with their public activities. But most important in this context is the mystical affection between the worshipper and the Catholic God, a sentiment that was heightened by both the public nature of this devotion and the very real corporeal pain it caused. In these contexts, Afro-Mexican religious affections are largely based on the relative degree of freedom individuals and groups were able to

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experience during public Catholic rituals. Choosing partners and godparents, or affiliating with and publicly performing religious worship as part of a larger group of African-descended peoples, was, of course, not the norm in the daily lives of slaves. While it is certainly true as Bennett argues, “by insisting on their rights as Christians, slaves circumscribed the masters’ authority to treat them in any way they saw fit,”7 this chapter will instead focus on the other side of the bonds between Afro-Mexican slaves and the Catholic Church. If we approach their relationship looking not at religious practices but instead situating the Catholic Church as one of the central institutions that shaped policies toward slaves and slavery in colonial New Spain, can we still find anything resembling affection, kindness, generosity, or love?

Church Law and Slavery The relationship between institutional Catholicism and slavery reaches back to the beginnings of recorded history. Slavery appears in multiple contexts in the Bible—the enslavement of the Israelites, in particular, features in the Old Testament. While the Israelites were not subject to the chattel slavery that would have deemed them property instead of people, theirs was not the only form of captivity included in scripture. According to the Bible, non-Hebrew slaves faced harsher restrictions: foreign slave children inherited slave status from their parents; foreign slaves could be captured in war; and foreign slaves could be bought and sold like property.8 At the same time, the New Testament asserts that baptized Christians are equal in the eyes of Christ, and all have the same opportunity to be saved from eternal condemnation. Yet this spiritual similarity did not mark any parity in temporal life. Even though all men were spiritually equal, in life on earth some were inevitably destined to be subjugated and enslaved. Early Christian thinking further likened the master-slave relationship to that between God and the faithful. By obeying his master, the slave honored God. Although the master’s responsibilities to his slave were nowhere near so encompassing, scripture did recommend that masters remember slaves were their brothers—however degraded.9 For centuries, the ecclesiastical and secular leaders of Latin Christendom had little reason to question the institution of slavery. But as Iberian and Mediterranean peoples ventured to the Canary Islands in the fourteenth century, they encountered men and women who were unrecognized in classical texts and who had no known ties to the world’s great Abrahamic religions. To the Europeans, the native Ca-

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nary Islanders’ dark skin, unintelligible languages, and foreign cultures marked them as definitive outsiders. When the mythical promises of gold that had originally lured the Europeans to the islands failed to materialize, they compensated by developing a trade in the next best thing—human slaves.10 But in order to do so “legitimately,” they had to perform a discursive trick of Canon law. This was because throughout medieval Christian Europe, the prevailing standards for conquering and possessing foreign lands were derived from the Canonical tradition of Pope Innocent IV (1243–1254). This contended that the laws of nations were secular, so the peoples of foreign nations were entitled to exist under their own rules of law, and Christians did not have a universal right to dispossess infidels of their own territory. Spiritually, however, human beings were subject to the rule of Jesus Christ, even if they were not members of the Church. The Pope claimed spiritual jurisdiction over all humans, who were consequently divided up into two groups: those Christians who were already part of the Church, and everyone else who resided outside of it, classified as extra ecclesiam. As religious infidels, the extra ecclesiam were legally subject to Holy War and enslavement—if they violated natural law (which by deductive reasoning, they could not do in their own homelands). This meant that the Catholic Church did not sanction invading the territory of foreign peoples to enslave them.11 Yet the Church was an important partner in the Age of Iberian Expansion and the early slave trade in the Canary Islands, and it needed canonical justification for those endeavors. This came in 1403 with the papal bull Apostalatus officium, which elevated expeditions to conquer foreign peoples from mere tactical campaigns to religious crusades. It declared that instead of simply being extra ecclesiam, or outsiders to Christianity, non-Christian foreign peoples were now classified as infidel heretics, and fighting against them became a religious war, like that the Christians were fighting against the Muslims in the battles of the Reconquista. And just like in Holy War against the Muslim invaders, combatants against Christianity in the Canaries could be rightfully captured and enslaved, as theoretically they would benefit from learning Catholicism from their captors.12 This Canon law precedent legitimizing enslavement as part of conquest would influence the development of colonization and subjugation throughout the Iberian empires in America, and it would be employed most markedly in Catholic and Iberian policies toward African peoples. Initially, the Spanish had gone to the Canary Islands for gold, but they stayed for the slaves. Soon it became evident that the Canaries had an even greater value: with portions of their territory just over

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sixty miles from the African coast, they were an ideal launching site for expeditions to mainland Africa. From the Canaries’ sandy shores, the Castilians launched journeys to locate the fabled gold trade of the North African Maghreb. But quickly their Portuguese competitors became dominant in the region, expanding their power even more as they explored down the African coast. By 1450, the most important sector of Portuguese trade in Africa was slaves, and the Portuguese soon earned the unsavory distinction of being the leading slave traders in Europe.13 The Spanish nipped at their heels, trying desperately to gain a stake in the lucrative slave commerce. To keep them at bay, the Portuguese turned to the papacy for legitimation of their dominance in Africa. Romanus pontifex (1455) was the result. It confirmed the Portuguese rights of pillage, plunder, and taking prisoners in Africa, “rights” that the papacy had first pronounced in 1436. More importantly, Romanus pontifex granted Portugal the exclusive right to conquer and enslave in Guinea, as sub-Saharan Africa was frequently called at that time.14 The papal bull ordered the Portuguese to “bring into the bosom of faith the perfidious enemies [of God, including] the Saracens [Muslims] and all other infidels.” Even though the vast majority of Africa’s sub-Saharan peoples were not Muslim, the papacy and the Iberian monarchs found it convenient to classify them as such. By transforming all of Africa’s inhabitants into Islamic infidels and heretics, the papacy could sanction European “just war” against them—and, of course, enslave them in the process. The Portuguese had already succeeded in converting “a large number” of enslaved Africans to Christianity, the bull read, and “if such progress be continued with them, either those peoples will be converted to the faith or at least the souls of many of them will be gained for Christ.”15 This was a religious justification for war and slavery. As such, it was not novel: throughout the Reconquista, the papacy had used similar logic to endorse wars over territory held by groups who were at religious and cultural odds. But for the first time, Romanus pontifex expanded the religious rhetoric of conquest to cover military actions against gentiles or pagans who had not yet been exposed to Catholicism, and thereby could not be classified as “heretics” or “infidels” who had willingly rejected it. Romanus pontifex further contains the first clear statement of the idea that Africans would actually benefit from being enslaved: it stipulated that when working for Christian masters, African slaves would be brought “into the bosom of faith” and have the opportunity to become Christians themselves. Herein we see the first dubious manifestation of the connection between “affection” and slavery in Catholic doctrine. Romanus pontifex transformed the Portu-

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guese search for African slaves into an act of charity and piety. Enslaving the Africans helped them, the Church argued, by introducing them to Christianity and Catholicism. It was a party line that the Iberian powers would continue to use well into the nineteenth century. For instance, in the text of the 1814 treaty with the British that purported to “end” the slave trade to Spanish America, Spanish King Ferdinand VII wrote that instead of being a blight on African society, the transatlantic slave trade had introduced civilization to Africa, bringing Africans “the incomparable benefit of being instructed in the knowledge of the True God.”16 This is certainly far from “affection,” “love,” “kindness,” or any related concept in modern conceptions—and undoubtedly the victims of the slave trade did not see it as such either.

Slaveholding Interests of the Spanish Catholic Church in North America From New Spain in 1553, Viceroy Luís de Velasco publicly expressed concern that there were too many people of African descent in Mexico—estimates suggest that by 1570, 36,500 African slaves had been imported to the viceroyalty via official channels alone.17 Prior to 1640, New Spain was the second most frequent New World destination for African slaves.18 Throughout the seventeenth century, the viceroyalty was home to Spanish America’s second largest population of African slaves, and it had the largest population of free people of color.19 At the Jesuit hacienda of Santa Lucia, outside Mexico City, slaves were inventoried along with livestock—a disturbing yet logical mode of accounting since they were purchased (and treated) much in the same fashion. Even the Jesuit colegios of Spanish America purchased slaves—Santa Lucia College in Mexico City, for instance, recorded no fewer than five hundred transactions purchasing or selling slaves during the seventeenth century.20 Jesuits used their slaves in multiple contexts—in addition to performing agricultural labor, they served in domestic capacities, attending to the needs and desires of both the Jesuit brothers and the elite young men who boarded at their schools.21 Although the Jesuits were not the only religious order to own slaves for personal service and agricultural labor, Jesuit records contain some of the most complete data on the Church’s role in perpetuating the institution of slavery. Jesuits owned and managed their own properties, rather than renting them out, so they kept good records. These tell us that in general, Jesuit plantations in Spanish America were so financially successful that by the year of the order’s expulsion in 1767, the

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value of the ninety large estates the order owned in New Spain alone totaled approximately 8,500,000 pesos. Typically, estates were linked to particular Jesuit secondary schools, with each colegio being funded by several agricultural properties.22 On most Jesuit estates, Afro-Mexican slaves labored alongside forced Indian laborers and free contract workers. For slaves on sugar estates, the workday began at 4:30 a.m. in the winter and 5:15 in the summer. They worked until sundown, although those who manned the sugar mills had longer workdays. Sundays were a day of “rest,” with only one hour of work allowed.23 In broad terms colored by popular history and even Hollywood, the Jesuits are often recognized for their relative kindness—affection, one might say—toward the subjugated peoples they purported to “help,” both on their missions for Native Americans and on their slave plantations as well, where the argument is necessarily more difficult to sustain. While by contemporary standards characterizing one variant of slavery as “better” or a certain group of slave owners as “kinder” borders on the offensive, there are some aspects of slave life on Jesuit plantations that appear to have been preferable to enslavement by others outside the order. Many of these small “affections” the Jesuits showed to the slaves—or at least recorded on paper—were based on their belief in the importance of family life on the estates. Jesuit records suggest that on many of their properties, slaves lived in family units, occupying their own small huts. The order had official instructions to keep families together “whenever possible,” largely by avoiding selling off family members separately. However, one scholar of Jesuit slaveholding in Mexico has confirmed that this small “kindness” was applied most often to spouses—once they came of age, children were often transferred to other Jesuit estates or sold for profit.24 Much of what we know today about how Jesuit estates in colonial Spanish America intended to manage their slaves comes from the Instructions to the Jesuit Brothers Administering Haciendas, a manuscript document from eighteenth-century New Spain that circulated widely throughout Spanish America. The third chapter of this work is titled “How to Preserve the Good Management of Slaves When They Exist.” Compared to other prescriptions for slave administration, there is some degree of “affection” that might be extracted from these instructions: brothers were cautioned not to punish errant slaves “while furious with anger”—instead, they were to gather their wits and “with calmness and serenity convey the crime and the justice of the punishment.” The Jesuits were to remind the secular overseers they employed that they were “fathers of a family . . . and because of this they must pay attention to God.” The orders specify that each week, family units

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were to be supplied with evenly divided rations of “corn, meat, salt, chiles, and tobacco,” as well as “a little bit of honey if there is any.” On Catholic holy days when eating meat was prohibited, it was to be replaced with “fish, beans, or something else similar.” Slaves were to receive a new set of clothes, hats, and blankets each year—but warned that if they sold these for cash, they would be punished. Brothers were instructed to treat the ill with “much care and charity,” bringing them to a separate infirmary that was to be staffed by “an old female slave, practiced in everyday cures.” Women in labor were to have an “intelligent midwife” attend to the birth of their babies. Once well enough, the mothers were to bring their nursing infants to the fields. From weaning until the age of five, children would not work, instead remaining under the care of an elderly female slave who would teach them “the sign of the cross and to say their prayers.” Children five to eight years old would accompany the adults to the field, assisting in the care of infants. After eight, children were deemed old enough to work “in jobs appropriate to their abilities,” such as “gathering rocks, cleaning roads, weeding cemeteries, and gathering trash.” Finally, the orders reminded the brothers to “make good Christians of the slaves and they will make good servants, and God will bestow his blessing upon them.”25 On paper at least, these aspects of the Instructions appear marginally preferable to the stories of slave treatment on plantations in the US South, for instance. While it is impossible to know to what degree the brothers and the overseers they employed followed the Instructions, they do at least pay lip service to ideas of Christian “kindness”—a limited sort of affection, perhaps—toward slaves. Yet we cannot rush to such an optimistic conclusion—this was still slavery. One of the very first suggestions the Instructions make is that “the camp where the huts of the slaves are located be enclosed with a strong tall fence that has one door which must be in view of the [main] house,” allowing for constant surveillance. Shackles, chains, and stocks were to be reserved for “grave crimes,” but used nonetheless. While slaves on Jesuit plantations were regularly married and baptized, they were prohibited from selecting godparents who were free, “because this might lead to later inconveniences” (perhaps including the inconvenient desire to also become free). Slaves were not allowed to go to nearby towns, even during religious holidays, and outsiders were to be prohibited from entering slave quarters as well—again, the reason given for this was the unspecified “serious problems” that might arise.26 At the end of the day, these provisions mark no measurable difference from other rules for managing slaves. Despite their attention to the “care” and “spiritual instruction” of their slaves, the Jesuits ulti-

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mately understood African slaves in the same way most early modern European descended peoples did: as “moveable property,” or “an object for buying and selling.”27 Slaves were above all instruments of economic gain; the work they did supported the Jesuits’ primary occupation educating the sons of Spanish America’s elite. One of the strongest indicators that slaves on Jesuit estates were viewed little differently than slaves owned by other religious orders or private individuals is that in the thirty-two points of governance the Instructions give, evangelization and catechization of slaves is mentioned only regarding children, and that was to be done by the elderly slave women—not priests or Jesuit brothers. This negligence toward slave catechization belied the fact that when the Church first became entangled in slavery and overseas expansion, the papacy and Rome had insisted that enslaving Africans was a “pious and noble work . . . since the salvation of souls, increase of the faith, and overthrow of its enemies may be procured thereby.”28 If slavery was so beneficial to Africans and their descendants in Spanish America precisely because it introduced them to Catholicism, why did the Catholic Church for the most part entirely neglect to evangelize its African and Afro-Mexican slave members? How can we explain that scholars have been unable to find any decree coming from Catholic leaders in Rome or in Spain that outlined how slaves were to be instructed in Catholic doctrine? The closest such document, which some scholars believe was originally written for native converts but may have been employed with slaves as well, was titled A Short Catechism for the Rude and Busy.29 Constructed in the question-and-answer format characteristic of the genre, this document prompted students to answer such simple questions, as “Is there a God?” (Correct answer: “Yes, Father, God exists.”) The Catechism also reminded students of the importance of baptism, particularly since it was the only remedy to save sinners from condemnation in hell.30 Scholars have suggested that the Short Catechism was used with slaves when they were evangelized, but the more salient point is that although Catholic and Spanish authorities took every caution to be sure slaves were baptized, and the Catholic Church as an institution appears to have promoted slave marriage and godparenthood, the Church laid no particular institutional protocol for how slaves were to be indoctrinated or evangelized beyond these cursory points of contact. The Short Catechism was not designed specifically for slaves. In fact, although there were multiple catechisms in native languages in sixteenth-century New Spain—even some designed with pictograms that Indigenous peoples could “read” in their native tradition of “painted books,” scholars have found no catechisms, mis-

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sionary tracts, confession guides, or other theological works about evangelizing Black slaves in Spanish America.31 Masters were “supposed” to teach their slaves doctrine and to assure that they attended Mass, but these logistics remained sketchy—would the planter pay a priest to come to the estate to say Mass? (Unlikely.) Would he allow his slaves to leave his property so they could attend Mass in the nearest town? (We already saw that the supposedly lenient Jesuits forbade slaves to leave their properties.) Would a master evangelize his slaves himself, and even if he was willing to do so, was he linguistically able to communicate to the newly arrived bozal slaves who did not speak Castilian? In fact, there was no empire-wide policy on evangelizing Afro-Latinos or slaves until the matter was addressed in the 1785 black code promulgated by the Crown for the island of Santo Domingo, a code that I have argued elsewhere appeared to gesture toward the amelioration of slaves’ living conditions, but at its core focused more on making the institution of slavery, in which the Crown was becoming increasingly involved, even more profitable.32 It is also important to recall that while multiple ecclesiastics lobbied Madrid on behalf of their Indigenous Christian flock, there was no such intense advocacy campaign on behalf of the slaves. The most famous “defender of the Indians” was of course Bartolomé de Las Casas, who even traveled to Valladolid to debate for the humanity of Native Americans from 1550 to 1551. Yet we should not forget that Las Casas himself advocated that Black slaves be imported to America to replace the Indian ones he believed should be freed. Although Las Casas did retract his position about African slavery in 1552, the deep contradiction in his treatment of subjugated peoples—one that essentially recommended sacrificing Black African bodies in order to save brown Indigenous ones—reflects the general neglect the institutional Church showed to slaves, signifying the strong limits of Catholic “affection” when it came to holding Africans and African-descended people in bondage.33

Catholicism and Antislavery in the Spanish Empire Fundamental to understanding the politics of slavery in the early modern Hispanic world is recognizing how the lack of care the Church and its representatives showed toward indoctrinating African slaves and their descendants is tied to the Catholic Church’s complicity in the slave trade and slavery itself. In the Spanish Empire in particular, the Church had little choice but to support the Crown’s sanctioning

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of transatlantic slavery. Even if the Catholic Church had wished to speak out against the Atlantic slave trade, it would have been effectively impossible to do so in Spanish territory. This was largely due to the special arrangement between the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown known as the patronato real (royal patronage), by which Rome granted the Crown an unprecedented degree of control over the Church in Spanish America in return for Spain’s promotion of Catholicism around the world. The patronato real created an intermingled relationship of power sharing that characterized Spanish colonial rule—and meant that the Church hierarchy had very little room to question imperial policies.34 In terms of slavery and the slave trade, the stakes were especially high. Although fifteenth-century international treaties and papal accords had officially banned Spain from directly capturing slaves in Africa—Portugal received that “privilege” instead— the Spanish Crown nevertheless enjoyed multiple taxes and duties on slave imports that generated substantial royal income from the estimated 2,072,000 slaves “legally” brought to Spanish America from 1520 to 1810.35 Although, as Christopher Schmidt-Nowara pointed out, sixteenth-century Spanish clerics like Las Casas, Mercado, and Albornoz “abhorred the traffic,” the institution of slavery was roundly sanctioned by the Catholic Church and Catholic doctrine until very recently.36 In fact, it was not until Vatican II in 1965 that the Catholic Church officially recanted its position on the legality of slavery, which it had long upheld under the condition that the enslaved received basic physical and spiritual care they would otherwise lack—“affection,” as it were, shown toward the lowliest and most degraded members of society.37 Yet paradoxically, despite the Church’s ideological allegiance to the Spanish monarchs and its deep involvement in slave labor, the earliest public critiques of slavery and the slave trade in colonial Spanish America came from within its cathedrals, churches, and palaces. “Christianity,” Schmidt-Nowara wrote, “not only provided the justification for slavery but also sometimes the critical edge to opponents of slavery and the slave trade.”38 My previous work on Hispanic antislavery before 1820 contends that in the Spanish Atlantic Empire, the antislavery movement, the abolition of the slave trade, and the end of slavery itself are part of a deeper tradition running throughout the colonial period on both sides of the Spanish Atlantic. This began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a select few religious men who wrote publicly against the slave trade—and in one case, even slavery itself. In keeping with the special relationship between Church and Crown, most critics approached the matter obliquely, questioning the

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legality of certain aspects of the trade, or arguing that the capture and sale of slaves was illegal under certain circumstances. Nevertheless, these Catholic activists and thinkers were some of the very first to publicly speak out against the slave trade and slavery itself. One of the first such critics of slavery was Alonso de Montúfar, Archbishop of Mexico (1551–1572) who in 1560 wrote to King Felipe II to point out the moral tensions inherent in granting freedom to Indigenous Americans while enslaving Black Africans. “We do not know what reason there is that the blacks would be slaves more than the Indians,” he questioned, “because they, according to what they say, receive the Holy Spirit and do not make war against the Christians.” Montúfar also employed the language of Catholic affection in his letter, concluding that “stopping this capturing . . . there would be more care in bringing them the preaching of the Holy Spirit, so that in their lands they would be free in their bodies and more in their spirits, bringing them to the knowledge of the true Jesus Christ.”39 Scholars have not uncovered any further records pertaining to the receipt and potential response to Montúfar’s letter, but one of his modern biographers noted that Montúfar held eight African slaves for his household use—a clear indication that his affection toward slaves had its limits.40 Even the most widely recognized early Spanish American activist on behalf of African slaves, Alonso de Sandoval, a Spanish Jesuit who lived and worked in Cartagena from 1605 to 1652, failed to speak out against slavery itself. Instead, he concerned himself with exposing how Spanish Americans mistreated the bodies and the souls of African captives. He framed this discussion in evocative terms that would make meaningful emotional appeals to his readers. Among “the terrible things that happen to slaves,” Sandoval told the readers of his How to Restore the Salvation of the Blacks (1627), “their masters beat them until their skin falls off and they die from the cruel blows and horrible torture.” Of this, he noted, “no one could see a poor black man covered in terrible wounds from beatings done for no reason whatsoever without feeling moved to pity.” To masters, he cautioned “a slave owner has to look into the slaves’ eyes and see their needs and try to understand their language in order to speak kindly to them.”41 Constrained by the etymological limits of his universe, Sandoval spoke out as he was able—using the language of sentiment and empathy to engender sympathy for the slaves, not to argue against the institution of slavery itself. A similar emphasis on sentiment and the vivid horrors of life under slavery is readily apparent in one of the most unique—but somehow least studied—stories of Catholic antislavery in seventeenth-century

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Spanish America. Resolution About the Freedom of Slaves, written by a Spanish Capuchin abolitionist in Cuba in 1681, described the wrongs of slavery and the slave trade in terms clearly designed to tug at readers’ heartstrings. Author Francisco Jaca spoke of “the suckling boys and girls who . . . are brought to these lands and carried to others like dogs, cats, and sheep, condemned to the noose of slavery, without any guilt other than that of original sin.” He conveyed slaves’ stories about their devastating capture in Africa. The slave traders would scoop up children, the slaves told him, and then tie them to trees. “From there,” he continued with their stories, the slave traders “go to collect the mothers, who leaving the other children flee as fast as they can with those who are attached to their breasts, and they do not stop until they embrace one another.” The slave traders would then “attack them tyrannically, with punishments, clubs, whips, [and] blows,” before finally enslaving the entire family.42 Like the abolitionists who would carry on his discourse against slavery in the nineteenth-century Spanish Empire and the broader Atlantic world, Jaca focused on the disastrous consequences of the slave trade for African and slave families. The very relationship that stood at the center of all families—that between a mother and her baby, or a mother and her child—was capitalized on by slave traders, who from there went on to destroy whatever they could of the previous lives of their victims. Along with his French colleague Epifanio Moirans who worked alongside him in Cuba, Jaca was the only known Hispanic abolitionist of the colonial period who backed up his words with actions: in addition to preaching that all slaves should be freed and paid restitution, the two friars refused to hear confession from slave owners or absolve their sins until they agreed to free their slaves. The Capuchins were imprisoned, excommunicated, and exiled to Europe, where they brought their cause before the Roman Cardinals and the Holy Office of the Inquisition—which agreed that capturing, buying, selling, and reselling Black slaves was morally impermissible. Despite the unequivocal nature of this statement, it was effectively meaningless. In the Spanish Empire, even an institution as central as the Inquisition had no authority over the business of slavery itself—the theoretical “affection” the Inquisition displayed for the plight of the slaves meant nothing. As the nineteenth century began, a new round of Spanish antislavery and abolitionist activity flourished among liberal intellectuals— and this too took much of its inspiration from the Catholic religion. It also employed affect and sentiment to provoke a visceral reaction from readers and listeners. Isidoro Antillón, a Spanish law student who spoke publicly against slavery and the slave trade in 1802, used

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horrifying detail to explain how traffickers drove slaves west to the African coast like herds of cattle, enclosing particularly “dangerous” captives in a wooden collar with “two holes that receive a metal nail which passes through the nape of the neck . . . [so that] the smallest movement that the slave makes is . . . almost enough to suffocate him.” Antillón proposed that Black slaves be freed, and that ultimately, “the traffic . . . of slaves is not only opposed to the purity and liberalism of the feelings of the Spanish people, but also to the spirit of [the Catholic] religion.”43 Knowing the religious tradition of his Spanish audience, Antillón appealed directly to their sense of Catholic morality as a source of sympathy for the slaves. Although he would abandon the Catholic faith into which he was born for Evangelical Christianity, Spanish liberal journalist José Blanco White also based his antislavery arguments on the incompatibility of slavery with Catholic morals. He plainly asserted that the slave trade “profanes the morality of Christ.” He furthermore discredited the Canonical tradition that made waging holy war on pagans and infidels a Christian duty, saying scholars who propagated this idea were relying on what he termed “books from the centuries of ignorance” propagating the outdated link between religion and slavery. The slave trade did not spread Christian values around the globe, Blanco White insisted—instead it “closes the entry to the light of revelation in Africa, and extends vice and corruption throughout all of America.”44 Despite the emotional appeals of these arguments specifically designed to reach Spanish Catholics, the slave trade was not abolished in the Spanish Constitution of 1812. Instead, as the former Spanish colonies broke away from the metropolis one by one in the first decades of the nineteenth century, they began the laborious process of eliminating slavery within their new borders. Soon, what had once been the greatest empire of the early modern world was reduced to Spain, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Yet despite the turn against slavery in the former Spanish American colonies, the Spanish Caribbean enthusiastically ushered in the “second slavery” of the nineteenth century, and Spanish sugar, coffee, and tobacco plantations produced spectacular wealth based on slave labor until slavery was finally abolished there, in Puerto Rico in 1873, and in Cuba in 1886. In conclusion, it would be reprehensible by contemporary standards of morality and human decency to say the Catholic Church as an institution showed any “affection” toward the slaves it purported to care for. In particular cases, it may be possible to find outlying examples demonstrating that certain Jesuits punished less harshly, or some

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Catholic priests took care to evangelize slaves. But on the whole, the Church failed to live up to its own official program for African slaves. The papacy originally backed the Iberian monarchs in their fifteenthcentury ventures into the slave trade by arguing that captured slaves would benefit from being introduced to Catholicism, but after the initial ceremonial interactions of Catholic baptism and marriage, Church representatives overwhelmingly neglected the spiritual care of slaves and their descendants. The language of Catholic affection, sentiment, and empathy for slaves seemed infinitely more effective when placed in the hands of individual men who used it to lobby on their behalf. Yet as Francisco Jaca’s story makes clear, churchmen speaking out against slavery risked exclusion from the very institution that gave them physical and spiritual sustenance. As the colonial period gave way to the era of independence in Spanish America, the relative political opening created in the wake of Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula allowed for an unprecedented degree of public antislavery and abolitionist discussion, which Spanish thinkers wisely paired with Catholic morality. Although it is of course impossible to determine just how effective their arguments were, it was they who made the strongest case for any bonds of affection between the Catholic Church and African slaves.

Acknowledgments Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s Empire and Antislavery, which I read in seminar in my early years of doctoral work, changed the trajectory of my career as a historian and an academic. Until then, I had only learned about antislavery and abolition in the British or American contexts—his work opened up a whole new area of investigation. I immediately began to wonder if I could find similar antislavery sentiment in the colonial period, and this was how my second book project was born. It wasn’t until after completing my PhD that I had the opportunity to consult more closely with Chris several times, at conferences, symposia, and once even for a lovely afternoon lunch in Pasadena. I was so pleased to find that his rigorous, innovative scholarship was matched by his generosity as a mentor and as a colleague. In these meetings he helped to shape what has now become a 500-year history of the slave trade and its abolition in the Spanish Empire, The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire. Without his inspiration, guidance, and scholarship, this project would not exist. I am honored to be contributing to a work in memory of what he has

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done for the history of slavery and abolition in Latin America, a field that is presently enjoying a wide-ranging renaissance, much of which is directly connected to Chris and his scholarship. I would also like to thank Herman Bennett for his valuable commentary on this work, which was first presented in an earlier version at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, in January 2017. Emily Berquist Soule is a historian of the Spanish Atlantic world, race and slavery, and colonial Latin America. She is writing a 500-year history of the slave trade and the Spanish empire, titled The Atlantic Slave Trade and the Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire. Her first book, The Bishop’s Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2014. Her work has also appeared in Slavery & Abolition and Atlantic Studies, among others. She is professor of history at California State University, Long Beach.

Notes 1. Swarn, “Georgetown University Plans Steps to Atone.” In 2003, Brown University established an internal steering committee on slavery and justice, which three years later completed a full report on the university’s connections to slavery and the slave trade. See http://www.brown.edu/Research/ Slavery_Justice/. For a more comprehensive treatment of the longstanding ties between American universities and slavery, see Wilder’s Ebony & Ivy. Frustrated by the slow pace of university reforms after this admission, in April 2019 Georgetown students voted by a wide margin to impose a student fee of $27.20 per semester (the number represents the 272 people sold by Georgetown in 1838) to create a fund benefitting the descendants of those slaves, particularly those living in underprivileged communities. Jaschik, “Georgetown Students Vote to Pay Reparations.” 2. Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, 64, 92. 3. Schmidt-Nowara, “Still Continents,” 379. 4. Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 33–59. 5. For Baroque piety, see Larkin, The Very Nature of God and Voekel, Alone Before God. 6. von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, 23–40. 7. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 13. 8. Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church, 22–25. 9. The Holy Gospel is flush with reminders of these ideas. Paul, for instance, wrote in Colossians that “here there is not Greek and Jew . . . barbarian . . . slave, [or] free . . . but Christ is all and in all.” Col. 3:11, 22–24, The New American Bible, 1287. 10. On Iberian Expansion to the Canary Islands, see Berquist Soule, “From Africa to the Ocean Sea,” as well as Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind;

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

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Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus; and Phillips, “Africa and the Atlantic Islands.” This complex matter is eloquently explained in Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, Chapter 2. Rumeu de Armas, La Política indigenista de Isabel, 29–33. Blake, Europeans in West Africa, 21; Phillips, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, 63. On the ambiguous usages of the term “Guinea” in the Iberian worlds from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, see Wheat, Atlantic Africa, 21. Nicholas V., “Romanus Pontifex,” 22. “Real Cedula Circular a Indias.” Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 21. Proctor, “Damned Notions of Liberty,” 4. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico, 1. Konrad, A Jesuit Hacienda, 247. Sweet, “Black Robes and ‘Black Destiny.’” Bauer, “Christian Servitude,” 90. Cushner, Lords of the Land, 96. Konrad, A Jesuit Hacienda, 258. “De lo que han de guardar en el buen gobierno de los esclavos,” in Chevalier, Instrucciones a los Hermanos Jesuitas. Chevalier. Borja Medina, S.J., “El Esclavo,” 88. Nicholas V., “Romanus Pontifex,” 22. Vila Vilar, “La Evangelización del esclavo negro,” 197. “Catecismo Breve Para los Rudos y Ocupados,” 466–69. Burkhart, “The ‘Little Doctrine.’” Also see Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 27. von Germeten and Villa-Flores, “Afro-Latin Americans and Christianity,” 85. On the 1785 Code, see Berquist, “Early Anti-Slavery Sentiment,” 184. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara explores how Cuban historian José Antonio Saco employed Las Casas’s paradoxical stance on slavery in order to promote his own vision for Cuba’s future, which entailed outlawing the slave trade but preserving slavery itself in order to avoid possible race war and economic collapse. He wrote that “Las Casas allowed Saco to resolve the tension” in condemning the slave trade while defending slavery as necessary to Cuba’s well-being. Saco concluded, Schmidt-Nowara wrote, that “African slavery was a necessary evil for the foreseeable future. If it protected white Cubans from violence and bankruptcy in the nineteenth century, it had also saved Indians from Spanish brutality in the sixteenth.” Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History, 156–57. On the patronato real, see: Farriss, Crown and Clergy, 15–30; and Sheils, S.J., King and Church, 4–18. Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat estimate there were 1,506,000 enslaved Africans brought directly to the Americas from 1520 to 1810, and that another 566,000 were imported to Spanish America from elsewhere in the New World. “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade,” 434. Schmidt-Nowara and Fradera, “Introduction,” 3.

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37. Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church, 10. 38. Schmidt-Nowara, “Slavery, Antislavery, and Christianity,” 142–52. 39. Montúfar, “Carta al rey,” 53–55. Montúfar’s antislavery views are only sparsely studied in the secondary literature. For more general work on him see Lundberg, Unification and Conflict. Also see: Lucena Salmoral, Regulación de la esclavitud negra; Vila Vilar, “La Postura de la Iglesia,” 25– 33; Gallego and García Añoveros, La Iglesia y la esclavitud, 32. 40. Lundberg, Unification and Conflict, 226. 41. Sandoval, S.J., Treatise on Slavery, 65–70. 42. Jaca, Resolución sobre la libertad, 15, 18. 43. Antillón, Dissertación, 1811. 44. Blanco White, Bosquejo del comercio.

Bibliography Abulafia, David. The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Antillón, Isidoro. Dissertación sobre el origen de la esclavitud de los negros, motivos que la han perpetuado, ventajas que se le atribuyen y medios que podrían adoptarse para hacer prosperar nuestras colonias sin la esclavitud de los negros. Mallorca: Imprenta de Miguel Domingo, 1811. Bauer, Arnold J. “Christian Servitude: Slave Management in Colonial Spanish America.” In Agrarian Society in History: Essays in Honor of Magnus Mörner, edited by Mats Lundhal and Thommy Svensson, 89–108. London: Routledge, 1990. Bennett, Herman. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. ———. Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Berquist, Emily. “Early Anti-Slavery Sentiment in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1765–1817.” Slavery & Abolition 31, no. 2 (2010): 181–205. Berquist Soule, Emily. “From Africa to the Ocean Sea: Atlantic Slavery in the Origins of the Spanish Empire.” Atlantic Studies: Global Currents 15, no. 1 (January 2018): 16–39. Blake, John William, ed., trans. Europeans in West Africa, 1450–1560. Vol. 1. London: Hakluyt Society, 1942. Blanco White, José Maria. Bosquejo del comercio de esclavos, y reflexiones sobre este tráfico considerado moral, política, y Cristianamente. Edited by Manuel Moreno Alonso. Sevilla: Ediciones Alfar, 1999. Borja Medina, Francisco de, S.J. “El Esclavo: ¿bien mueble o persona? Algunas observaciones sobre la evangelización del negro en las haciendas Jesuíticas.” In Esclavitud, economía, y evangelización: Las haciendas Jesuíticas en la América Virreinal, edited by Sandra Negro da Tua and Manuel M. Marzal, 83–124. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica Peruana, 2005.

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Borucki, Alex, David Eltis, and David Wheat. “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America.” American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (2015): 433–61. Burkhart, Louise M. “The ‘Little Doctrine’ and Indigenous Catechesis in New Spain.” Hispanic American Historical Review 94, no. 22 (2014): 167–206. “Catecismo Breve Para los Rudos y Ocupados.” In Monumenta Catechetica Hispanoamericana, Siglos XVI–XVIII. Vol. 2, edited by Juan Guillermo Duran, 466–471. Argentina: Pontificia Universidad Católica, 1990. Chevalier, Francois, ed. Instrucciones a los Hermanos Jesuitas Administradores de Haciendas (Manuscrito Mexicano del siglo XVIII). México, DF: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1950. Cushner, Nicholas P. Lords of the Land: Sugar, Wine, and Jesuit Estates of Coastal Peru, 1600–1767. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980. Farriss, Nancy. Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 1759–1821: The Crisis of Ecclesiastical Privilege. London: University of London, 1968. Fernández-Armesto, Felipe. Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Gallego, José-Andrés, and Jesús María García Añoveros. La Iglesia y la esclavitud de los negros. Pamplona: Eunsa, 2002. Jaca, Francisco José de. Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios. Edited by Miguel Anxo Pena González. Madrid: CSIC, 2002. Jaschik, Scott. “Georgetown Students Vote to Pay Reparations.” Inside Higher Ed, 12 April 2019. Konrad, Herman W. A Jesuit Hacienda in Colonial Mexico: Santa Lucia, 1576– 1767. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980. Larkin, Brian. The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. Lucena Salmoral, Manuel. Regulación de la esclavitud negra en las colonias de América Española (1503–1886): Documentos para su estudio. Alcalá: Nuevo Siglo, 2005. Lundberg, Magnus. Unification and Conflict: The Church Politics of Alonso de Montúfar, O.P., Archbishop of Mexico, 1554–1572. Uppsala: Swedish Institute of Missionary Research, 2002. Maxwell, John Francis. Slavery and the Catholic Church: The History of Catholic Teaching Concerning the Moral Legitimacy of the Institution of Slavery. Chichester: Barry Rose Publishers, 1975. Montúfar, Alonso de. “Carta al rey, del arzobispo de México, sobre la esclavitud de los negros.” In Epistolario de Nueva España, 1505–1818, edited by Francisco del Paso y Troncoso, 53–55. Mexico City: Antigua Librería Robredo, 1940. The New American Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Nicholas V. “Romanus Pontifex.” European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States and its Dependencies to 1648. Edited by Frances Gardner Davenport. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1967.

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Phillips, William D. “Africa and the Atlantic Islands Meet the Garden of Eden: Christopher Columbus’s View of America.” Journal of World History 3, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 149–64. ———. Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Proctor, Frank T. “Damned Notions of Liberty”: Slavery, Culture, and Power in Colonial Mexico, 1640–1769. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. “Real Cedula Circular a Indias Expedida por el Rey Fernando VII Sobre Prohibición de la Trata Negrera en los Dominios Españoles, 19 de Diciembre de 1817.” In La Gente Negra en la Legislación Colonial, edited by Sergio Antonio Mosquero, 68–72. Colombia: Universidad Tecnológica del Choco, 2004. Rumeu de Armas, Antonio. La Política indigenista de Isabel la Católica. Valladolid: Instituto Isabel la Católica, 1969. Sandoval, Alonso de, S.J. Treatise on Slavery. Selections from De instauranda Aethiopum salute. Edited by Nicole von Germeten. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. ———. “Slavery, Antislavery, and Christianity in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Christianity, edited by Lamin Sanneh and Michael McClymond, 142–52. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central. ———. “Still Continents (and an Island) with Two Histories?” Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 377–82. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, and Josep M. Fradera. “Introduction: Colonial Pioneer and Plantation Latecomer.” In Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, edited by Josep M. Fradera and Christopher SchmidtNowara, 1–12. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Sheils, W. Eugene, S.J. King and Church: The Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1961. Swarn, Rachel. “Georgetown University Plans Steps to Atone for Slave Past.” The New York Times, 1 September 2016. Sweet, David G. “Black Robes and ‘Black Destiny’: Jesuit Views of African Slavery in 17th-Century Latin America.” Revista de Historia de América 86 (1978): 87–133. Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947. Vila Vilar, Enriqueta. “La Evangelización del esclavo negro y su integración en el mundo americano.” In Negros, Mulatos, Zambaigos: Derroteros africanos en los mundos ibéricos, edited by Berta Artes Quieja and Alessandro Stella, 189–206. Sevilla: CSIC, 2000. ———. “La Postura de la Iglesia Frente a la Esclavitud, Siglos XVI y XVII.” In Esclavitud y Derechos Humanos: la Lucha por la Libertad del Negro en

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el Siglo XIX, edited by Francisco de Solano and Agustín Guimerá, 25–31. Madrid: CSIC, 1990. Voekel, Pamela. Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. von Germeten, Nicole. Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. von Germeten, Nicole, and Javier Villa-Flores. “Afro-Latin Americans and Christianity.” In Religion and Society in Latin America: Interpretive Essays from Conquest to Present, edited by Lee M. Penyak and Walter J. Petry, 83–100. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2009. Wheat, David. Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Wilder, Craig. Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013.

Chapter 6

Questions of Scale Spain, Latin America, and the Atlantic World in Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s Scholarship on Slavery Elena Schneider

å We’re not really supposed to talk about how personality influences the writing of history. Historians are of course social scientists, trafficking in archival research, quantitative and qualitative analysis, and “objective” scholarly argument. I can’t help but think, though, that the scholarship of Christopher Schmidt-Nowara was in no small amount shaped by his preternatural sociability. You can sense in his body of work his gregariousness, his openness to new ideas and places, his many travels throughout Europe and the Americas, and his ability to build lasting collaborations with so many friends and colleagues scattered far and wide. Chris’s first and ground-breaking book Empire and Antislavery is a study of the politics of antislavery in the Spanish empire that unites Caribbean and Spanish historiographies infrequently brought together. The book could only have been written by a person who felt comfortable moving between and conversing with communities of scholars in all three nations discussed—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spain. His book established the importance of a transatlantic public sphere in the unraveling of slavery in the nineteenth-century Spanish empire. In doing so, Schmidt-Nowara effectively wrote Puerto Rico into the story, showing how the marginality of slavery there freed up the institution for attack on both the island and in Spain through the founding of the first Spanish abolitionist society. Empire and Antislavery revised understandings in the historiographies of Spain, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. The book also carefully compared the Spanish Caribbean with the South

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Atlantic system and the British empire at a time (1999) before that kind of analysis was common.1 His next monograph, The Conquest of History, built upon the project of situating Spanish colonialism in broader global and comparative contexts, but did so in very different ways. The book explored the question of how the Spanish conquest was understood, narrated, and commemorated in nineteenth-century Spain and its colonies. It moved outward from prior work, encompassing not only Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, but also the Philippines. Even more, it used an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon not just traditional historical sources but also literature. In this case it managed to revise historiography in all four nations and become an indispensable book on the topic.2 It is no accident that every time that Chris published a monograph, it came alongside a coedited collection on the same theme. These books are conference volumes that far surpass the limitations of the genre. Interpreting Spanish Colonialism, edited with John M. Nieto-Phillips, expands upon the themes of The Conquest of History.3 The book he coedited with Josep Fradera, Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, builds upon the themes of his first and last monographs.4 This habit is a sign of his generosity as a scholar, his sharp and restless mind, and his prolific rate of publication. But I also see in it his preternatural sociability. He was often at the center of groups of scholars, choreographing interesting and important conversations that made the sum of all of our work greater than its parts. Chris understood that no matter how conceptually innovative or archivally rigorous our new work is, it will always be much enhanced by putting it in deeper and more intensive conversation with the work of our peers. There are of course challenges to moving between micro and macro scales, Atlantic and Pacific worlds, and history and literature, as Chris did in his writing. The way that he “Spanished” Latin American history provided a necessary counterpoint to the more locally grounded social histories commonly written by Latin Americanists working in colonial contexts. Yet when we zoom out to a broad-angled view, there is the risk of losing the messiness and particularities of specific people and places, as well as the agency of local actors. Rereading Empire and Antislavery, we might wish that Chris had paid more attention to the actions of people of African descent themselves, their resistance to the institution of racial slavery, and their impact on its unraveling.5 We also might have faulted him for ending the story in 1874, before slavery’s abolition in Cuba. Of course Chris knew that others would and had told the Cuban story that continued after his chronological

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endpoint, including his friend and colleague Ada Ferrer and graduate mentor Rebecca J. Scott.6 A response to these criticisms may also be found in his synthesis published a decade later, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. It shows the breadth of Chris’s thinking and his commitment, even in a synthesis, to both micro and macro scales. The book covers all three centuries of Iberian and American slavery and antislavery and seeks to answer a singular question: why was slavery so resilient in Latin America and how was it finally overcome? As the book explores the changing forms of this “protean institution,” it juxtaposes discussions of imperial politics with the life stories of famous individuals like the Brazilian freedwoman Chica da Silva and Estevanico, the Arabic-speaking man of African descent who accompanied Cabeza de Vaca on his journeys. The book effectively sketches out the broader view that framed Empire and Antislavery in the same way that the collection he edited with Josep Fradera did. I also think it makes clear what a phenomenal teacher Chris was for his lucky students at Fordham and Tufts.7 My own research and writing have been inspired in part by the way Chris moved between micro and macro scales of analysis and in and around Spanish, Portuguese, and British global empires. I have also been influenced by his scholarship to seek to connect social history based in the Americas with the study of imperial politics and political discourse in the metropole—in effect, to “Spanish” Latin American history. I am firmly convinced that you cannot make sense of either Latin American or Spanish history in the period without moving your historian’s lens around, within and without Spanish empire, in the way Chris did throughout his career. The deeper I went into my own research on the rise (rather than fall) of Spanish slave trading, the more it became apparent that a transatlantic framework was necessary, one that moved between Cuba, Spain, and its empire, inside and outside Spanish imperial contexts. African slavery and slave trading are topics that are by their very nature multi-imperial and require work that moves around and between a number of different sites of history and scales of analysis. As I worked my way through my own set of historical questions and problems, I found myself leaning on Chris’s important scholarship and seeking to take his model in new directions, with regards to questions of scale, in my own writing. For the rest of this chapter I will discuss the rise of Spanish slave trading, a central theme in my work that has powerful resonance with Chris’s scholarship on Spanish slavery and antislavery.

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Essentially what I offer here is my half of a conversation with Chris that, sadly, I will never get to have. My work has sought to make sense of the ascendance of proslavery and pro-slave-trade thinking among Spanish Bourbon officials after the Seven Years’ War, a crucial shift that Chris outlined in his own writings.8 In a sense, we can think of this as the flip side of the story of slavery’s unraveling, the Empire and Slavery to Chris’s Empire and Antislavery. This transition became the basis of the new Spanish policy of “free trade in slaves,” announced in 1789, which underwrote Cuba’s sugar and slavery boom and, ultimately, the ascendance and persistence of a political economy of large-scale slave trading, agricultural slavery, and the mechanized hyper-exploitation of African and African-descended peoples. In his synthesis Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition, Chris portrayed the horrific legacy of this transition well into the 1850s and 1860s, when Spanish and Cuban slave traders used steamships to carry massive cargoes of the enslaved from Africa to Cuba, as many as fifteen hundred souls at a time.9 This development can be traced back to a radical new departure one hundred years before, beginning in the 1760s, when Spain was still a non-slave-trading nation with policies that limited and even discouraged transatlantic human trafficking. In the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, Spanish officials pursued a host of pro-slave-trading policies. For the first time in the long history of the presence of people of African descent in the Americas, the Spanish monarchy began actively and programmatically to promote and prioritize its own transatlantic trade in Africans. From a position one royal official in 1752 had described as “with our eyes closed as to the manner of this traffic,” the Crown and the Council of the Indies made a number of reforms both to expand the traffic in slaves under the Spanish flag and to govern the growth of African slavery and the populations of African descent in its overseas territories.10 These included the establishment of a Spanish slave trading monopoly company, the Compañía gaditana de negros, in 1765; the dramatic escalation of the number of royal slaves; the acquisition of territory meant to serve as Spain’s first slave trading entrepôt in West Africa in 1778; and the attempt between 1784 and 1790 to codify laws for the first time in the long history of Spanish slaveholding with regard to not only enslaved Africans but also all people of African descent in its American possessions.11 Cumulatively these new policies helped set the stage for Spain’s nineteenth-century empire, part of the dramatic expansion of an industrial mode of slavery—i.e., slavery with railroads—that occurred

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simultaneously in the Spanish Caribbean, Brazil, and the US South.12 The question that animated my research was: how had this about face in Spanish policy come to pass? I have come to call Spain’s transformation from a non-slave-trading to a slave-trading empire after the Seven Years’ War “the Bourbon reform of slavery,” but the existing literature on Spain’s Bourbon reforms paid little attention to the topic of slave trading and plantation slavery.13 Instead that literature focused on political and military reforms and trade liberalization—specifically, the comercio libre policy introduced first in the Spanish Caribbean and later extended to other American territories.14 In general, the scant literature on the opening of the slave trade to Spanish America centered on the policy of “free trade in slaves” announced in 1789 and portrayed it as the inevitable result of macroeconomic forces inexorably advancing across the final decades of the eighteenth century.15 The idea that this may have been a contingent process driven by specific events and historical actors had not been as fully explored.16 In addition, no one had charted the precise relationship between events in Havana during the Seven Years’ War—in particular, the ways in which they were reported, discussed, and interpreted at the time—and this new political commitment to plantation agriculture and slave trading that resulted in Madrid.17 Surely, there was something to be gained from following the story back and forth from Cuba to Spain and Havana to Madrid, much as Chris had done in his study of nineteenth-century abolitionism, the mirror image of my story. Focusing with greater intensity on the events of 1762–63 and moving my historian’s lens back and forth across the Atlantic between Cuba and Spain allowed me to see that this new departure in Spanish policy was by no means inevitable. In fact, a pre-sugar elite in Havana exerted leverage to help force Spain onto this new path, promoting slave trading and plantation agriculture. The cataclysmic end to the Seven Years’ War and the reforming moment that followed allowed a Havana-based elite to lobby for these changes in the Spanish empire. In a disturbing finding from my research, the actions of people of African descent themselves had also led to these new departures in Spanish policy that expanded slavery, the slave trade, and the exploitation of black lives and bodies. Focusing more carefully on the process of Havana’s loss and return to the Spanish empire revealed the influence and contradictory impacts of local actors. Let me explain how this messy process of reform worked, moving back and forth between Cuba and Spain, and involving a variety of actors in both locales. Much as Chris had shown in his book Empire and Antislavery, events in Spain’s overseas territories, transatlantic debates, and local inter-

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ests framed shifts in metropolitan policies that had dramatic impacts beyond Iberian shores. The process of deliberation and reform that launched this new political economy of exploitation in the Spanish empire moved between Cuba, the Caribbean, and Spain, just as debates about ending slavery did more than one hundred years later. As in the case of abolition, events in the colonies set the terms of the debate in Madrid. The disastrous end of the Seven Years’ War conditioned a shift in metropolitan thinking in the years that followed.18 The period after the war was a time of reform in almost all the European empires, but given the war’s outcome, the Spanish government proceeded with an acute sense of urgency. Not long after Spain’s late entry into the war alongside its fellow Bourbon monarchy France, King Charles III’s hated Protestant rival Britain managed to capture both Havana and Manila, precious nodes of Spanish empire and key sites for the circulation of trade goods and silver. This devastating blow awakened Spanish reformers to the need to borrow from the successful policies and practices of its ascendant enemy Britain, the dominant transatlantic slave traders of the eighteenth century. In Spain the arrival of news of the capture of Havana sparked a moment of recrimination and fact finding, but also an opportunity for reform. Havana’s loss was a tremendous blow to Spanish honor and an occasion for soul searching about the way forward. As the royal counselor Francisco de Craywinkel reported to the Crown, Britain had clearly proven itself “much more powerful than Spain,” but the differences between the two monarchies were not insurmountable, as long as Spain worked “to make the most of this disgrace.”19 Although Spain, along with Portugal, had been an innovator in the use of African slavery in the Americas, and Africans had helped build the foundations of the Spanish empire, rival nations Britain and France were among those growing rich and powerful based on a newer political economy of large-scale sugar plantation slavery and slave trading that was leaving Spain behind.20 There was great pressure on the Spanish government to get to the bottom of what exactly had gone so horribly wrong in Cuba, and that pressure ensured that reforms would follow. Not only the Spanish public but also the king and his Bourbon ally France wanted answers. When King Charles III first received news of Havana’s surrender, he was, as one royal official put it, “disgusted” by the news.21 According to the French consul in Madrid, “News of the taking of Havana has gravely upset the Spanish nation . . . . There is no consolation for the irreparable loss of one-third of Spain’s naval forces [then docked in Havana], surrendered without a cannon shot.”22 The Spanish public

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was indignant over Havana’s surrender and satirized the seemingly incompetent officials who had directed the defense. After the embarrassing loss, the king’s councilor Ricardo Wall was forced to resign, and the Council of the Indies’s Julián de Arriaga lost clout. Each was in turn usurped and replaced by the Italian reformers, the Marqués de Esquilache and the Marqués de Grimaldi. Much was sacrificed for Havana’s return: the peace treaty at the end of the war stipulated that Spain must hand over all of Florida to the British to get Havana back. Whatever it took, the city must never be lost again.23 What followed was a prolonged, public treason trial in Madrid for Havana’s former governor Juan de Prado and eleven other military officials identified as most responsible for the failures of Havana’s defense. Two one-thousand–page tomes of testimony were published to ensure the transparency of the proceedings, with the first appearing while the verdict was still under deliberation. These volumes, a mix of trial transcript and correspondence, journals, and minutes from the siege allowed the Spanish public to engage in great detail with the play-by-play of this embarrassing defeat, determining their own list of causes and culprits. This intense engagement with the way in which Havana was governed before and during its loss to the British—and the rush to find both tragic heroes and scapegoats—framed the policy decisions that would follow.24 As these two volumes of treason trial proceedings made evident, a perennial complaint in Havana was the lack of sufficient enslaved Africans to meet local demand. In fact, the trial testimony revealed that this shortage had endangered the city, as local elites lacked enough enslaved workers to loan out for royal projects, a customary practice throughout the Spanish empire. Without loaned laborers, the Havana governor had been unable to strengthen the city’s built fortifications, as ordered in his instructions upon taking office. As the treason trial found, the failure to properly fortify the Cabaña heights across the bay from Havana was perhaps the most critical failing that led to the city’s capture.25 In determining precisely what had gone wrong in Havana and how to set it right, Bourbon reformers and Spanish bureaucrats began moving back and forth from Madrid to Havana, where they consulted with local elites about the best path forward for the island. During this period of postmortem inquiry, new directions in Spanish imperial policy emerged in dialogue between Madrid and Havana. As would be the case in later moments—for example, during the period of ascendant plantation slavery on the island—Havana’s elites had inordinate influence over the direction of Spanish policies later implemented em-

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pire wide. In this case their leverage derived not from the wealth produced from sugar but from the island’s obvious economic potential, the geopolitical importance of Havana to the Spanish imperial economy—whose silver passed through the port city—and its vulnerability to British attack. Upon repossessing Havana for Spain, the new captain general of Cuba felt urgently the need to repair relations with Havana’s wealthiest residents. Reports had reached Madrid from Havana detailing the alacrity with which the city’s elites fled the city during the siege—failing to take up arms for the king—only to return under British rule, fraternizing with occupying officers and seeking trade relations with British merchants and slave traders arriving in port. The desire of Havana’s commercial sectors to expand the slave trade, the sugar sector, and their own commercial relations made them embarrassingly complicit in British rule. Alongside the high-profile trial of Havana’s military junta, two members of the Havana elite were also tried for treason in Madrid for their collaboration with British occupation. Stories like these of elite complicity and even malfeasance under British rule made a powerful case for the urgent need for change. Elites’ questionable loyalty under British occupation pressured Spanish metropolitan authorities into finding ways to win them back. Without their investment and allegiance, Spain could not govern their crucial port city. Opening the slave trade would be an essential step toward forging a new and more powerful bond with Spain’s subjects in Havana. The messages returning to Madrid from Havana were twofold. First of all, Havana’s defenses absolutely had to be strengthened, which would require serious investment and new supplies of labor. In order to cover these royal outlays, it was necessary to locate new sources of revenue in the Cuban economy. Secondly, the Spanish government needed to tie its leading residents more closely to the Crown. Stimulating the economy of Cuba and developing further its trade would provide a necessary and urgent remedy. Doing so would help pay for the expansion of the city’s defenses and bind a wayward elite more closely to the Spanish Crown. As these reformers saw it, the answer to both of these challenges resided in expanding commerce and the slave trade to the island, thereby stimulating its economy. Shortly after his arrival in Cuba, the new captain general, the Conde de Ricla, reported back to the Council of the Indies in Spain that the slave trade to Cuba needed to be expanded. As Ricla acknowledged, “the first difficulty” that arose upon Havana’s restitution to Spanish rule was “the lack of blacks.” Slaveowners were eager to replace those enslaved Africans killed, lost to the interior, or manumitted during the

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invasion and occupation, and Ricla needed laborers to rebuild the city’s fortifications and initiate a new round of construction at the royal shipyard. In 1763 Ricla contracted for a large importation of enslaved Africans, more than the British had brought in during their eleven-month occupation of Havana. At least three thousand men from this group were put to work rebuilding and expanding the city’s fortifications. In total, during his short tenure in Cuba, from 1763 to 1765, the Conde de Ricla sanctioned the importation of up to seven thousand royal slaves to rebuild the city’s fortifications.26 Ricla and the military and government officials who accompanied him to Havana consulted extensively with the island’s elites, who convinced them of the urgency of expanding Cuba’s slave trade, an essential engine of the island’s development. The Havana city council requested that Ricla allow Havana residents to trade in slaves directly with British colonies and to exchange Cuban produce for enslaved Africans. Though not immediately successful, their lobbying influenced the captain general and began to reframe the thinking of the Council of the Indies about the trade in enslaved Africans. Spanish political thought had traditionally been more focused on developing policies for the mining economies of Mexico and Peru, the core sites of royal revenue production in the empire, and the Indigenous peoples who predominated in those regions. Now events in Cuba had drawn their attention to the Caribbean and its populations of African descent. During these events in Havana people of African descent had proven themselves loyal defenders of the territories of the Spanish Crown, and their service helped to pave the way for new departures in Spanish policy. Reports emanating from Havana to Madrid after the British siege and occupation of the city emphasized the crucial role played by people of African descent in the island’s defense. Though the battle for Havana had a tragic denouement for Spain, and many of the city’s white residents had failed their Spanish monarch, free and enslaved soldiers had distinguished themselves with their brave actions during the siege. During the British invasion, free and enslaved people of African descent stood on the front lines of the battle, launching counterattacks against the British, capturing enemy soldiers and sailors, and defending the walled city from the onslaught of British cannons. They spied across enemy lines and served as soldiers defending Havana’s flank and its vital connection to the countryside, which provided foodstuffs and troop reinforcements to sustain the city during the siege. Lured by the promise of manumission, several thousand enslaved Africans left plantations in Havana’s hinterland to come serve in the defense. Thousands more free people of color served in militia regiments defending

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the city, with a proud tradition of service in Cuba ranging as far back as 1600. Together with the support of Havana’s Spanish and Creole defenders, people of color made the capture of the city so difficult that the British almost failed and prolonged the siege so much that British forces lost thousands more people to yellow fever than they might have otherwise. Cumulatively their service proved the great utility of populations of African descent to Spanish imperial defense.27 Not only Havana’s largest slaveholders but also people of African descent themselves communicated the same message to the Spanish government. At least one enslaved soldier named Santiago de Sotolongo journeyed all the way from Havana to Spain to tell the king about his service and request his formal manumission.28 Other enslaved veterans approached the Conde de Ricla seeking similar ends as soon as he arrived in reoccupied Havana. Shortly after he reclaimed Havana for Spain, Ricla began seeking out militia officers of color to reward for their roles in the battle. While Ricla acknowledged white elites for loaning financial resources to the Crown, Blacks in Cuba were the ones he recognized with medals and rewards for their military service. Upon arriving in Havana, the Conde de Ricla also sent two leaders of the battalion of morenos libres of Havana to Madrid in order to perform a display of arms before Charles III and his court. There the king celebrated their service, allowed them to kiss his hand, and delivered a medal directly to them. The message Havana’s white population and its subjects of African descent had been conveying—of the great value of people of African descent to the Spanish Crown—could not have been made more powerfully to the king and his councilors than by these two men and the display of arms they performed at the Spanish court. Their presence supported a newly emerging consensus that enslaved Africans and free people of color were essential as both engines of the island’s development and loyal manpower for its defense. All the reports coming to the Council of the Indies from Ricla and the officials that accompanied him to Cuba advocated opening the slave trade to the island. Ironically and painfully, that decision was made at least in part based upon the brave military service of people of African descent themselves. By proving themselves reliable soldiers, they had made a case for their necessity to the empire in a climate of intensifying military rivalry and economic competition. Tragically, that logic would propel a new political economy that would intensify their exploitation in Spanish America, heighten racial hierarchy, and curtail many of their traditional rights and privileges won across prior centuries of Spanish colonialism.

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According to reformers’ logic, the reasons for expanding the slave trade were political (ensuring the satisfaction and hence loyalty of the island’s elite), military (populating the island and providing manpower for its defense), and economic (curbing contraband, supplying laborers in all facets of the economy, and developing the agricultural sector, which would drive further settlement and provide revenue for the Crown). Elites in Havana demanded more enslaved Africans and would build ties with Spain’s British enemies and even abandon their loyalty to the fatherland in order to get them.29 In order to stop them, Spain had to construct its own slave trade and secure access to more populations of African descent. Unlike in other empires, the push to expand the slave trade paralleled new efforts to expand the military role of people of African descent throughout Spanish empire—a result of the unique and twisted route of the reforms between Cuba and Madrid in the 1760s. Over the ensuing decades, a reform process that started in Cuba and Madrid traveled around Spanish America, ricocheted through West Africa, and sent ripples all the way to the Philippines. Scholars have described how the comercio libre reform was rolled out region by region, moving from the Caribbean outward in concentric circles, but the trajectory of reforms of the slave trade moved through its own specific geography. In charting this story, I have followed Chris’s example in connecting some of the disparate geographies of the Spanish empire not often placed in the same frame. In my case, because of the global nature of the slave trade, that meant linking developments in Cuba with those in West Africa and the Philippines. The same conversations begun in Havana in the wake of the Seven Years’ War framed the decision of the Council of the Indies to acquire the African islands of Fernando Po and Annobón in the Bight of Biafra in 1778 as planned slave-trading entrepôts. Similarly, at the same time as the king and the Council sent an expedition to take formal possession of these islands from Portugal, they also sent word to the Spanish governor of Manila to gather an array of cloth samples from China and Bengal demanded by coastal African slave traders. Efforts to tighten commercial ties to the Philippines tracked through the West African slave trade, as embodied by the charter granted to the Royal Philippine Company in 1785, which included a monopoly on trade at Fernando Po and Annobón, meant to supply Cuba with “a copious abundance of blacks.”30 The slave trade would serve as a new bonding agent between center and peripheries, as events in Cuba and the debates, discussions, and discoveries that followed had convinced the

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Spanish government that people of African descent were an essential tool of empire building. Following this story across its unique geographies required flexibility and a willingness to travel, qualities so well exemplified by Chris. At several junctures, senior scholars in the field of early American history advised me to cut out the section of my book manuscript on Fernando Po, Annobón, and the Philippines. It would make a good article but was tangential to my story—at worst showy Atlanticism, at best unnecessary, impractical, and somewhat obscure. The pushback I received from these scholars opened my eyes to the very real challenges of connecting different historiographies not usually in conversation with each other. I would have to make a case for the links and parallels between the histories of these disparate regions to an audience that in some cases was disinclined to travel along with me. I am confident that Chris would have backed me up, as another mentor and friend Antonio Feros did, and it was in part their intellectual and moral support that kept me moving forward productively on this facet of my argument. Their own work—and that of Josep Fradera, among others— elaborates the global nature of the Spanish empire and the very real connections that enmesh the history of Cuba with seemingly distant lands. My experience, however, renewed my appreciation for the foundation laid by Chris’s work and provided a reminder of the challenges of building community among scholars where little has existed before. To tell the story of what happened in Cuba in its fullest extent required venturing into new terrain, and as always, the best way to do so is to make friends along the way. What I have described then is a process of deliberation and reform that moved between the Caribbean, Cuba, and Spain, then outwards toward the Spanish American mainland, ricocheting around the globe from West Africa to the Spanish Philippines. The mirror imaging between both processes—the raveling and unraveling of Spanish slave trading—is striking. In both cases, events in the colonies set the terms of debate in Madrid. Also, Britain played a key role in both the rise and demise of Spanish slave trading. In the case of slave trading, this was via its military intervention in Havana and by providing a model of an empire that had used its dominance of the slave trade and its slave powered– plantation economy to accumulate great wealth. In the case of abolitionism, it was as an ascendant navy that sought to intercept Spanish and Cuban slave trading ships, or those on their way to Spanish islands.

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Chris’s work was so broad in range that it intersected with the work of many of us in the field. When he and I were neighbors in Brooklyn, Chris generously took the time to discuss with me the big ideas behind my project. I should probably say he helped me to realize what the big ideas behind my dissertation were when I was in the weeds of writing it and could hardly see them. In my case, Chris helped me to see the strength in writing about Cuba during the eighteenth century, the time before the time that everyone is interested in. He also urged me to explore how my project could trouble assumptions about the relationship between the first and the second slaveries in the Spanish empire and potentially show that the transition from one to the other was by no means a foregone conclusion. In addition, he introduced me to the work of a number of scholars I needed to know about. I think he helped a lot of us to put our work into a broader context. Standing here, looking back, I still really miss Chris, both his mentorship and his friendship. He was a phenomenal conversationalist, whether you were talking about history or baseball, Spanish food or crime fiction. I also can’t help but lament no longer having the chance to talk with Chris about themes my work continues to share in common with his, like the many interconnections between British and Spanish slavery and antislavery. In addition to shared interest in the topic of slavery, we both argued for the role of war as an engine of change in this period, and we both wrote about the experience of prisoners of war.31 I know I would have gained immensely from his insights on my ideas for future projects. As he had in the past, I bet he would have provided me with crucial advice for navigating Iberian history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and introduced me to many historians I needed to know. I might have needled him a bit about needing to pay slightly more attention to Cuba, and he might have needled me back for a Cuba-centric view of the world. In the end, I know our exchanges would have deeply enriched both my work and my life. Not just personally but also professionally, Chris’s loss is felt extra hard. That’s because he was so beloved and also active in the field, facilitating conversations between so many of us scattered around the globe. Perhaps part of his legacy can be the continuation of these broader conversations as embodied in this volume published in his memory. Maybe that is the best way to honor him—to keep having these conversations across subfields, across different geographies and time periods, between disparate communities of scholars, even if they might feel awkward at first, both to remember him and keep doing what he did as a matter of course.

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Elena Schneider is a historian of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World. Her book, The Occupation of Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), is a longue durée history of the causes, central dynamics, and enduring consequences of a crucial incident of imperial warfare, the British invasion, occupation, and return of Havana (1762–63) during the final stages of the Seven Years’ War. It has won multiple prizes, including the James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History from the American Historical Association, the Bryce Wood Award of the Latin American Studies Association, the Murdo J. McLeod Prize of the Southern Historical Association, and the Biennial Book Prize of the Forum on European Empires and Global Interaction.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery. Schmidt-Nowara, The Conquest of History. Schmidt-Nowara and Nieto-Phillips, Interpreting Spanish Colonialism. Fradera and Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery and Antislavery. Examples of this approach to the process of abolition in Cuba and Brazil include Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba, and Castilho, Slave Emancipation. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba; Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers. Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition. Much of what follows derives from Schneider, “African Slavery and Spanish Empire,” and Occupation of Havana. Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition, 126. Julián de Arriaga to the Marqués de la Ensenada, 18 March 1752, AGI (Archivo General de Indias, Seville), SD (Santo Domingo): 2209. Spanish territories benefited from Portuguese transatlantic slave traders during the union of the two Iberian Crowns, 1580–1640. On the ties between West and West Central Africa and the Spanish Caribbean during that time, see Wheat, Atlantic Africa. Schneider, “African Slavery and Spanish Empire”; Ramírez Torres, La compañía gaditana; Lucena Salmoral, Los códigos negros and Regulación de la esclavitud; de Castro and de la Calle, Origen de la colonización española; Cencillo de Pineda, El brigadier Conde de Argelejo; Sundiata, “A Note on an Abortive Slave Trade.” Tomich, “Wealth of Empire” and “‘Second Slavery.’” Schneider, “African Slavery and Spanish Empire.” Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, 61; Brading, “Bourbon Spain”; Lynch, “Institutional Framework”; García-Baquero González, Comercio colonial; Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform, 100–5; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 307; and Amores, Cuba en la época de Ezpeleta, 179–82.

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15. Tornero Tinajero, Crecimiento económico, and Tomich, “World Slavery and Caribbean Capitalism.” 16. Alan Kuethe and Douglas Inglis are an exception in that they focused on the role of the Havana elite brokering these reforms in their article, “Absolutism and Enlightened Reform.” 17. Again the exception is Alan Kuethe and Douglas Inglis, though they did not address African slavery in their article, “Absolutism and Enlightened Reform.” 18. For this argument, see, for example, Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform. 19. “Discurso que con motivo de la pérdida de la Habana formó Don Francisco Craywinkel,” Madrid, 1762, II/2869, fols. 289–300, esp. 290r, 291v, 295v, Biblioteca del Real Palacio; Craywinckel to Wall, “Discurso sobre la utilidad que España pudiera sacar de su desgracia en la pérdida de La Habana,” no. 12, 1762, AHN (Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid), Estado, 2927, no. 271; Torres-Cuevas, “El grupo de Aranda.” 20. See for example, Bryant, Rivers of Gold and Wheat, Atlantic Africa. 21. Marqués de Esquilace to Prado, 2 November 1762, AGI, SD, 1586, no. 387. 22. Béliardi to Choiseul, 13 October 1762, MS Fonds Français, fol. 297v, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, cited in Stein and Stein, Apogee of Empire, 51. 23. Ricardo Wall to Bernardo Tanucci, 21 December 1762, AGS (Archivo General de Simancas, Valladolid), Estado, 6093; Palacio Atard, El tercer pacto de familia, 246. 24. Proceso formado por orden del Rey Nuestro Señor por la Junta de Generales que S.M. se ha dignado de nombrar a este fin sobre la conducta que tuvieron en la defense, capitulación, pérdida, y rendición de la plaza de la Habana, y esquadra, que se hallaba en su Puerto el Mariscal de Campo Juan de Prado . . ., 2 vols. (Madrid, 1763–1765), I, BNE (Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid); “Proceso y sentencia dada al gobernador de la Habana, Don Juan de Prado,” 1765, MS 10421, BNE; Morón García, “El juicio por la pérdida”; Parcero Torre, La pérdida de la Habana, 194–202. 25. “Papeles aprehendidos entre los de Don Joseph García Gago, Secretario del Governador, y de la Junta formada en la Habana,” “No. 474: Relación simple de la comisión dada a Don Juan de Miralles para la negociación, y compra de negros en las colonias estrangeras,” I, and “Defensa del Mariscal de Campo Don Juan de Prado,” II, in Proceso formado de orden del Rey Nuestro Señor por la Junta de Generales, BNE. 26. On the importation of royal slaves to work on the fortifications, see Pérez Guzmán, La Habana, and Jennings, “War as the ‘Forcing House of Change.’” 27. For a complete account of the role of people of African descent during the siege of Havana, see Schneider, Occupation of Havana, 113–62. 28. Schneider, 219–20. 29. “Dictamen sobre las ventajas que pueden sacarse para el mejor fomento de la isla de Cuba,” n.d. [late 1760s], AGI, SD, 1156, no. 4, fols. 34v–35r; “Prospecto del proyecto para el establecimiento del abasto de negros de la

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Isla de Cuba,” II/2855, no. 2, fols. 19–31, BRP (Biblioteca del Real Palacio, Madrid). 30. Real orden, May 18, 1778, AGI, Cuba, 1258; King to Governor of the Philippines, 18 September 1779, and Joseph Barco y Vargas to Joseph de Galvez, 23 December 1778, both in AGI, Buenos Aires, 41; AGI, Mapas y Planos, Tejidos, 34 (1–15). See also, Schurz, “The Royal Philippine Company”; Díaz-Trechuelo Spínola, La real compañía de Filipinas; Real cédula de erección de la Compañía de Filipinas de 10 de Marzo de 1785 (Madrid, [1785]). 31. Schmidt-Nowara, Spanish Prisoner.

Bibliography Amores, Juan Bosco. Cuba en la época de Ezpeleta, 1785–1790. Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 2000. Brading, D. A. “Bourbon Spain and Its American Empire.” In Cambridge History of Latin America, vol.1, Colonial Latin America, edited by Leslie Bethell, 389–440. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Bryant, Sherwin. Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing Through Slavery in Colonial Quito. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Castilho, Celso Thomas. Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Cencillo de Pineda, Manuel. El brigadier Conde de Argelejo y su expedición militar a Fernando Poo en 1778. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto de Estudios Africanos, 1948. de Castro, Mariano L., and María Luisa de la Calle. Origen de la colonización española en Guinea Ecuatorial (1777–1860). Valladolid: Ediciones Universidad de Valladolid, 1992. Díaz-Trechuelo Spínola, María Lourdes. La real compañía de Filipinas. Seville: Publicaciones de la Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1965. Elliott, John H. Empires of the Atlantic World. Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Ferrer, Ada. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Fradera, Josep M., and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds. Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. García-Baquero González, Antonio. El comercio colonial en la época de absolutismo ilustrado: problemas y debates. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2003. Jennings, Evelyn Powell. “War as the ‘Forcing House of Change’: State Slavery in Late-Eighteenth-Century Cuba.” William and Mary Quarterly 63 (2005): 411–40. Kuethe, Allan J., and G. Douglas Inglis. “Absolutism and Enlightened Reform: Charles III, the Establishment of the Alcabala, and Commerical Reorganization in Cuba.” Past and Present 109 (November 1985): 118–43.

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Lucena Salmoral, Manuel. Los códigos negros de la América española. Alcalá de Henares: Ediciones UNESCO, Universidad Alcalá de Henares, 1996. ———. Regulación de la esclavitud negra en las colonias de américa española (1503–1886): Documentos para su estudio. Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, 2005. Lynch, John. “The Institutional Framework of Colonial Spanish America.” Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (1992): 69–81. Morón García, José. “El juicio por la pérdida de la Habana en 1762.” Baluarte 1 (1994): 40–46. Palacio Atard, Vicente. El tercer pacto de familia. Madrid: Publicaciones de la Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1945. Paquette, Gabriel. Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 1759–1808. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Parcero Torre, Celia María. La pérdida de la Habana y las reformas borbónicas en Cuba. Léon: Junta de Castilla-Léon, 1998. Pérez Guzmán, Francisco. La Habana: Clave de un imperio. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1997. Ramírez Torres, Bibiano. La compañía gaditana de negros. Sevilla: Publicaciones de la Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de la Universidad de Sevilla, 1973. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. ———. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. ———. Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011. ———, ed. A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire: The Diary of Fernando Blanco White’s Flight to Freedom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, and John M. Nieto-Phillips. Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Schneider, Elena. “African Slavery and Spanish Empire: Imperial Imaginings and Bourbon Reform in the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of Early American History 5 (2015): 3–29. ———. The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Schurz, William Lytle. “The Royal Philippine Company.” HAHR 3 (1920): 491–508. Scott, Rebecca J. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899, 2nd ed. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Scott, Rebecca J., and Jean M. Hébrard. Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Stein, Stanley J., and Barbara H. Stein. Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759–1789. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2003.

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Sundiata, I. K. “A Note on an Abortive Slave Trade: Fernando Po 1778–1781.” Bulletin de l’Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire, Série B 35, no. 4 (1973): 793–804. Tomich, Dale. “‘The Second Slavery’: Bonded Labor and the Transformation of the Nineteenth-Century World Economy.” In Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy, 56–74. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. ———. “The Wealth of Empire Francisco Arango y Parreño, Political Economy, and the Second Slavery in Cuba.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 1 (2003): 4–28. ———. “World Slavery and Caribbean Capitalism: The Cuban Sugar Industry, 1760–1868.” Theory and Society 20 (1991): 297–319. Tornero Tinajero, Pablo. Crecimiento económico y transformaciones sociales: esclavos, hacendados, y comerciantes en la Cuba colonial (1760–1840). Madrid: Ministerio de Trabajo y Seguridad Social, 1996. Torres-Cuevas, Eduardo. “El grupo de Aranda en Cuba y los inicio de una nueva época.” In El Conde de Aranda y su tiempo. Vol. 2, edited by José Antonio Ferrer and Esteban Sarasa Sánchez, 323–48. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2000. Wheat, David. Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Chapter 7

Empire and Antislavery through a New Lens Spanish Colonialism Seen from the Dominican Republic and Haiti Anne Eller

å Es cual rosa de montaña de Quisqueya flor sencilla, que da vida y no mancilla ni tolera flor extraña . . . [It is a mountain rose from Quisqueya a simple flower, that nourishes and does not harm nor does it tolerate outside flowers . . .] —José Martí, Versos sencillos (1891)1

In Empire and Antislavery, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara considers midnineteenth-century Spanish reformers, together with attentive interlocutors in the Caribbean and the Philippines, as they grappled with fundamental questions of imperial policy: slavery and political representation.2 His intervention was most welcome. After the massive territorial loss of continental Spanish America by the dawn of the 1820s, political turmoil in the Iberian Peninsula worsened. Because of this loss of territory and Spain’s political and economic predicament, scholars often minimize Spanish imperial debates in the middle of the nineteenth century as “but a footnote in the age of empire.”3 Schmidt-Nowara’s Empire and Antislavery took midcentury Spanish policy seriously, and Josep Fradera and others joined him to rectify the lack of research on these transitions, producing a rich conversation about Spanish authorities’ Caribbean policies.4 Other scholars offer complex and important analyses of political loyalties and abolition contests in the Caribbean

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itself.5 In the grand narratives of mid-nineteenth-century imperialism however, the Spanish empire remains at the margins of the global historians’ conversation that looks to renewed colonial violence in Africa and on other shores. Although Cuban plantations have been well integrated into studies of second slavery, for example, scholars generally characterize this expansion as an in-situ innovation, directed by planters in the interests of local and hemispheric capital. Scholars describe how an entire brutal plantation complex flourished in Cuba, without particular reinforcement from the metropole, except perhaps the pronounced blind eye officials turned to the illegal slave trade. Puerto Rico’s nineteenth-century plantation expansion emerged less dramatically, although sugar and coffee production doubled from an amalgam of enslaved and free labor.6 Cuban and Puerto Rican abolitionist and independence activists in the nineteenth century faced different circumstances and forged different paths. Despite their grievances against Spain, many proslavery Cuban political elites decided that the tumult provoked by independence efforts would be too risky, retreating from the prospect of realigning their fate with the antebellum United States for the same reason. A smattering of filibuster efforts came to little. Only after Cuban emancipation was complete in 1886, scholars argue, was the path clearer for independence.7 Puerto Rican abolitionists and independentists acted within a somewhat different landscape, where the unavailability of land and capital, and competition with Brazilian coffee and later European beet sugar, frustrated slave owners’ aggressive expansionist inclinations somewhat. In Empire and Antislavery, Chris details how abolitionists in Spain argued that free labor would sustain, rather than sink, the future of sugar production in Puerto Rico.8 “Free” laborers simultaneously faced new restrictions as authorities implemented a number of measures meant to restrain the movement of freed individuals off of plantations, however, and land ownership concentrated further in the hands of few.9 An autonomist movement grew in Puerto Rico and unsteadily in Spain; Spain conceded autonomy to Puerto Rico in 1897 after fighting broke out in Cuba for the final time. There was a third Spanish Caribbean colony at the dawn of the nineteenth century, of course—Santo Domingo—but the territory became independent (with Haiti) in 1822, prior to the beginning of the period considered by Empire and Antislavery. Nevertheless, Chris’s analysis of Spanish policy in nineteenth century, particularly how Spanish colonialism emerges as more dynamic than often considered, greatly influenced my perspective in studying the reoccupation of the independent Dominican Republic. To retell the tale of Spanish reoccupation of the

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nation—realized in 1861, prior to emancipation in Cuba or Puerto Rico, and in the height of debates about Caribbean self-governance, and nearly four decades after Dominican separation from Spain— Chris was a logical interlocutor. In our first email correspondence, Chris was kind enough to respond to a second-year graduate student who knew very little, writing back with paragraphs of archive advice and, humbly, only in closing mentioned his own work. He attached a forthcoming essay that was not yet even in print. That was what kind of generous and forthright mentor and colleague Chris was. He was the second reader on my book manuscript, later published as We Dream Together (2016), and I was lucky enough to receive one round of his advice in review. In this essay, I will reproduce some of the insights that he offered, as I examine the meaning of the contests over emancipation in Cuba and Puerto Rico to Dominican and Haitian citizens. It concludes with Spanish generals’ meditations on the meaning of Dominican annexation to Spain’s empire in the 1880s, nearly two decades after its spectacular failure.

Dominicans and Haitians Assess Spanish Caribbean Rule The project of Dominican annexation in 1861 dovetailed with the ambition of Spanish administrators serving in Cuba particularly. Anticipation for the appearance of the so-called special laws that were to govern Spain’s Caribbean holdings are key to understanding how certain authorities and Caribbean figures saw Dominican annexation to Spain in 1861 as a key opportunity for reform and expanded local authority after decades of reversals. In the decades after they were first promised at the dawn of the nineteenth century, no laws materialized, despite increasingly vocal complaints from Cuban and Puerto Rican elites.10 Spanish governors of Cuba acknowledged this breach. When the embattled Dominican strongman president, Pedro Santana, offered the Dominican nation to Spanish authorities after several decades of annexationist rumblings, the Spanish governor of Cuba, Francisco Serrano, jumped at the chance of returning the territory to the Spanish empire. Annexing the Dominican Republic represented the chance for a new bulwark against US filibuster efforts and the chance to force certain questions of Caribbean governance in Madrid. To be sure, the premise of annexation was voluntary and anti-Black: Santana’s coterie sold a story of desperate Dominicans, unable to fend off Haitian aggression. The Cuban governor did not particularly focus on the Dominican leader’s anti-Haitian “race war” narrative, as much as

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it was an ingratiating discourse. His concerns were pragmatic: to abet Spain’s goal to fend off growing US power in the region. The moment was exactly right to make this move and to save, through reform, the Spanish empire. At the exact same moment as a crisis of secession and battles over slavery distracted authorities in the United States, the Cuban governor authorized authorities and troops to move into Dominican territory, occupying it in 1861. The Spanish perspective of the research, then dissertation and later manuscript, was always the weakest point of my inquiry. I dedicated the majority of my energy into trying to pick apart the details of the occupation on the ground, picking apart court cases of the rebellion that began against the arriving Spanish occupiers for rural Dominican voices. Interactions with Spanish soldiers and civil authorities came to life, too, in a very local context. A wonderful dissertation by Francisco Febres-Cordero Carrillo, completed at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, about the occupation and the subsequent independence fight, as seen from the perspective of the Spanish troops, supplemented this social history pursuit.11 But how did the Dominican annexation project fit with the larger context of midcentury Spanish empire? This was a question that my documents did not immediately answer. Chris’s advice to me was to locate the annexation of Santo Domingo within a broadened perspective of Spanish-Atlantic discussions about abolition and Caribbean governance, to add questions of imperial policy to consideration of these material and social contests. Chris encouraged me to focus on the greater meaning of Spain’s long-promised “special laws,” laws that legislators never even passed, in order to elaborate principles of Caribbean political autonomy. They were, in Trouillot’s invocation, “unthinkable,” or rather: regularly invoked but always simultaneously opposed, present, but in the relief of their putative “impossibility,” epistemologically unspeakable, their impact potentially disastrous.12 Legislators promised laws that would extend a legal frame of inclusion and representation to Spain’s overseas empire. For decades after the wars of independence, Spain’s remaining overseas possessions—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—remained in legal limbo, outside of constitutional rule. Spain’s 1812 constitution proposed the transformation of the American colonies into representative provinces, albeit with unequal representation. Even though the document excluded men of African ancestry from citizenship, Cuban planters had opposed it, associating constitutionalism with abolitionism. Implementation stalled, anyway, as independence vitiated the empire. In 1837, Caribbean representatives were expelled from Madrid’s Cortes altogether. Spain ruled the overseas territories in

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a state of exception for the next several decades, as centralized, militarized government controlled the islands. Political divides on the peninsula and the question of slavery forestalled any conclusive legislative changes.13 Chris’s advice to focus on this Atlantic context fell on ready ears; just like every other graduate student of a certain vintage, I had read the numerous texts exhorting a transimperial framework in the early 2000s, whether in the framework of Atlantic history, “New Colonial History,” or some other moniker. I knew these contests mattered in this brief reoccupation, even as the center of my energies never strayed far from Dominican soil. But how to consider laws that had never even been drafted? Wrestling with this midcentury legal limbo underscores a fundamental truth: governing in a state of exception was not an aberration but the fundament of imperial policy toward the Caribbean in the mid-nineteenth century even beyond the Spanish empire. Chris pointed me toward Miranda Spieler’s article, “The Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution,” which highlights how metropolitan authorities rescinded Caribbean local governance precisely in response to the battles of liberation that raged in Saint-Domingue. As Latin American territories moved to independence, as settler colonial projects in Canada, Algeria, South Africa, and elsewhere moved to republican reforms and federative inclusion for their white male citizens, authorities determined that exceptionality itself would define the Caribbean. Citing Haiti’s Black liberation and the putative “failure” of post-abolition British islands, politicians, proslavery commentators, and imperial advocates resolved that these political rights would not be expanded to the Caribbean. In the French Caribbean, expanded suffrage lasted only a few hundred days. The move away from local legislature to direct rule by the colonial office, Crown Colony status, in Jamaica after 1865 is well known.14 Meanwhile, new labor unfreedoms arrived steadily. In this broader imperial and hemispheric context, it becomes clear that Dominican annexation in 1861 was not some folly, a prestige project, or a fool’s mission, as nationalist historiographies have sometimes depicted it (the French-Habsburg occupation of Mexico at the same time also sometimes receives this treatment). Dominican annexation seemed to be a welcome development. From the perspective of the Spanish governor in Cuba who worked the Dominican president to change flags in the territory, annexation represented a very specific kind of legal wedge, to force a different kind of empire through the potential extension of constitutional rule to the territory, which had been free of slavery for nearly forty years. French and British pundits,

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eager to forestall US expansion in the Gulf of Mexico, quickly shifted from surprise to approval at the annexation news. In the earliest drafts of my manuscript, Spanish authorities arriving to Dominican territory were something like malevolent specters, an undifferentiated elite who ruled without contest. Chris urged me to engage with their interaction with powerful local elites, the Arango y Parreños of the region.15 It was these planters, merchants, and other wealthy men who insisted on gaining the ear of Caribbean colonial administrators. Their consensus and pleas at midcentury, paraphrased, went something like this: send us more troops; we fear abolitionist conspiracies born at home and from abroad, and expand our integration into the empire, promptly, or we just might entertain all of these proslavery US filibusters in earnest.16 In 1859, wealthy Cubans sent two representatives to Madrid in anticipation of representation that did not yet exist. Puerto Rican authorities grappled with their lack of capital and redoubled efforts to control free labor. In dialogue with these Cuban and Puerto Rican elites, Governor Serrano and other high-ranking military authorities stationed in Cuba traveled to Santo Domingo and surmised that a mix of metropolitan civil law and Spanish Caribbean colonial law would rule the territory. Dominican elites expected to be integrated into the empire as a free labor province. A whole pastiche of laws would govern. Cuban elites looked on eagerly, celebrating the dispatch of troops from Havana. Were they oblivious to the precedent that a free-labor Spanish territory would pose? Did they feel secretly confident that the new acquisition would only bolster their own power? At any rate, events unfolded rapidly. US secession began at almost exactly the same moment. Dominicans’ assessment of Spanish promises to maintain a freelabor territory are telling: many did not trust the project from the first days. The Haitian president, Fabre Nicholas Geffrard, felt similarly, and issued a resounding condemnation before Spanish warships forced him into silence in the summer of 1861. Just as Chris’s research in Empire and Antislavery shows Spanish abolitionism to have been a very indeterminate project, so did Haitians and Dominicans assess Spanish free labor commitments grimly. Indeed, the projects that Spanish authorities and their collaborators hoped to realize in the new territory were kin to cash-crop endeavors throughout the imperial world at the moment. Among the crops they hoped to foment was cotton. The manner through which officials and their allies expected to make the colony profitable was a combination between increased domestic labor control and—it seems, although there was never much time for this project to take shape—indentured labor.17 In this endeavor, a weird

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amalgam of civil rule and an occupation of the sort that Africanist scholars might refer to as “hegemony on a shoestring,” Spanish administrators hoped to strike a precarious line between discourses of fraternalism conflicted with the frank colonial nature of their actual intent.18 An anti-Spanish rebellion took place between 1863 and 1865; it is known in Dominican historiography as La Guerra de la Restauración (The War of Restoration) to re-establish the republic. Beyond national liberation, many rebels indicted Spain’s slaveholding projects in its neighboring colonies. Many Dominicans focused quite intently on the labor control threats that loomed at the hands (and guns) of the newly arriving authorities and troops, well before authorities could implement changes. In this perception and in the rebellion they mounted, we see here, too, the importance of a regional, even hemispheric, analysis. Dominicans from towns and rural spaces across the territory rebelled with a pointed and urgent rallying cry: more occupation would bring enslavement. The ubiquity of this warning might seem like a paradox in a putatively “non-plantation” space. In the context of restricted Caribbean sovereignty, hostile emancipation regimes, Spanish slavery, and also growing projects across the Atlantic, however, the logic of their fears emerges as a lucid warning for other Caribbean residents. Just as Chris thought carefully about geographic frameworks, it is useful to think how Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo/the Dominican Republic are sometimes occluded within the historiography of Latin American independence, and what promise a collective field of study of “Caribbean representation struggles” might bring. At any rate, this rebellion certainly crossed national lines; both the occupiers and the rebels looked to Haiti. Spanish authorities called for a “Leclerc-like” expedition to crush the resistance, in a chilling reference to French violence during liberation struggles of the Haitian Revolution’s final months. But just as France could not quell the massive rebellions of six decades prior, the Spanish could not defeat the island’s guerrilla resistance. Chris’s closing counsel within his gentle and constructive advice about the manuscript was firmer: you must write a conclusion. He was right, of course, and his admonition strikes at the heart of the importance of scrutinizing midcentury Spanish policy through the social contests in the islands themselves. The Dominican rebellion contributed to a crisis in Spanish slavery in a manner and to a degree that rarely receives proper consideration. Nervous authorities prohibited discussion of abolitionism in Cuba in 1862, and as the fighting began in the neighboring island, they tried to ban it even in Madrid. Chris de-

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scribes better than I could recapitulate the societies that sprang up in Madrid at this exact moment. When Spanish occupation collapsed in 1865 at the hands of peasant rebels, the event must have been dramatic and astounding news in Havana and San Juan. “Bullets don’t respect the Spanish,” a Puerto Rican rebel tract exulted as war in Santo Domingo raged.19 In the conclusion of We Dream Together, I discuss how news of Spanish defeat spread, and I insist that Dominican victory played a direct role in the calls for independence and full emancipation in the neighboring islands, just three years later. While We Dream Together meditates mostly on the cost of mobilization for independence in its closing pages, in this chapter I take the opportunity, at Chris’s behest, to focus on the conversation about the impact of the failed Dominican venture in Spain. Schmidt-Nowara’s critical perspectives on the reinvigoration, rather than just a neat “decline,” of Spanish empire in the middle decades of the nineteenth century mandate this conversation. The interpretation that the Dominican annexation project might be a lesson for a renewed Spanish Caribbean project is a discussion that has been erased, just as the entire occupation is often omitted entirely. Once again, however, it is a dialectic of struggle between Caribbean and Spanish actors that deserves more consideration.

“The Memory of Glorious and Unfortunate Events”: General Gándara’s Lessons for Saving Empire, 1884 As Spain attempted to maintain its control over Cuba and Puerto Rico in the 1860s, annexation’s failure in Santo Domingo remained the subject of scrutiny in Spain, and soldiers and officers who had served in the endeavor weighed in in public Spanish debates. Infantry Captain Ramón González Tablas published a monograph-length account that was extraordinarily critical of Spanish weakness in suppressing the Dominican rebels, predicting “torrents of blood” in remaining Spanish possessions.20 Even more prominently, General José de la Gándara, the final governor of the rebellious colony, sought to redirect colonial policy. A high-ranking officer with extensive political and military experience on the peninsula and in Cuba, General Gándara had the dubious honor of leaving a post in eastern Cuba to become the last Captain-General of Santo Domingo during the failed occupation and the head of Spanish Caribbean forces during the majority of the annexation fighting.

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News of General Gándara’s planned memoirs sparked opposition in high places after he returned to Spain. Both Union Liberal leader Leopoldo O’Donnell and Queen Isabel II fought against the publication of his memoirs for nearly twenty years.21 Finally published in 1884, the 1104-page account, Anexión y guerra en Santo Domingo, reflects the general’s bitter disappointment with the annexation project and his concern for “the most vital questions of interior and exterior order for Spanish policy” raised by the endeavor.22 Gándara intended his memoirs as a manual for Spanish imperial survival, aiming to address the failure of Dominican annexation in a sober and pragmatic tone. Building a thesis of the impracticality of Dominican annexation on practical rather than moral or political grounds, the memoir’s first volume begins with a sweeping narrative of Santo Domingo’s colonial history and a more in-depth portrait of a troubled independent state after 1844. Next, Gándara takes clear-eyed aim at the impractical and misguided elements of the brief Spanish reforms from 1861–63; he is critical in particular of the “complicated and numerous bureaucracy” and the speed with which incoming officials expected Dominicans to adhere to strictures that were contradictory to the territory’s recent “history, aspirations, customs, and character.”23 As the fighting began, he is equally critical of the military missteps by various Spanish and loyal Dominican officials, and he freely admits the popular support of the anti-Spanish insurrection in Dominican territory. Published during a peace that followed more than ten years of fighting in Cuba, the general minces no words about how opposition could quickly become massive. Gándara intended his description of the end of the war, similarly, to be a warning for Cuban and Puerto Rican policy. By the end of August 1863, he argues, it was clear that Spanish abandonment of Dominican territory was the only feasible option, although it was not to come for two more years of fighting (the subject of the entire second volume).24 Of the terrible impact of Spanish failure, he writes, the way in which we governed Santo Domingo drove sympathies and prestige to the breaking point in America and served to foment discontent, which, as time went on, obligated us to an arduous and difficult war in Cuba. The way we abandoned Santo Domingo allowed interpretation that we weren’t strong enough, nor vigorous enough to maintain our dominion in the Antilles.

The importance of this defeat to Spanish domination in Cuba was obvious. Gándara continues,

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Is it strange that, believing us weak, a part of the Cubans would take up arms . . . ? Those who seek to attribute that fight and that rebellion on the island of Cuba to Liberal policy have much to learn in this book [about Conservative errors]. 25

The “glorious and unfortunate events” of Santo Domingo had served to make the Spanish empire look weak and blundering, the general concluded, but nor should Spanish liberalism of the 1860s neatly be faulted. The failure of Dominican annexation compounded the lessons learned from the earlier independence movements in Latin America, Gándara argued, underscoring that shared cultural heritage and affinity alone were insufficient to secure colonial domination. South and Central American movements had demonstrated with what ease such bonds could be broken; Santo Domingo was an even more exceptional case of colonial neglect, he argued, and so authorities ought to have been suspicious. The purported españolismo vaunted by Dominican president Pedro Santana to be genuine affect for the Spanish and support for annexation in the Dominican Republic proved to be “simply a rhetorical move,” the general observes, bitterly.26 In a drastic revision of all of the pre-annexation writings, Gándara argues that Spain “in reality had not done more than discover and conquer” the territory; most Dominicans felt profoundly “indifferent” toward the Spanish in 1861, with sentiment declining quickly.27 Transgressing the weak fraternal bonds had made a spectacle of their fracture, exposing anti-Spanish sentiment for all of the region to see. The Spanish empire of the 1880s ought to recur to soft power, Gándara urges. He emphasized the utility of extensive diplomatic outreach in Latin America for the 1880s, in order to foment a relationship of “tight connection and intimate friendship” with the republics of South America and to maintain Cuba and Puerto Rico.28 Continued Spanish hegemony in the region could only be maintained by conquering great sympathies in Central and South America, lending to those countries valuable and important services . . . erasing the traces of old aggravations and bloody struggles . . . . The monarchy, to continue subsisting, must bind itself to liberty and transform itself, sacrificing in the plow of democracy its most valued and precious prerogatives; so we will be able to continue occupying in America a preponderant and respectable role, we ought to have modified our colonial policy a long time ago and continued with the emancipated colonies.

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He is silent about Spain’s flagging economic role, about the strength of British commercial ties, and the growing and vital role of US trade. Only demonstration of Spain’s commitment to liberal principles could stave off the “invasive influence of the other [Anglo-Saxon] race,” he warns.29 Gándara’s account underscores the tremendous rigidity and durability of racist Spanish colonial schema, only barely latent in the above fraternal exhortations. He saw the Dominican Republic’s lack of plantation development as a sign of irredeemable weakness and the source of its political disorganization. He judged the relative social equality of the Dominican population as disorganized, if not dangerous, and his unease with nonwhite subjects is constant. He wrote in frustration about the “Dominican national character.”30 Colonization by a “robust and flowering people” was the only way to regain their “lost virility,” he argues, “inoculat[ing] them, to say it that way, with purer blood, less stirred up and African.”31 Haiti preoccupies Gándara further, underscoring the distinct and anxious regard colonial observers reserved for the Black republic in particular into the 1880s, on the eve of emancipation in Cuba. It was Haiti that was violating the “principles of universal brotherhood,” the general argues, mysteriously.32 “More cultured, stronger, more educated and richer than the Dominicans, the proximity of this adversary has been a perennial element of disorder and malestar for the Spanish part of the island and for its inhabitants,” he concludes.33 He is preoccupied with the idea that Haiti was propagating a race war. The proclamations issued by President Geffrard against the Spanish occupation merely proved that the president sought a “war of the races,” he insists.34 Fear of Black empire follows. Gándara is convinced that the Haitian state “conceived a plan for a black republic that dominated in all of the island of Santo Domingo, lending a hand to Cuba, and extending to Jamaica,” to be effected as quickly as possible.35 For all of the mistakes of the ill-planned Dominican endeavor, imperialism remained a benevolent and necessary part of the Spanish national project, Gándara concludes. A country without ambitions of national and material aggrandizement was “a miserable one and will languish . . . just the [imperial] aspiration itself is dignifying and unites the country,” he writes.36 The desire to imperialize was “always noble and grand and worthy of praise, because it reveals a profound and sincere patriotism,” the general argued, as long as it was part of a “politics of growth” (engrandecimiento) rather than “sterile adventures and disasters.”37 He remained convinced of Spanish moral authority. Few

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nations were “so generous, so candid,” he insists, continuing, “Spain in every epoch has exemplified that certain platonic and disinterested love.” “In Cervantes’ country, the ingenious hidalgo has never gone away, nor will he ever probably,” the general muses grandiloquently.38 The foot soldiers of these imperial projects were “glorious,” he continues, and he dedicates the memoir to the fallen “who on the ungrateful ground of that Antille, spilled their blood” in the service of Spain.39 Despite being prohibited from doing writing by both liberal and conservative authorities, Gándara persisted in writing, so that “real public opinion, together with the upright and disinterested men who deplore in silence the ills of the country” might work for the national—and imperial—glory of the Spanish nation.40 Pragmatic expansion, rather than “imaginary philosophizing,” might yield Spanish gains in Europe and Africa, he boasts.41

Force Meets Force Even as Gándara praises the prospect of new imperial expansion, foreboding simultaneously pervades in his memoir about the future of Spain’s Caribbean possessions. His analysis recalls, however grudgingly, all of the complexity of Cuban and Puerto Rican political debates of the 1880s in which autonomists and independentists unevenly gained ground. “The injustices that we have committed and still continue to commit with the people [of African] lineage” earned opposition, Gándara admits. On the prospect of resistance to this colonial violence, he acknowledges, simply, “We cannot protest . . ., just as the feudal lords could not protest against the Jacquerie. Force has no more logical response in the world than force.” He concludes, “Every fault has its punishment.”42 Cuban elites in particular echoed his fears; desperately unwilling to admit that the hard-fought contest for abolition might be won, they threatened that independence fighting would bring race war.43 Dominican observers anticipated the political events of the neighboring islands more eagerly, however. “You are leaving your patria, going to mine,” an exiled Dominican poet wrote to a woman in Matanzas in 1882. “Don’t be sad any more, stop crying,” he reassured her. “Sky for sky, star for star, valley for valley . . . souls for souls . . . everything is the same,” he wrote. 44 He affirmed more unity between the islands than Gándara had ever hoped to acknowledge. Within a few years, the anticolonial fighting began anew.

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Anne Eller is associate professor of history and affiliate of Spanish and African-American Studies at Yale University. Duke University Press published her first book, We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom, in 2016. She is currently writing about political struggles around the Caribbean in the 1890s.

Notes 1. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 296. 2. Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery. 3. Morillo-Alicea, “‘Aquel laberinto de oficinas,’” 111–40. Chris traced a genealogy of this distortion in his review essay “Silver, Slaves, and Sugar,” 196–210. 4. Fradera, Gobernar colonias; Fradera and Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery and Antislavery; Fradera, Nación imperial. 5. Foundational texts on Cuban emancipation struggles and midcentury political contests include: Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba; García Rodríguez, Conspiraciones y revueltas; Barcia, Seeds of Insurrection; Reid-Vazquez, The Year of the Lash; Sartorius, Ever Faithful; Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba; Chira, “Affective Debts.” Titles in Puerto Rico include: Scarano, Haciendas y barracones; Picó, Al filo del poder; Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery, & Freedom; Carlo Altieri, Justicia y gobierno; Rodríguez Silva, Silencing Race; Baerga, Negociaciones de sangre. 6. Laviña, “Puerto Rico: ‘Atlantización,’” 103; Rood, The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery. 7. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba. 8. Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 7. 9. Carrasquillo, Our Landless Patria. 10. Fradera, “Spain’s Special Overseas Laws,” in Spain, Europe and the Atlantic, 334–49, 338, 348; Fradera, “Reading Imperial Transitions,” 57; Marquese and Parron, “Atlantic Constitutionalism,” 184; Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 25. See full discussion in Eller, We Dream Together. 11. Febres-Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión y la Guerra.” 12. Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Scholars have suggested that the silencing was not total but rather that the silencing paradigm invites us to look closely for what conversation did occur (including through the movement of people and goods); Ferrer, “Talk about Haiti.” 13. Fradera, “Spain’s Special Overseas Laws,” 338, 348; Marquese and Parron, “Atlantic Constitutionalism,” 184; Fradera, “Reading Imperial Transitions,” 57; Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 25. 14. Holt, The Problem of Freedom. 15. Francisco Arrango y Parreño was a Cuban planter who was famously influential in the expansion of the Cuban plantation state at the dawn of the nineteenth century. There is no exact Dominican equivalent for the era, although wealthy loyalist families like the Del Monte shared a similar

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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vision for the Caribbean: cash-crop production and unfree labor. See We Dream Together, Chapter 3. Recent important works on the expansion of the Cuban plantation system include Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror; Schneider, The Occupation of Havana. Some of these complaints are summarized in Febres-Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión y la Guerra,” 137. For US conceptions of these filibuster enterprises, see for example, Leary, A Cultural History of Underdevelopment, Chapter 1. Other appeals to Spanish empire, critically, surged from below. See Sartorius, Ever Faithful. See Eller, We Dream Together, Chapter 3. Barry, “Hegemony on a Shoestring.” Suárez Díaz, El Antillano, 60. González Tablas, Historia de la dominación, 229. Gándara y Navarro, Anexión y Guerra, 7. Gándara y Navarro, 3. Gándara y Navarro, xvi. Gándara y Navarro, 6, 290. Gándara y Navarro, xx–xxi. Gándara y Navarro, 72. Gándara y Navarro, 72, 79. Gándara y Navarro, 104. Gándara y Navarro, 104. Gándara y Navarro, 78–79. Gándara y Navarro, 80. Gándara y Navarro, 62. Gándara y Navarro, 63. Gándara y Navarro, 275, 205. Gándara y Navarro, 275. Gándara y Navarro, xi. Gándara y Navarro, xii. Gándara y Navarro, 80. Gándara y Navarro, 80, 1. Gándara y Navarro, 11. Gándara y Navarro, 196. Gándara y Navarro, 63. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 8. Lavastida, “En un abánico,” 379.

Bibliography Baerga, María del Carmen. Negociaciones de sangre: Dinámicas racializantes en el Puerto Rico decimonónico. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2015. Barcia, Manuel. Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808–1848. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

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Barry, Sara. “Hegemony on a Shoestring: Indirect Rule and Access to Agricultural Lands.” Africa 62, no. 3 (1992): 327–55. Carlo Altieri, Gerardo A. Justicia y gobierno: la Audiencia de Puerto Rico (1831– 1861). Madrid: CSIC, 2007. Carrasquillo, Rosa. Our Landless Patria: Marginal Citizenship and Race in Caguas, Puerto Rico, 1880–1910. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Chira, Adriana. “Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817–68.” Law and History Review 36, no. 1 (Feb. 2018): 1–33. Eller, Anne. We Dream Together: Dominican Independence, Haiti, and the Fight for Caribbean Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Febres-Cordero Carrillo, Francisco. “La anexión y la Guerra de Restauración dominicana desde las filas españolas (1861–65).” PhD diss., University of Puerto Rico, 2008. Ferrer, Ada. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ———. Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. ———. “Talk about Haiti.” In Tree of Liberty: The Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, edited by Doris L. Garraway, 21–40. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008. Figueroa, Luis A. Sugar, Slavery, & Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Finch, Aisha. Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Fradera, Josep. Gobernar colonias. Barcelona: Península, 1999. ———. Nación imperial: derechos, representación y ciudadanía en los imperios de Gran Bretaña, Francia, España y Estados Unidos (1750–1918). 2 vols. Barcelona: Edhasa, 2015. ———. “Reading Imperial Transitions: Spanish Contraction, British Expansion, and American Irruption.” In Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, 34–62. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. ———. “Why Were Spain’s Special Overseas Laws Never Enacted?” In Spain, Europe and the Atlantic: Essays in Honour of John H. Elliott, edited by Richard L. Kagan and Geoffrey Parker, 334–49. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Fradera, Josep, and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds. Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Gándara y Navarro, José de la. Anexión y Guerra en Santo Domingo. Madrid: Impresora de “el correo militar,” 1884. García Rodríguez, Gloria. Conspiraciones y revueltas: la actividad política de los negros en Cuba 1790–1845. Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 2003. González Tablas, Ramón. Historia de la dominación y última Guerra de España en Santo Domingo. Madrid: Imprenta á cargo de Fernando Cao, 1870.

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Holt, Thomas. The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938. Washington, DC: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Lavastida, Miguel Alfredo. “En un abánico.” In Reseña histórico-crítica de la poesia en Santo Domingo. Notas y adiciones de Vetilio Alfau Durán, edited by César Nicolás Penson, 379. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1980. Laviña, Javier. “Puerto Rico: ‘Atlantización,’ and Culture during the ‘Segunda Esclavitud.’” In The Second Slavery: Mass Slaveries and Modernity in the Americas and in the Atlantic Basin, edited by Javier Laviña and Michael Zeuske, 93–112. Zürich: Lit Verlag, 2014. Leary, John Patrick. A Cultural History of Underdevelopment: Latin America in the US Imaginary. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Marquese, Rafael, and Tâmis Parron. “Atlantic Constitutionalism and the Ideology of Slavery: The Cádiz Experience in Comparative Perspective.” In The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World: The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812, edited by Scott Eastman and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, 177–93. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. Morillo-Alicea, Javier. “‘Aquel laberinto de oficinas’: Ways of Knowing Empire in Late Nineteenth-Century Spain.” In After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas, edited by Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero, 111–40. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Picó, Fernando. Al filo del poder: subalternos y dominantes en Puerto Rico, 1739–1910. Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993. Reid-Vazquez, Michele. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Rodríguez Silva, Ileana. Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Rood, Daniel. The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean. New York: Oxford, 2017. Sartorius, David. Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Scarano, Francisco. Haciendas y barracones: azúcar y esclavitud en Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1800–1850. San Juan: Ediciones Huracán, 1993. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. ———. “Silver, Slaves, and Sugar: The Persistence of Spanish Colonialism from Absolutism to Liberalism.” Latin American Research Review 39, no. 2 (2004): 196–210. Schneider, Elena. The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Scott, Rebecca J. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

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Suárez Díaz, Ada. El Antillano: Biografía de Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances, 1827– 1898. San Juan: Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe, 1988. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and Production in History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Vicioso, Abelardo. El freno hatero en la literatura dominicana. Santo Domingo: Editora de la UASD, 1983.

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara as a graduate student in the early 1990s. Photograph courtesy of the Schmidt-Nowara family.

Thanksgiving celebration of Fulbright Fellows in El Escorial, Spain in 1991. From left to right: Deborah Ortiz, Bob Pavich, Mario Padilla, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Sandie Holguín (University of Oklahoma), Mary Coffey (Pomona College), Elena Ortiz, Geoff Jensen (Virginia Military Academy), David Ortiz, Jr. (University of Arizona), and Inés Sánchez de Madariaga (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid). Photograph courtesy of David Ortiz.

Panelists for the conference “The Politics of Second Slavery” held on 16 October 2010 at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, World-Systems, and Civilizations (Binghamton University). From left to right: Rafael Marquese (University of São Paulo), Edward Rugemer (Yale University), Enrico Dal Lago (National University of Ireland, Galway), Edward Baptist (Cornell University), Robin Blackburn (University of Essex, New School for Social Research), Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (Fordham University), Dale Tomich (Binghamton University), and Ricardo Salles (Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro). Kneeling: Daniel Rood (University of Georgia); crouched: Celso Castillo (Vanderbilt University). Photograph courtesy of Dale Tomich.

At the annual conference of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies held at Tufts University in March 2012. From left to right: Josep Maria Fradera (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Stephen Jacobson (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Joshua Goode (Claremont Graduate University), and James Amelang (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid). Photograph courtesy of Stephen Jacobson.

With the members of the testimonial panel dedicated to the scholarly work of Professor José Álvarez Junco at the ASPHS at the Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, in June 2014. From left to right: Pamela Radcliff (University of California, San Diego), José Álvarez Junco (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Scott Eastman (Creighton University), Stephen Jacobson (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), and Nigel Townson (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). Photograph courtesy of Stephen Jacobson.

With Montserrat Miller (Marshall University) and David Messenger (University of South Alabama) at the ASPHS conference held at Johns Hopkins University in March of 2014. Photograph courtesy of Enrique Sanabria.

With Iris Montero Sobrevilla (Brown University) and Marcela Echeverri (Yale University) at the John Carter Brown Library Jamboree in May of 2015 (Brown University). Photograph courtesy of Neil Safier.

Chapter 8

Unlocking the Historical Truth of Abolitionist Literature Beecher Stowe’s A Key in Spanish Translation Lisa Surwillo

å In October 2010, I met Chris for a Wisconsin-style Bloody Mary in lower Manhattan. After we ordered, he reminded me to let the garnish steep awhile. I’ve forgotten the name of the bar, but the day’s conversation has stayed with me. In that casual way that he was wont to use when proposing big ideas, Chris suggested that the Spanish translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin merited a read and that its reception probably had something to say about Spanish abolitionism. For my part, I doubted that A Key had even been noticed in Spain. He insisted that it had and, of course, quickly (and kindly) shared his textual evidence. We then mused over who might have translated A Key and what sort of rhetorical work this curious book might have done in Spain. Before long, the conversation turned in other directions and then he went back to Brooklyn and I went to a meeting at the MLA headquarters. We certainly talked about literature many more times after that, but we never discussed Stowe again. I think that, by now, this pickle has steeped long enough. Here, Chris, is my belated follow-up to our wide-ranging conversation that afternoon almost a decade ago about fiction and fact, race, translation, abolition, and literary reception.

Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Miscegenation Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was a lightning rod for anti-trade sentiment in nineteenth-century Spain and underwent

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numerous translations and adaptations immediately after its publication.1 Some of those adaptations clearly appealed to a public who saw the novel as a means to discredit the United States and suggest that, however problematic Spanish slavery and human trafficking might be, the North Americans were far worse. Other Spanish editions used the American location as a means to condemn an analogous slave system in Cuba while evading the strict government censorship that prevented a straightforward literary representation of the lives of the enslaved in Spanish territory. Yet others capitalized on the novel’s popularity to promote Spanish racial theories and a policy of miscegenation that held sway regarding Cuba. For example, the edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin published in 1853 by Mellado included a preface that criticizes Stowe’s separation of races and explicitly advocates for the wholesale assimilation of all Africans and Afrodescendants into a single white race. This translation transformed Uncle Tom’s Cabin into propaganda for a particular Spanish strand of racist gradual abolitionism. Racial theories of miscegenation held different valences around the North Atlantic. Chris weaves an analysis of early iterations of the myth later propagated by Freyre and Tannenbaum (that characterized slavery in the Spanish and Portuguese empires and Brazil as somehow less racist because of an explicit policy of miscegenation) through his larger arguments in Empire and Antislavery. He traces this line of thought through the words of some of its various proponents in the nineteenth century. For example, in 1832, the Cuban intellectual Francisco Arango y Parreño claimed that miscegenation between Afrodescendents in Cuba and immigrants from Europe was the means to preparing Cuba for abolition by ensuring the “erasure or destruction of the preoccupation with color.”2 Several decades later, Domingo Dulce stated his belief in the superior powers of “the Latin race” to absorb others; Chris highlights the Capitan General’s proposal that the Spanish government “encourage the amalgamation of races, or better said, the absorption of the African by the European.”3 As Chris demonstrates, José Antonio Saco and José Julián Acosta similarly favored miscegenation as one element of a policy to strategically manipulate race and labor to Spain’s advantage.4 In contrast, Uncle Tom’s Cabin stoked fears of miscegenation in the United States: if an “octoroon” like Eliza could be enslaved, what would prevent the enslavement of those who presented as white and did not have any African ancestry? Stowe was clearly conversant with Spanish theories of racial amalgamation and challenged them in her novel by questioning the stability the supposed Spanish race and its claims to whiteness. To start, in Stowe’s America, a Spaniard is darker

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than a “mulatto.” Early in the novel, runaway George Harris moves freely among whites, for he “was very tall, with a dark, Spanish complexion, fine, expressive black eyes, and close-curling hair, also of a glossy blackness.” Later in the same chapter, Stowe explains just how George came to have a Spanish complexion: the result of a slight adjustment of his birth color and a performance of the stereotypical dignity of a Spanish don. We remark, en passant, that George was, by his father’s side, of white descent. His mother was one of those unfortunates of her race, marked out by personal beauty to be the slave of the passions of her possessor, and the mother of children who may never know a father. From one of the proudest families in Kentucky he had inherited a set of fine European features, and a high, indomitable spirit. From his mother he had received only a slight mulatto tinge, amply compensated by its accompanying rich, dark eye. A slight change in the tint of the skin and the color of his hair had metamorphosed him into the Spanish-looking fellow he then appeared; and as gracefulness of movement and gentlemanly manners had always been perfectly natural to him, he found no difficulty in playing the bold part he had adopted.5

Spanishness, thus, is not a resilient whiteness able to absorb all others entirely. Rather, a “glossy blackness,” it is the result of a mixture of African and European lineages. Several chapters later, in a passage evocative of Washington Irving’s descriptions of the Alhambra, Stowe paints an enchanting image of domestic architecture in New Orleans. In lieu of introducing an actual Spanish character in her novel, Stowe gives primacy to the Saint Clare family home to clarify the meaning of nonwhite Spanishness in her literary landscape. The supremely sensual mansion stands for Spain, Spanish geopolitical power, and the Spanish race in its beautiful but fading glory. “[F]ragant violets,” “two orange trees, now fragrant with blossoms,” “delicious shade,” “huge pomegranate trees,” “dark-leaved Arabian jessamines,” “luxuriant roses” and many other plants alternated in the interior courtyard with “here and there a mystic old aloe, with its strange, massive leaves, sat looking like some old enchanter, sitting in weird grandeur among the more perishable bloom and fragrance around it.” The “fountain” (mentioned twice), “arabesque sculpture,” “Moorish arches,” fabrics “of some kind of Moorish stuff” all contributed to the “Moorish fashion” of the “ancient mansion,” “luxurious and romantic” that “carried the mind back, as in a dream, to the reign of oriental romance in Spain.”6 The character traditionally seen as closest to a mouthpiece

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for Stowe deems it “a pretty place, . . . though it looks rather old and heathenish to me.”7 The “vigor” of the Latin race, as Dulce proclaimed it, differs significantly from the exhausted decadence it held in Stowe’s America informed by Black Legend lore (another topic Chris wrote on frequently). Spanishness is not merely nonwhite, its claims to Christianity—or Western culture—are suspect—a view not unlike that held by US politicians opposed to the annexation of Cuba on racial grounds. Ultimately, the New England author reveals Spanishness to be nothing but a floating signifier. Much later in the novel, another runaway successfully adopts a Spanish mien. Like George before her, Cassy does not so much as pass as white as impersonate Spanishness in a sartorial performance. Cassy was dressed after the manner of the Creole Spanish ladies, — wholly in black. A small black bonnet on her head, covered by a veil thick with embroidery, concealed her face. It had been agreed that, in their escape, she was to personate the character of a Creole lady . . . . Brought up, from early life, in connection with the highest society, the language, movements and air of Cassy, were all in agreement with this idea; and she had still enough remaining with her, of a once splendid wardrobe, and sets of jewels, to enable her to personate the thing to advantage.8

The novel distills Creole Spanishness into language, class, and gesture; an individual body or face is secondary, as race here is an imagined signifier more present in the eyes of the viewer than fixed to the person posing as Spanish herself. In the final analysis, Stowe proffers a view that concedes that Spanishness, such as it is, may be built upon miscegenation (whether in Andalusia or in the Americas) but depicts it as having been absorbed by as much as it absorbed others. Spanish policies of whitening were topics of debate by political elite; literature was the space where the implications of these calls for whitening were imaginatively explored. As point of comparison, Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés animates yet a third view of Spanish miscegenation in the nineteenth century.9 The protagonist Cecilia Valdés is a product of (non-strategic) whitening, a condition that leads to tragic consequences when she partners with the white Creole playboy Leonardo. In a well-known passage, Leonardo notes “my mother is a Creole but I wouldn’t guarantee that she’s pureblooded” while his friend explains that Leonardo’s Spanish-born father “is not free of the suspicion of having mixed blood” of North Africans or Black slaves. Leonardo fails to examine Cecilia’s racial identity, to her peril.10 Lovers born of the same Spanish slave-trading father, Cecilia and Leonardo are char-

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acters that demonstrate the ability of the Spanish race to absorb Blackness but also the dangers of the belief in miscegenation as a solution to social strife in Cuba. Creole dissenters in New York City, such as Villaverde, suggested that caution rather than praise was the appropriate response for Spanish racial policies in Cuba. As the Atlantic world debated slavery and abolition, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin provided language and imagery to satirize the racial theories that justified enslavement in the Spanish Caribbean. But miscegenation and the global valence of Spanish race together formed just one aspect of the novel that was read uniquely in Spain. Stowe’s place in Spanish abolitionism encompassed more than the public’s fleeting fancy with her bestseller. Tío Tom mania persisted in works such as Wenceslao Ayguals de Izco’s installment novels, where the character el negro Tomás animated Madrid life through the Glorious Revolution (El palacio de los crímenes was published in 1869). More immediately, however, the sensationalism of the novel prompted a contemplation of truth and fiction in abolitionist narratives in both Spain and the United States. Just a few years after Uncle Tom’s Cabin shifted the conversation on race, slavery and what was euphemistically called “resettlement to Liberia” in the United States, the author responded to incredulous critics who denounced her for having mischaracterized slavery in the US South. They questioned her evidence and accused her of narrating fantasy, of creating a fiction untethered from fact.

A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin Advertised in Spain as the “segunda parte de la célebre novela de la Mistress Harriet Beecher Stowe” [the second part of the famous novel by Mistress Harriet Beecher Stowe], A Key is not, however, a work of fiction. It did not introduce new plot lines for Cassy, George, Eliza, or Uncle Tom or deepen their characterization. Rather, it is a book about fiction and authorship. Stowe narrates her process of searching for and establishing historical truth to express in a fictional mode. In Key Stowe reviews the research she carried out before composing the novel and the corroborating evidence sent in by readers after its publication. Perhaps graver than the charge that she had fabricated a story, Stowe was accused of mishandling evidence. To defend the accuracy of the antislavery facts of her fiction, she had to “prove that pro-slavery facts are lies and anti-slavery fictions [specifically, Uncle Tom’s Cabin] are truths.”11 She establishes her authority to write by examining and verifying textual evidence regarding the lives of the enslaved and mas-

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terfully turns Southern dissenters into eyewitnesses for her case by revealing the falsity of their arguments and their evidence. Cindy Weinstein underscores the importance of irony to Stowe’s argument and contends that every page of A Key “pit[s] Stowe’s irony against her opponent’s reckless unconcern for the truth.” The rhetorical power of the text should not be underestimated. Weinstein claims that “A Key is a hermeneutic tour de force whose indictment of slavery begins and ends with demonstrating the difference between fact and fiction, between the true and false meaning of words.”12 For his part, James Helten suggests that Stowe’s Key opened her work up to a new type of critique, a “formal invitation for readers, scholars, and detractors to speculate on the origins of nearly every incident and character of the novel.”13 In other words, even as Stowe defends literature as a mode of sharing knowledge, she invites challenges to the validity of fiction as art by submitting it to a test of its historiographical strengths. Helten defines Key as a “formal apologia” with the distinct purpose to “prove that American slavery was at least as evil as her portrait had depicted.”14 Stowe defends literature as a faithful interpretation of lived experience, a narrative of truth, that can be tested by consulting primary sources. On the face of it, she describes a methodology of assessing human experience that appears to be an inverse of the work of historians, who analyze evidence and elaborate an argument in a prose narrative. Stowe uses particular facts to craft composite characters and place those characters in similarly composite situations where their choice of action illuminates truths about life in a slave society that are otherwise inaccessible to the general public. Stowe opens Key with a general defense of literature as the appropriate medium for this grave matter, for in fictitious writing, it is possible to find refuge from the hard and the terrible, by inventing scenes and characters of a more pleasing nature. No such resource is open in a work of fact; and the subject of this work is one on which the truth, if told at all, must needs be very dreadful. There is no bright side to slavery, as such. Those scenes which are made bright by the generosity and kindness of masters and mistresses, would be brighter still if the element of slavery were withdrawn.15

The discourse of fiction allows her to teach while pleasing her readers by inserting pleasant stories to grant respite between disturbing depictions of the harsh truths of slavery. She notes the unusual character of Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

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this work, more, perhaps, than any other work of fiction that ever was written, has been a collection and arrangement of real incidents, —of actions really performed, of words and expressions really uttered, —grouped together with reference to a general result, in the same manner that the mosaic artist groups his fragments of various stones into one general picture. His is a mosaic of gems, —this is a mosaic of facts.16

Today it is an unconventional practice of interpretation to examine a novel in order to “disentangle the glittering web of fiction, and show out of what real warp and woof it is woven.” But Stowe notes that her novel “had a purpose entirely transcending the artistic one” and consequently has been “treated as a reality,—sifted, tried and tested, as a reality; and therefore as a reality it may be proper that it should be defended.”17 Key guides its readers to critically assess “facts” and “the law” and to judge Stowe’s novel according to its selection and analysis of evidence, rather than its emplotment, characterization, or dramatic tension, already applauded by the public at large. Stowe’s view of role of literature in the creation of historical truth draws indirectly from Aristotle: a poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse . . . . The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason, poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.18

Stowe defends fiction as a means of understanding the world, but as Samuel Otter has noted, over the course of Key she moves from defending the factuality of her fiction to explaining that under slavery facts and fiction intermingle. In the law in particular, Stowe found an “awful kind of truth, stranger than fiction.”19 Similarly, the primary documents archived by a slave state are unreliable, falsified, and corrupt. In this sense fiction is not inferior to history based on inquiry of primary sources where there are, in a sense, no facts. Stowe proves the truth of her novel by proving the falsity of the evidence, including laws, used in attempts to refute her. Stowe demonstrates that law is sometimes simply fantasy and “defenders of slavery can’t produce reliable evidence because they don’t or won’t know the difference between fiction and fact.”20

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A Key introduced the question of law-and-literature more than a century before the academic phenomenon of the 1980s. While the stakes of the more recent critical school were different, Stowe’s Key opened up the law to a reading of its fictionality in a novel way. It is distinct from law in literature or law as literature, concerned with the way that the authority of the law arises from “the concealment of its aesthetic qualities—the rhetoric of its imagery and sexual practices, its passion, and its circumstantiality and singularity.”21 Rather, A Key teaches its readers that law has no mimetic relationship to the lived experience and is, thus, even more untethered than realist fiction, or even a surrealist image where the gap between signifier and signified is explicitly acknowledged and exploited. Stowe drew together what had been two textual worlds, two discursive realms of interpretation with unequal gender valences—the feminized sentimental novel and the exclusively male jurisprudence—and forcefully blurred the line between them. Is the woman-authored sentimental novel more reliable in assessing truth than the law is? Does its text point to a recognizable signifier in the lived world that illuminates the human condition and verifiable facts? Key demonstrates that Uncle Tom’s Cabin does. There have always been tensions between history and literature as modes of narration and the various ways that they are seen to reveal, create, or occlude knowledge of the past. Stowe’s Key argues that the form of the sentimental romance, strongly coded as feminine, not only can reveal truth through the interpretation of evidence but serve as historical evidence itself. In an article ostensibly analyzing the work of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, the nineteenth-century Spanish politician and critic Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto defended literature by women in general and Uncle Tom’s Cabin in particular. Indeed, he suggests that the only novels in the United States worth reading are those written by women, “llenando gloriosamente el vacío que, sin ellas, quedaría necesariamente la civilización de aquel pueblo especulador y materialista” [gloriously filling that void into which, without them, the civilization of that speculating and materialist people would fall].22 An avid reader of novels by female authors across Europe and America, Cueto countered those critics who dismissed Stowe’s novel as purely sentimental. Rather, he engaged with the novel as a work of art and judged its literary merits, including its success at evoking a strong emotional response in readers. He found the plot lacking in dramatic unity but celebrated the ideological and theoretical power of this novel, like much literature by women, to change policy and, thus, the course of history.

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From Key to Llave The Barcelona-based writer and translator Gregorio Amado Larrosa was the author of several original works (including crime tales) and responsible for the translation and dissemination of numerous foreign (mostly French) books in the mid-nineteenth century.23 The texts he introduced to Spanish readers range from a volume of the Historia de Francia by Lavallée to Michaud’s Historia de las cruzadas, illustrated by Gustave Doré, to works by Michelet and Shakespeare, with Gaume’s influential Catequismo representing Larrosa’s deepest engagement with religious work. It would be difficult to identify this translator too closely with a single ideology on the basis of his entire body of work. Larrosa’s stylistic choices in his translation, La llave de La cabaña de Tío Tom, suggest he had some familiarity with the United States and remarkable fluency with English. He faithfully rendered many moments of nuance in Stowe’s argument and, less frequently, irony into equivalent prose for the Spanish reader. More significant than Larrosa’s fidelity to tone, however, are his editorial choices to severely modify the text by cutting evidence and condensing arguments. In 1855, Larrosa adapted Stowe’s treatise on literature and history, based on the second edition of Key, into Spanish.24 He translated the first two parts (of four) of Stowe’s original without significant adaptation. In Part I, Stowe reveals the genesis of individual characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: she reviews their most salient aspects and then names her sources. She shares the testimony of those who had informed her of their lives, revealing the raw material that she then collapsed into a single character, or alternately, public and private texts she had consulted before she published the novel. Significantly, the typeface in A Key distinguishes the original evidence from Stowe’s interpretation of its reliability and her discussion of her decision to adapt it. Part II of A Key constitutes Stowe’s assessment of slave law in states across the Union, again, with cited laws in smaller font. The Spanish translation unifies the narrative by regularizing the typeface—Stowe’s commentary does not stand apart from the evidence. It also collapses Parts III and IV that, in the original, open up more general philosophical questions about public opinion, morality, and the abuse of enslaved persons. Stowe’s final section, Part IV, is entirely dedicated to religion and the responsibility of Christians of all denominations (although with only minimal attention to Roman Catholicism). This religious and moral concern is edited out of the Spanish translation. Although Llave does include phrases like “El que lee la Biblia” [he who reads the Bible]

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when referring to Protestant practice, the overall religious tone is softened.25 Stowe speaks to white Christian Americans as a community unified in its moral obligation to support abolition and urges them to action, from providing support for Black churches to assessing their local governments’ complicity in upholding the slave system and economy. Clearly, religious censorship might have limited the discussion of Methodist, Presbyterian, and Quaker faiths in Spain but more importantly, its exclusion also prevented Larrosa’s Spanish readers from identifying abolitionism too closely with Protestantism. Chapter VII of Part IV is the sole section in Key in which Stowe engages directly with Spain. In fact, she cedes most of the chapter to “a short abstract, from M. Balmes, of the early course of the church.” Stowe cites “Protestantism compared with Catholicity,” in which the Catalan thinker traced antislavery thought through the history of the Catholic Church. Josep Fradera has characterized the central aim of El protestanismo comparado con el catolicismo en sus relaciones con la civilización europea as a vindication of the positive actions of Catholicism, past and present in society.26 While Balmes’s argument in the treatise as a whole is wide-ranging, he argues that Christianity has always worked to improve the human condition, not through revolution, but moral and sentimental education. He showcases the Church’s opposition to slavery to illustrate his point. Stowe points out that Balmes contrasted modern Protestant movements for emancipation grounded in violence with the slow, methodical, and nonviolent Catholic embrace of abolition.27 While Stowe demonstrated no favor for Spaniards, she confesses that she cannot but sympathize deeply in the noble and generous spirit in which these chapters are written, and the enlarged and vigorous ideas which they give of the magnanimous and honorable nature of Christianity. They are evidently conceived by a large and noble soul, capable of understanding such views, —a soul grave, earnest, deeply religious, though evidently penetrated and imbued with the most profound conviction of the truth of his own peculiar faith.28

This is high praise indeed, from a staunch Protestant, for a Spanish Presbyter who wrote of the negative excesses of Protestantism and his fear of the social consequences of private reading of the Bible. No less remarkably, Larrosa did not include this praise for the Catholic faith and for the Spanish thinker in Llave.29 But Balmes had died four years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published and had become wholly identified with Moderado politics. In spite of the fact that his overall argu-

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ment largely coincided with Larrosa’s ideological perspective in Llave, Balmes and the party he represented were not enlisted as an ally in the case against enslavement but instead entirely ignored. Ostensibly speaking of the Estados Unidos but stripped of Stowe’s rich and multilayered treatment of religion, Protestant denominations, and their shared mission to sometimes counter the government, the Spanish translation defends the veracity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and condemns slavery, but does not turn government and religion into opponents. In this sense Llave closely approximates Balmes’s defense of Spain’s religious unity and praise for the social hierarchy of authority that accompanied his view of Catholicism. A fear of social unrest and civil war are present in both Balmes and Llave, but the Spanish adaptation amplifies scenes of mob violence and suggests that while individual abolitionists may be peaceful, the move to suppress slavery is likely to provoke violence. For example, in Stowe’s text a violent faceless mob murders a stoic abolitionist publisher for his beliefs; the translation expands each element of the tragedy. The publisher confronts a “turba feroz” [savage crowd] who cheered the death of their first victim with “Mueran todos! perezca hasta el último en las llamas!” [They all should die! Every last one should go down in flames!].30 Larrosa moves this scene to the end of Llave where it functions as an ominous denouement of Stowe’s own reflection on abolitionist writing. To write against enslavement is to draw slave owners to arms. After several hundred pages of passionate denunciations of slavery, Spanish readers can have no doubt that abolitionist works, like the one in their hands, have the potential to spark armed resistance. Slave owners would not relinquish their claims on human property without a fight. Structurally, Larrosa’s adaptation gestures toward a future war over abolition even more pointedly than A Key does.

Evidence versus Adaptation The Spanish translation of Key cut many of the articles of evidence that Stowe marshaled for her defense, such as newspaper advertisements of the estate sales of enslaved persons or other classified ads.31 The reduction of evidence narrows the structure and changes the force and focus of Stowe’s arguments. For example, Chapter Three (of Part III), addressing family separations, begins with quotes from a proslavery novel and a question, “Are these representations true?,” before defending her depictions of enslaved families legally torn apart in Uncle Tom’s

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Cabin. Llave skips this important attack on the historical truth of other propagandistic novels, a moment of textual interpretation that clarifies the unique stakes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s relationship with evidence. As a result, Stowe’s argument becomes fundamentally conceptual for Larrosa’s Spanish readers. The translation of Chapter 4 of Part III, “El comercio de esclavos” [The Slave Trade] similarly abridges the arc of Stowe’s thesis, largely by removing evidence and Protestant phrasing. It retains the scandalous accusation of the “breeding” of enslaved persons in the North for sale in the South, but the exposé of “la industria de la cría de los Estados del Norte” [breeding industry in Northern States] is built on a much smaller set of examples. Without Stowe’s devastating analysis of the unreliability of what passed for Southern evidence, Spanish readers find a largely decontextualized list of shocking statistics enumerating the number of people trafficked South and the staggering economic benefit of this “comercio” to the Northern States. Even punctuated, as it was, with statistics such as these, La llave becomes more a persuasive essay against slavery, with scathing descriptions of the South, than a collection of evidence in the defense of literature as a source of historical truth. The philosopher Dorothy Haecker theorizes that historical truth must “offer a mutually consistent and defensible account of historical meaningfulness, verification, and reference.” The claims in Llave are largely not “evidentially verified beyond a reasonable doubt.”32 Does Larrosa diminish Stowe’s credibility as an interpreter of evidence by choosing to include only a narrow subset of her sources? How much evidence is necessary to legitimate literature as a vehicle of historical truth? In the Spanish translation, Stowe’s argument over the ability of her novel to provide historical truth in the Spanish translation ultimately relies less on its literariness or her direct verification of evidence than on the moral logic of her abolitionist ideology. Additional paratextual modifications in the Spanish adaptation all but remake the work. As explained above, Jewett’s edition distinguished Stowe’s direct speech from her evidence by setting the latter in small font. Llave instead sets all of the material uniformly. The visual continuity diminishes the interplay of dialogue and glossing that animates Stowe’s engagement with her evidence. The removal of many pieces of evidence repositions Stowe’s moral arguments as anchor for most of the chapters and has both textual and paratextual implications. In one particularly poignant instance, Stowe provides the lithographic reproduction of a handwritten letter from Tom Ducket, who had requested to be sold out of freedom in the North in order to be reunited with his family, held as slaves in New Orleans. The image of

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his handwriting is stirring as an evocation of the individual man while rhetorically it serves as a guarantee of the authenticity of all of the evidence Stowe cites and analyzes. Additionally, the reproduction of Ducket’s letter allows Stowe to draw her readers into an active position with her sources: they may approach a primary document as she has (although hopefully with a less condescending attitude). “People who are not in the habit of getting such documents have no idea of them. We give a fac simile of Tom’s letter, with all its poor spelling, all its ignorance, helplessness, and misery.”33 Ducket was remitted to the South, enslaved, but not reunited with his wife and children; Stowe’s readers encounter one of the anguished letters he subsequently wrote to acquaintances in Washington, DC. Llave included neither the lithographed letter nor Stowe’s assessment of it and omits the opportunity for readers to confront the material traces of affect or the historian’s position as reader, in all her humanity. Instead, Larrosa included an illustration that interpreted another life story Stowe analyzed in the same chapter she discussed Ducket. The lithograph adapts the description of an enslaved mother who is informed of the death of her daughter, Emily Russell, who had been seized and sold into a probable life of sexual abuse. The lithograph illustrates the horrific relief expressed by the mother that Emily had escaped the fate of so many enslaved women and girls. “Emily is dead”—”¡Emilia ya no existe!”34 Whereas Uncle Tom’s Cabin was illustrated with interpretations of fiction, Key did not visually adapt the historical evidence. The triangulation of the relationship between fact and fiction with imagery infused Larrosa’s translation with yet another layer of interpretation. Larrosa’s edition included twelve full-page illustrations and highly creative illustrated drop caps at the beginning of each chapter that demonstrate knowledge of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in their interpretation of specific articles of evidence in Llave. As Chris noted, “the Spanish version of the Key thus not only related the events that Stowe transmuted into her fictional account of slavery and trafficking but also provided striking images of slavery, slave-owning, corporal punishment and mob violence in defense of slavery that might provide relevant parallels to the situation in Spain and its colonies.”35 Indeed, Stowe’s elaborate engagement with evidence is abridged and replaced with visual adaptations of some of her most shocking sources that may have prompted readers to envision Spanish domains. Stowe powerfully asserts that even while she has condensed life experiences to create her novel, every potential witness has their own history. “Every one of these slaves has a history, —a history of woe and crime, degradation, endurance, and wrong.”36 The illustrators disentangle the “real warp and woof” of

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Figure 8.1. “Repetinamente.” Urrabieta and Carnicero’s interpretation of Josiah Henson’s virtue, one model for Uncle Tom. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya. Translation: Suddenly this idea came to my mind: You. . . a Christian and you are going to be a murderer.

which Llave “is woven” and draw these lives out of their composites and into the visual arsenal of Spanish abolitionism. Each of the images is complex and engages with Stowe’s text in great detail. For example, the image in figure 8.1, “Repetinamente,” illustrates a long quote from the section of Josiah Henson’s memoires that Stowe had included in Part I.37 One night while aboard a ship, Josiah seized the opportunity to arm himself with a hatchet and kill the man who considered himself Josiah’s owner. Josiah descended to the sleeping quarters but was filled with horror at the idea that by killing

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Figure 8.2. “Eppes [sic] quiso.” Urrabieta and Carnicero’s stylized image of slave owner violence, the visual preface to La llave de la cabaña del Tío Tom. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional de Catalunya. Translation: Epps wanted to punish her for this absence that had not lasted more than two or three hours.

this man, however vile, he would himself become a criminal. The lithograph depicts Josiah Henson in the moment after he decided to refrain from the sin of murder, his arm lowered, but not relaxed. He remains in the shadows, conventionally “unenlightened,” with downcast eyes, yet filled with Christian empathy. Indeed, he sheds light into the tight quarters of the ship: it comes from the lamp on his belt. This image depicts Josiah Henson’s virtue, as expressed in the text; it also stands in contrast to the prurient image of Epps that serves as the frontispiece to the entire volume.

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Placed between the preface and the title page of part I, the image reproduced in figure 8.2 presents a similarly supine figure at the mercy of an armed Black man. The magnanimity of Josiah’s clemency is conveyed through contrast with the first lithograph in the book. “Eppes [sic] quiso” [Epps wanted it] is compositionally conventional with a triangular arrangement of figures: a woman is tied to the ground, the exposure of her nakedness contrasted by the overdressed white man clothed in a suit and armed with a parasol. He is ominously outfitted with a cigar, the shadow of his hand in his pocket darkening the fabric of his pants, and he gazes at the supine woman whose legs are spread and tied to spikes before him. Epps, the white man, watches while a Black man carries out his orders and whips her, executing a punishment utterly unequal to the crime of her short, unauthorized absence from his plantation. The structural balance of the scene is at odds with the barbarity of Epps’s response, even as he appears calm. The equilibrium is nuanced, however, and is not one of steadiness and security, but pain. The whip serpentines through the air, poised to slash the flesh of its target and mirrors the braid that cascades down the woman’s back, marking where the whip will land. The same cord is simultaneously already on her body and slicing the air above her in an endless loop. The white man gazes coolly while the two white windows of the house look out like eyes on this brutal scene. The depiction of a house constructed on pilings faithfully reflects the houses that dotted flood prone areas and the Delta while its triangles replicate the position of the three human figures that stand before them, below the floor level of the house. The savagery of slavery holds up the society that lives in these sorts of houses as much as the pilings do. But both the carpentry and the unbridled violence remain below the frame of the respectable. The majority of the images in Llave bore the signature of well-known engravers [Vicente] Urrabieta and [Antonio] Carnicero, with [Ricard] Llopis’s work interspersed. Carnicero had a long career collaborating with publishers in Barcelona but was also a highly sought after as a xylographer in Madrid, where he engraved images for projects such as the 1851 Los españoles pintados por si mismos—and may have been ironically reincarnated as Juan Bou in Galdós’s La desheredada. Carnicero often engraved the line drawings created by Urrabieta, also from Barcelona. Strongly identified with the coastal capital, Llopis was a leading figure in Catalan graphic arts for thirty years.38 Llopis illustrated Stowe again eight years later when he executed the title image of La cabaña de Tom for the 1863 adaptation published by the Museo dramático ilustrado.39 The original visual interpretations of Llave by these highly regarded artists merit a separate study, both for their aesthetic qualities

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and in order to more fully appreciate the reception of Stowe’s work in Barcelona as a fundamental element of the visual language of abolition. With their emotionally charged and highly complex images, these three artists adapted the historiographical evidence-based Key into a panorama of depictions of individual histories.

Conclusion Llave provided Spanish abolitionism with a valuable lesson about evidence. In the Spain of the 1850s and 1860s (the first edition of Llave was published in 1855; the second in 1863), the slave trade was officially illegal and slavery was distant but tolerated as economically unavoidable, or, in the words of Capitan General José Gutiérrez de la Concha, “a necessity and an indispensable condition for the maintenance of the territorial property of the island of Cuba.”40 The abolition of slavery in the Spanish empire may not have been open to the same debate as slavery was in the United States, but the discourse around the transatlantic slave trade shared important similarities. Spanish Captain Generals in Cuba consistently denied British accusations of governmental complicity with the outlawed slave trade and protection of the frequent landings of smuggled enslaved Africans. The denial of these landings and the destruction of evidence extended well beyond the Plaza de Armas. Francisco Serrano recounted to the ministers of war and ultramar in Madrid that traffickers and their counterparts in Cuba worked collectively and painstakingly to leave no trace of their actions. Moreover, Serrano claimed that circumventing the law in order to engage in human trafficking is considered a valiant deed, when not deemed a patriotic act, thus no one will come forward to declare against the authorities who forget their duties, no one favors neither directly or indirectly those who persecute them; far from it, they protect them and decidedly protect, by as many means as they have at hand, the introduction of smuggled enslaved Africans and cover for those who intervene in the trade.41

This, Serrano continues, is why neither the British nor those Spaniards inclined to prosecute infractions of the law succeed in finding concrete evidence “y que si alguna vez se encuentra, desaparece hasta la huella de los delincuentes” [and if one is ever found, even the traces of the delinquents disappear].42 Llave broadens our understanding of the importance of the popular reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Spain not only for understanding

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slavery as either in its US configuration or as a screen for Spanish Cuba but a means of reconsidering how historias and Historia were to be written, read, and received when dealing with the lives of the enslaved and the transatlantic slave trade to Spanish Cuba in a space where laws were fantastically unrelated to the truth on the ground and evidence was either scarce or unreliable. Unarguably, Spanish law and international treaties had abolished the slave trade and an array of Royal Orders established protections to the enslaved. La llave de La cabaña de Tío Tom challenged Spanish abolitionists to find language to express the historical truths of Cuban and Puerto Rican slavery and offered visual adaptations of missing evidence as one means to do so. Lisa Surwillo is the author of The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theater in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Stanford University Press, 2014) and Monsters by Trade: Slave Traffickers in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture (Toronto University Press, 2007). She is associate professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University, where she teaches courses on modern Spanish literature. Her interdisciplinary research interests in empire and anti-slavery frequently draw her to a network of historians who counted Chris as an esteemed colleague and friend.

Notes 1. Surwillo, “Representing the Slave Trader,” 69–72. 2. “Representación al Rey” cited in Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 20. 3. “Informe del Excmo. Sr. D. Domingo Dulce,” Información sobre reformas en Cuba y Puerto Rico, 219, cited in Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 105–6. 4. Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 175. 5. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 114–15. 6. Stowe, 168–69. 7. Stowe, 169. 8. Stowe, 432. 9. See Goode, Impurity of Blood, for a discussion of the development of these ideas later in the nineteenth century. 10. Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés, 64. 11. Weinstein, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the South,” 53. 12. Weinstein, 53–54. 13. Helten, “To Ontario,” 154. 14. Helten, 144. 15. Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, (1853), iii. 16. Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, (1853), 5.

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17. Stowe, 5. 18. Aristotle, Poetics, section 1451a–1451b. 19. Otter, “Stowe and Race,” 28, cf. Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854), 222 and 298. 20. Weinstein, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the South,” 52. 21. Kayman, “Law-and-Literature,” 11. 22. Cueto, “Observaciones,” 401. 23. He most commonly signed as G. A. Larrosa. 24. For the present study I consulted the printed, first edition of The Key (1853) and the 1854 edition adapted for online reading by the University of Virginia. While the prose is identical and both are octavo (25 and 22 cm, respectively) in format, the layout is notably different, with the first edition composed of double columns of text on each page. The second edition consequently has an additional 150 pages and presents as a more substantial volume. Larrosa based his translation on the 1854 edition. 25. Stowe, La Llave, 296. 26. Fradera, Jaume Balmes, 102. See 102–17 for a discussion of the major arguments, structure and aims of El protestanismo. 27. Balmes, El protestanismo, 143. Cited in Fradera, Jaume Balmes, 112. 28. Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, (1853), 237. 29. In an earlier chapter on Roman law, Stowe compares slave law in the United States with that of France and Spain and finds aspects of the Spanish slave code worthy of praise. However, Larrosa did not include any mention of Spain and its colonies. 30. Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, (1854), 449; Stowe, La Llave, 381. 31. The translation not only cuts many classified ads (Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, [1853], 250–51, 269–70) but also Stowe’s biting commentary of them, such as her query of what will happen to the baby of an advertised wet nurse or her sarcastic recounting of a “Mr J. S. Donovan” who “advertises the Christian public of the accommodation of his jail” (275) where enslaved persons trafficked by steamship or rail can be “secured” while in transit. 32. Haecker, “A Theory of Historical Truth,” 267. 33. Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), 171. 34. Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1854), 333; Stowe, La Llave, 358. 35. Schmidt-Nowara, “From Aggression to Crisis,” 137. 36. Stowe, Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), 176. 37. “Repetinamente” in La Llave, 76 and “Epps” in La Llave, 6. 38. Fontbona, Xilografía, 205. 39. Fontbona, 118. 40. Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 28. 41. “[S]e estima como un hecho meritorio cuando no se califica de un acto patriótico, de aquí que nadie se preste a declarar contra las autoridades que olvidan sus deberes, que nadie favorezca directa ni indirectamente a los que de la persecucion se ocupan y que muy lejos de ello protejan, y protejen de una manera decidida por cuantos medios tienen a su alcance la introduccion, de los bozales y la ocultacion de los que en ella intervinieren.” 42. Serrano, “Letter to Ministro,” s.p.

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Bibliography Aristotle. Poetics. In Aristotle in 23 Volumes. Translated by W. H. Fyfe. Vol. 23. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1932. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/. Balmes, Jaime. El protestantismo comparado el catolicismo, en sus relaciones con la civilización europea. In Obras completas, IV. Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1948. Cueto, Leopoldo Augusto de. “Observaciones acerca de algunas leyendas y novelas de la señora doña Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda.” In Obras literárias, Vol. 5., by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, 397–414. Madrid: Rivadeneyra, 1871. Fontbona, Francesc. La Xilografia a Catalunya entre 1800 i 1923. Barcelona: Biblioteca de Catalunya, 1992. Fradera, Josep M. Jaume Balmes. Els fonaments racionals d’una política catòlica. Vic: Eumo, 1996. Goode, Joshua. Impurity of Blood. Defining Race in Spain, 1870–1930. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Haecker, Dorothy. “A Theory of Historical Truth.” Philosophical Topics 13, no. 2 (1985): 267–75. Helten, James A. “To Ontario . . . In Pursuit of the ‘Original’ Uncle Tom: The Odyssey of a Neophyte Bibliophile (A Sea Change).” North Dakota Quarterly 59, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 142–50. Kayman, Martin A. “Law-and-Literature: Questions of Jurisdiction” in REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 18 (2002): 1–20. Otter, Samuel. “Stowe and Race.” In The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Cindy Weinstein, 15–38. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. ———. “From Aggression to Crisis: The Spanish Empire in the 1860s.” In American Civil Wars. The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s, edited by Don. H. Doyle, 125–46. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Serrano, Francisco. “Letter to Ministro de la Guerra y de Ultramar.” 12 November 1860. Archivo Histórico Nacional. Ultramar 4648. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work. Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1853. ———. The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work. Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1854. http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/uncletom/key/kyhp.html. ———. La llave de La cabaña de Tío Tom. Segunda parte de la célebre novela de la Mistress Harriet Beecher Stowe. La cabaña de Tío Tom. Que contiene los

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hechos y documentos originales en que se funda la novela, con las piezas justificativas, traducida de la última edición por G. A. Larrosa. Barcelona: Imprenta Hispana de V. Castaños, 1855. ———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Surwillo, Lisa. “Representing the Slave Trader: Haley and the Slave Ship, or Spain’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” PMLA 120, no. 3 (2005): 768–82. Villaverde, Cirilo. Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill. A Novel of Nineteenth-Century Cuba. Translated by Helen Lane. Edited by Sibylle Fischer. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Weinstein, Cindy. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the South.” In The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, edited by Cindy Weinstein, 39–57. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Chapter 9

Empire and Civil Rights in Franco’s Spain Louie Dean Valencia-García

å Metropoles and Peripheries In his germinal work, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara challenged the understanding of “conventional notions of the boundaries between the periphery and the metropole by examining how political interests and alliances cut across the Atlantic.”1 In that work, Schmidt-Nowara developed a model that considered “ideology and political action, both in the metropolis and the colonies, and the impact of capitalist development in the Spanish colonial empire on the politics of slavery and antislavery, particularly in the case of abolition movements.”2 While this framework was particularly relevant for understanding Spanish colonialism, antislavery movements, and constructions of nation and race in the late nineteenth century, the model was also helpful for understanding the spread of postcolonial ideologies that arose in the mid-nineteenth century—in particular, between Spain, Cuba, and the United States—countries with deeply entwined and complicated histories. To understand Spain in the mid-twentieth century, it is imperative to consider not only the impact of the Spanish colonial project in the nineteenth century but also the ways that Franco’s Spain attempted to reestablish itself as a country with global impact—to make Spain “grande” again. Despite still maintaining its colonial presence in the North African cities of Ceuta and Melilla, in many ways Spain became peripheral to the United States and Northern Europe, absorbing, and adapting to, their culture through tourism, political ideology, and popular culture.

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In the midst of the Cold War, Franco’s authoritarian-fascist régime, found itself allying with the United States, the country responsible for the fatal blow to Spain’s centuries-long colonial project—the “disaster of 1898”—which ended Spain’s colonial power in the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, and Puerto Rico. By midcentury, diplomatic relations between Spain and the United States were strengthened, which included a US presence at the Naval Station in Rota, Spain, as well as American air bases in Morón, Zaragoza, and Torrejón by 1953. Spain later received a place in the United Nations in 1955, during the peak of the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the United States. Like many western European countries, over the course of just a half century, Spain moved from being a colonial power in its own right to being under the United States’ sphere of influence. Schmidt-Nowara’s dialectical approach to understanding the ways in which the periphery changes the metropole is particularly helpful when considering the authoritarian-fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975. In this chapter, I will discuss two aspects of my research that were influenced by Schmidt-Nowara’s dialectical framework. To do this I will look at the last fifteen years of the Franco dictatorship, when some young, liberal, and leftist Spaniards borrowed rhetoric from the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Che Guevara, and Malcolm X—all anticolonialist voices of a sort from the Americas—as part of an effort to debate ways to move toward creating a democratic society while attempting to avoid complicity with what they saw as a new American imperialism.3 This section, adapted here, was the result of many conversations with Schmidt-Nowara, and came to form part of my dissertation and one of the chapters of my first book. Many of these writings make explicit the frustration of young Spaniards finding themselves positioned between what they understood as American cultural imperialism and a régime that denied them basic civil rights and freedom of expression. These debates drew direct comparison to American and Spanish imperialism in Latin America, demonstrating a need for scholars of Spain to consider transatlantic intersections in the study of contemporary Spanish history more broadly. Additionally, I will briefly look at the ways in which racist blackface stereotypes were used in countercultural fanzines during the early years of the Spanish democracy in articles intended to laud Black American musicians—showing a dialectical conversation about race in the US and in Spain. Though these racist caricatures already had a complicated history in Spain prior to the United States’ cultural hegemony, their appearance in the 1970s demonstrated ways in which Spain was still peripheral in that even

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those who would be progressives were still using racist tropes that had mostly fallen out of style in the United States.

Black Liberation and Notebooks for Democracy The “American penetration of Spain” of the 1950s and 1960s, a phrase coined in 1974 by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (b. 1939), was not only indicative of a very real question facing Spaniards during the second half of the Francoist dictatorship but was also a point of much consternation from within the régime itself—and amongst Spaniards. Trying to maintain its own National Catholic ideologies despite rural populations moving to more diverse cosmopolitan urban centers, while adapting to the emergence of capitalist values and consumerist tendencies that simultaneously were “penetrating” Franco’s Spain, the régime had to compromise its fascistic National Catholic values in order to earn support from the United States and other European countries to shake itself loose from economic stagnation.4 The dictatorship struggled with tensions from within expressing anti-American sentiments (from both the right and the left) and a need to appease American interests in its attempt to win tourists, support, and financial aid from abroad. Moreover, even Spain’s particular brand of Catholicism was being called into question with the shift presented in the debates of the Second Vatican Council from 1962 through 1965. The destabilization of Franco’s pillars of nationalism and religion created a space in which discourse and dialogue could happen. Young, university-educated Spaniards, who were mostly in their twenties and early thirties, with the help of reformed Falangists who in their youth had supported Franco, used the shifting landscape of Spain’s relationship to Catholicism and other Western countries to create a space for dialogue, breathing life into the café tradition of the political-literary tertulias of the pre-Franco years. Adapting the café tradition of dialogue for a mass audience, young writers who had no memory of the Spanish Civil War began to imagine alternatives to the dictatorship. These young people were also negotiating their own understandings of the effects of American cultural imperialism and shifting understandings of Catholicism. Spaniards critiqued the United States’ expanding postcolonial empire and praised its popular and countercultural production, all the while Francoist Spain began its own apertura, or opening, to the United States and Western Europe. Through the creation of a printed “thirdspace,” an analogue space that was both real and imagined, young Madrileños began their part in the

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process of reassembling the public sphere by reimagining what a tertulia could be in the mid-twentieth century through the publication of the “Christian Democratic” magazine, Cuadernos para el diálogo. 1974 saw the publication of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s book La penetración americana en España by the publishing arm of Cuadernos para el diálogo when the lauded Catalonian author was thirty-five years old. Vázquez Montalbán contended the penetration of Spain was “total” and that it affected “all levels of culture of [Spain].” For Vázquez Montalbán, American economic and cultural proliferation was fundamentally “conditioned by an imperial strategy.”5 However, despite these attempts at subjugation, by both the régime and the American empire, through their “ways of operating,”6 young, elite Spaniards managed to not only carve out spaces of dissent for themselves, such as Cuadernos para el diálogo, but they also subverted authority more broadly through their critiques. Taking advantage of the aforementioned set of circumstances that afforded the writers and editors of Cuadernos more autonomy, the magazine presented alternatives to authoritarianism in its discourse. While American cultural and economic hegemony indeed threatened new imperialism, young Spaniards also learned and observed the tactics Americans used themselves against those same powers that attempted to subjugate the young Spanish audience; they adapted those discourses for their own purposes. In his 1966 article, “Los EE.UU. en la actual encrucijada política,” Juan Losada argued the Americanization of Spain represented a very real threat, criticizing American life, stating, “[American] people have no other preoccupation besides living well, listening to ‘jazz’, watching cowboy movies, reading the funnies and adventure stories published in newspapers, and get excited only about ‘operaciones mertcantiles.’”7 Although reductive in his analysis of what American life was like, his statement reflects a popular perception of what the “American Way” was for Spaniards of the period. While praising the likes of Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck, Losada goes on to call American culture the “product of neurosis,” arguing that the United States represented a “mutation” of European culture. For Losada, American culture was the antithesis of European culture; however, contrarily, Losada defended the work of the likes of Americans like Walt Whitman, and the “elegance” and intelligence of Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy—even arguing their work was European.8 Curiously, Losada ends his anti-capitalist editorial comparing the “young singer” Bob Dylan to Upton Sinclair, praising the American for his critiques of the Vietnam War, racism, and the living conditions of the poor.9 Critical of American capitalism, Losada

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praised the cultural movements within the United States that were critical of American imperialism through an attempt to claim certain American ideals as being “European.” This process of (re)appropriation is fundamental to understanding how American culture was interpreted by Spaniards because this (re)appropriation demonstrates a movement away from an idea that American culture was forced upon Spaniards and also allows us to consider the ways American culture was adapted and adopted by young Spaniards living under Franco. While American consumerism was a very palpable threat, colonization is never a one-way process. The “Manifesto of the Young Generation” published in January 1968 points to the complexities found in Spanish discourse of America’s economic and cultural penetration.10 Highlighting “existential attacks” by American economic policies and consumer culture, the authors demanded recognition of the oppression of those marginalized and subjugated by American imperialism. The manifesto proclaimed: We cry out against the continual loss of the rights of man; against developed societies, which inexorably advocate for the mass consumption of goods, dominated by groups that are mixed up with the pressures of state power; we cry out for those who live in underdeveloped societies, who are mortgaged and suffer existential attacks, whose precariousness fluctuates based only on the protection of politics and economies of powerful nations.11

Moreover, Vázquez Montalbán, who primarily focused on the economic penetration of Spain by American interests, citing Wright Mill’s The Causes of World War Three, wrote American imperialism was “opening markets for the exportation of consumer articles—extravagancies—and the employment of a colonized country as the producer of primary materials the industrialized nation needs.”12 Coming from a Marxist perspective, Vázquez Montalbán argues that after World War II, new sorts of colonial ideas were needed to justify a colonizer status. Vázquez Montalbán believed that the US falsely legitimated its power through an argument that the American empire, that of capitalism, claimed to “elevate the standard of living for all nations, so that to make subversion impossible, stopping the advance of communism.”13 Concerned with what today would be considered (post)colonization, Vázquez Montalbán posits that the majority of the ideological penetration of Spain was realized through cultural influence, pointing to the usage of mass communication as a means to realize an “indirect and direct apology justifying the political ends of the United States.”14 This criticism is even seen in the cover of the book in which the artist

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depicts a traditional Spanish bullfighter using an American flag rather than a standard red cape.

Complicating the Discourse: Civil Rights in Spain As is well known, the late 1960s represented a time of broad cultural dissent throughout much of Europe and the United States. The Spanish case, however, is often not considered in relation to these cultural movements of the long 1960s, despite a months-long student strike at the Universidad de Madrid in the spring of ’68. To analyze these intersections, it is helpful to turn to the discourse surrounding the American civil rights movement to provide a specific example of how some of the broader sociopolitical unrest penetrated Spain, and how it was interpreted and adopted by Spaniards in Cuadernos. The difficulty in trying to understand the ways Spaniards adopted this discourse is trying to understand how the authors referred to the “Franco problem,” without talking about it directly. To try to better elaborate upon this, I will focus on the issues of Cuadernos during the months of April, May, June/July of 1968, attempting to flesh out the hidden polemics discussed indirectly in those magazines. Of course, this search for coded criticism of the regime and how to subvert it is not precise, specifically because it was not intended to be so. However, as the Spanish phrase goes, “one does not have to look five feet from the cat” to find these critiques. “Martin Luther King o la fuerza de la no-violencia” [Martin Luther King, Jr. or the force of nonviolence], published in April of 1969 by Josep Dalmau, in the wake of King’s assassination, gives an example of this sort critique of the dictatorship. In the article, Dalmau compares the methods of revolutionary Che Guevara and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., arguing that King desired to remove the established disorder of inequality through gradual change, and that Guevara “ineffectively” wished to do so by violent revolution. As often happened in Cuadernos, this article discusses the “what to do about Franco?” question without ever talking about it outright—there was a “freer press” after the Ley de la Prensa of 1966 was promulgated, but not completely free. Dalmau argues that the death of King inspired the American people to follow King’s example, whereas the death of Che demoralized the population. Dalmau writes, “It is obvious that a white person in power feels offended when another person, white or black, pretends to remove established disorder [a lack of democracy]; he does not care for a movement that attempts to liberate the oppressed.”15 Here, the

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rhetoric used allows for Spaniards to imagine themselves in the position of a Black American, recognizing commonalities in the ways in which an oppressor attempts to maintain power. The question of changing the system from the inside, through nonviolence, rather than armed conflict implicitly shows shades of the “Franco question.” Indeed, the privileged men that wrote for Cuadernos preferred “nonviolent” reform as opposed to the more violent action. Dalmau lauded the nonviolence of King as the most efficient road to overthrowing an oppressor—calling it the most ethical way to “fight for the fraternity of men and justice.”16 In fact, the question of nonviolence versus direct attack becomes even more important as this article was published only months before Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’s (ETA) first killing on 7 June 1968, an early attempt by the Basque separatist group at taking on the Francoist state directly through violence. The debate between “violent” and “nonviolent” action was a very real one. Further, the comparison of ETA to Cuadernos is not unwarranted, as ETA had grown from a student group called Ekin, founded in the early 1950s, which was organized originally around the publication of a student-run magazine. In his article, Dalmau addresses the internal conflict of looking at history from above, rather than through the observations of cultural change stating, “We are accustomed to judge history through wars, and we do not know how to study the profound underlying changes . . . Passion for justice and love of liberty never stop acting even if there are no visible wars to be seen.”17 In effect, Dalmau desired to create a movement that was peaceful by looking at issues of justice and liberty from the perspective of the American civil rights movement. The article “Martin Luther King, mártir de Memphis” by Laureano Bonet compares the death of King with the “disaster of 1898”—the year Spain lost its last colonies during its war with the United States. Quoting King’s father, Bonet calls American society “sick”—threatening that King’s assassination reflected the failure of American society. Bonet claims that the American problem is not a “racial problem” or a “black problem,” but rather a problem with sick white men. This sort of assertion takes the onus off of the oppressed, and instead focuses it on the oppressor. This challenge for democracy, although an American one, was one for which Spaniards could support. While still critiquing the US empire, Bonet’s support of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s nonviolent methods was also an attack against the oppressive Francoist regime. It is in spaces of discourse, found in Cuadernos, hidden in critiques and praise of the United States, that we can also find subtle critiques of the regime, and a positing of possible roads to democracy—violence or nonviolence.

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Reframing the Dissent of the Long 1960s to Include Spanish Discourse This issue of violence and pacifism is again bought up two months later in the pages of Cuadernos, in an issue dedicated to the May Revolution of 1968 in an article by Carlos Santamaría Ansa entitled “Crisis actual del pacifismo y teología de la revolución.”18 The debate of nonviolence versus violent dissent found in the pages of Cuadernos in the months leading up to the pan-European May ’68 protests, as well as the use of violence by ETA during June of that year, forces historians to consider these debates of violence versus nonviolence not just in a Spanish context, or even just a European context, but in a broader international context. In the pages of Cuadernos the debate of how to deal with the “Franco” problem implicitly was present in a discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr. In the discussion of May ’68 we see Spaniards dealing with issues of how to most effectively combat oppression—to follow King’s example or not. The article celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr., citing the civil rights activist’s practice of involving university students in his peaceful struggle. The article praises the work of those university students and recent graduates who collaborated to produce Cuadernos for taking the “nonviolent” route. This was a message that would have surely resonated with university students. The attention paid to the American discourse not only is reflective of Spanish frustrations with the regime but also, more importantly, demonstrates an “apertura” to Spanish democratic ideals, understood and coded through a discourse of internal struggles from within the American empire. Young Spaniards were asking themselves whether or not to change the system from the inside-out, desiring to change the culture of Spain—a question not unlike that of many young Americans and Europeans of the period. In hindsight, we now know that in the wake of Franco’s death, a new youth culture influenced by American and European popular culture did indeed emerge. Young Spaniards not only critiqued the penetration of American hegemony, but also began to use it to their advantage. The articles published in Cuadernos show that young Spaniards were interested in democracy, but they were dubious of the American democratic-capitalist model. Even despite this hesitation, young Spaniards still found inspiration in some of the American discourse. The debates found in Cuadernos not only functioned to show how Spain more broadly fits into the international social movements of the 1960s but demonstrates why scholars must look earlier for the beginnings of

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the transition to democracy in Spain and the role of young people in imagining Spanish democracy.

Transatlantic Constructions of Race in Spain To better understand the “American penetration of Spain,” it is helpful to see not just the ways the political ideologies were adapted by Spaniards but also the ways often complicated constructions of race comingled with popular culture. In particular, in the aftermath of Francoism, which ended with the dictator’s death in 1975, one of the more popular forms of cultural production amongst young people were “fanzines,” photocopied pamphlets that were handmade, shared, and sold cheaply due to new advances in reprographic technologies, such as the copy machine. These “zines” were dedicated to music, comics, film, and popular culture, most often from abroad. As was often the case, many zines attempted to both educate the young reader to what would otherwise be an obscured history. 96 lágrimas, named after the song “96 Tears” by the band “Question Mark and the Mysterians,” was itself a hat-tip to the 1960s band formed by Rudy Martínez, Larry Borjas, Robert Martínez, and Bobby Balderrama, all of whom were children of Mexican migrant workers—growing up in the Saginaw, Bay City, and Midland, Michigan, respectively.19 While it is unclear whether or not the zine-makers were aware of the origins of the band, the zine’s title reflects the complicated history that underlies the transatlantic history of punk music in Spain, which was simultaneously influenced by American, Caribbean reggae, British, and Mexican music.20 Moreover, the history of rock and roll music more generally is tied to that of the musical traditions of Black musicians in the United States South, a fact that did not escape Spaniards. While the zine’s presentation of the history of the rockabilly music that influenced punk was often helpful for showing continuities between genres, tying punk music to its countercultural and rock and roll influences of decades past, this was sometimes done inelegantly. On the back cover of the aforementioned issue of 96 lágrimas, the zine includes an article about legendary Motown group Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. The article begins, “One nice day in August of 1957 five negritos, friends from high school, in the city of Detroit, decide to dedicate themselves to music and show up for an audition for the manager Jackie Wilson . . . .”21 The article goes on to introduce readers to the music of Robinson and his group, compile a list of hits, extol

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Robinson’s songwriting abilities, and proclaim the importance of Robinson’s influence. The existence of an article at all is curious, given that the zine primarily focused on more contemporary musicians such as Joy Division, Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, and David Bowie—musicians who seemingly are removed from the period and style of Robinson. The page-long article, featured prominently on the back folio, even goes on to discuss the influence of Robinson on the Beatles and Bob Dylan. In doing this, the article attempts to credit Robinson, a Black man, for his influence on New Wave music. For all the lauding of Robinson, even reiterating Robinson as “the world’s greatest living poet” more than once, the article simultaneously uses a diminutive, “negritos” [little Black boys], when introducing the band and a hand-drawn image of a Black character, drawn in the style of blackface, with a sort of entranced gaze, and hearts floating around the character’s head. The author, who is only identified as “F.R.V.,” and the creators of the zine certainly wanted to show admiration for Robinson and his group, yet the image recalls minstrelsy and racial prejudice. While there might not have been malintent, given the content of the article, the use of negritos and the drawing certainly reinscribes racist images. The image resembles the Black characters drawn in Hergé’s Tintin au Congo, or the poster of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s 1939 Broadway musical, Hot Mikado. The undated zine, published ca. 1981, represented very real underlying racial prejudices present in Spain in the 1980s. That said, at the time, the blackface trope was hardly unique to Spain; in the United Kingdom, The Black and White Minstrel Show aired from 1958 until 1978. In fact, almost any child across Europe would have recognized the blackface Congolese figure, seen in the immensely popular children’s book Tintin au Congo, in which the Congolese are drawn as minstrelized blackface characters that also resemble primates featured in the comic. While it is impossible to say when that image entered Spanish consciousness, it certainly would have been a recognizable image for young Spaniards, found in the Spanish translation of Tintin au Congo—first printed in Spain in December of 1968 by Editorial Juventud, in Barcelona. A Spanish variation of blackface was also found throughout the Enciclopedia Álvarez series in the 1960s, school textbooks that were distributed to millions of children across Spain under the dictatorship. Similar blackface characters were used as the mascot of the “Conguitos” [Little Congolese] chocolate candy, which debuted in Spain in 1961, and were confused with a candy called “Chimpancitos” [Little Chimpanzees], even resulting in a legal case because of those racist stereotypes.22 Blackface characters were also featured in the

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Spanish variation of a chocolate milk drink mix—Cola Cao—which even as recently as 2017 brought back the racist blackface image in an advertising campaign.23 In two other issues of 96 lágrimas, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas and Diana Ross and the Supremes—both popular groups from the 1960s composed of American Black women—are also praised in a prominent back cover article.24 In these cases, the article is decorated with a buxomed figure, dancing, which recalls a blackface character with animalesque features, similar to those of the Walt Disney character, Minnie Mouse. The use of a Minnie Mouse-like figure also evokes minstrelsy, as Nicholas Sammond has shown in his analysis of Mickey Mouse.25 However, in a similar attempt to bring attention to the important influence of Black musicians on new wave music, of Martha and the Vandellas, F.R.V. wrote, “Nearly all of their songs were about love, far from absurd sensibilities; rather, a love sung both with excitement and sexuality, with aggressiveness, and overwhelming strength.”26 The description of Black women’s sexuality and aggressiveness further demonstrates the use of racist tropes that sexualize and fetishize Black women. To be sure, both articles attempt to assert the influence of Black women into Madrid’s punk/new wave scene; however, the clumsiness of that insertion threatened to undermine any gains, again reinstating racist tropes. Indeed, by understanding the interplay and shifts in power between the Spain and the Americas, we can still see the traces of white supremacy at play even in the work of progressive young people trying to recognize the work of Black artists.

A Legacy Christopher Schmidt-Nowara served as both my master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation advisor during his time at Fordham University in New York City—continuing in that role when he became the Prince of Asturias Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization at Tufts University. When I first arrived at Fordham as a master’s student, Schmidt-Nowara made it clear to me that he was ready and enthusiastic to work with me. From the first graduate course I took with him, Colonial Spain, 1808–1939—what to me then seemed like unusual dates to frame the class—I knew the impact of his thinking would be long-lasting. How could Colonial Spain encompass the Spanish Civil War? What about 1898? I knew then that I had an advisor who would not only challenge me but who was also challenging normative constructions of historical narratives and timeframes. In the class, he treated students as

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colleagues in the field, expected quality work, and empowered us to question boundaries ourselves. The following semester, I took a tutorial with him on research methods for studying Modern Spain. In our weekly meetings, SchmidtNowara always encouraged me not only to think comparatively but also to consider wide varieties of theoretical frameworks. We spent a considerable amount of time reading the social history of Spain. We discussed the methodologies and theories of scholars such as David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley (with whom Schmidt-Nowara had studied at the University of Michigan), studied literary analyses of Madrid and the Spanish empire, and delved into countless works by colleagues in the field whom he encouraged me to know both at the scholarly level and at the personal level—too many to list here, but many contributors to this volume. We read classic works by anthropologists such as William A. Christian, Jr., Clifford Geertz, Julio Caro Baroja, and Ruth Behar. The curriculum he developed in our tutorial not only prepared me to be an historian but to be one who tries to borrow methodology from various disciplines and genres—something he learned and actively practiced as a graduate student at Michigan. Notably, SchmidtNowara introduced me to the work of Michel de Certeau, providing me a framework to understand ways to consider the relationship between everyday life and history. We spent long afternoons thinking through what for me were impossible historical questions of agency and power. Our conversations were always casual but challenging. He actively met with other mentors of mine, such as Rosemary Wakeman, S. Elizabeth Penry, and David Hamlin, to discuss the best ways to create a cohesive program possible for my own research on antiauthoritarian youth culture in Francoist Spain—a topic he encouraged me to pursue despite an initial indecisiveness on my part in choosing between nineteenth century bohemian culture in Spain and the topic that would become my dissertation project and first book, Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism. Often, graduate students are encouraged to not stray far from the work of their advisor. Despite most of Schmidt-Nowara’s own work focusing on the nineteenth century, not only did he encourage me to do the project I really wanted to do but he gave me the tools to better do that work—to venture into uncharted trans-Atlantic waters. In many ways, Schmidt-Nowara’s work speaks not only to questions of power but to the messiness of race in context. As seen with the work of young Spaniards in the 1960s, Black American voices could impact the ways Europeans understood their own oppression. Yet, when young people tried to emphasize the importance of Black voices,

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there were often still racist underlying assumptions that tinged those efforts—demonstrating the constant dialectic between identities that were trying to break free of white supremacist constructions of what it meant to be a person of color and how progressive white Europeans interpreted and understood Blackness. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s work inspired not just a discourse that helped to locate ways in which colonized people demonstrated agency and affected change, it provided a methodological model to consider power relations more generally amongst marginalized groups. This, in fact, is part of the longer-lasting legacy of Schmidt-Nowara’s work—both as a historian and as a professor. He found voices that had impact and that might have been left out of the historic record otherwise. Louie Dean Valencia-García is assistant professor of digital history at Texas State University and senior fellow and head of the History Research Unit for the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. He has taught at Harvard University and served on the Research Editorial committee of EuropeNow, the journal of the Council for European Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism (Bloomsbury, 2018) and editor of Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/ Histories (forthcoming from Routledge). He earned his PhD from Fordham University in 2016, and he has received fellowships from the United States Library of Congress, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport.

Notes With appreciation to Bloomsbury Academic, sections of this essay are adapted from the chapter “The Penetration of Franco’s Spain” in Valencia-García, Louie Dean. Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 1. Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery, 17. 2. Schmidt-Nowara, 17. 3. For more on such implicitly democratic messages see Muñoz Soro, Cuadernos Para El Diálogo, 1963–1976, 37. 4. For an in-depth study of Spain’s tourism industry, see Pack, Tourism and Dictatorship. 5. Vázquez Montalbán, La Penetración Americana en España, 353. 6. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 39. 7. Losada, “Los EE.UU. en la actual encrucijada política,” 29.

180 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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Losada, 29–30. Losada, 30. Anonymous, “Manifesto de la generación joven,” 13. Anonymous, 13. Vázquez Montalbán, La penetración americana en España, 31. Vázquez Montalbán, 39. Vázquez Montalbán, 366. Translated from the Castilian, “Está visto que el blanco instalado se siente ofendido cuando otra persona—blanca o negra—pretende remover el desorden establecido; le da igual el camino que siga el movimiento de liberación de los hombres oprimidos.” Dalmau, “Martin Luther King o la fuerza de la no-violencia,” 36. Dalmau, 36. Dalmau, 36. Santamaría Ansa, “Crisis actual del pacifismo,” 35–37. White, “Fifty Years Later.” For more on the history of race and the origins of punk music, see Duncombe and Tremblay, White Riot. F.R.V., “Smokey Robinson and the Miracles,” back cover. Martín Morales, “Los ‘Chimpancitos’ ganaron a los Conguitos,” 9. Landeira, “El negro de Cola Cao.” F.R.V., “Martha Reeves and the Vandellas,” back cover; F.R.V., “Diana Ross and the Supremes,” back cover. Sammond, Birth of an Industry, 1–5. F.R.V., “Martha Reeves and the Vandellas,” back cover.

Bibliography Anonymous. “Manifesto de la generación joven.” Cuadernos para el diálogo, 1968. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Dalmau, Josep. “Martin Luther King o la fuerza de la no-violencia.” Cuadernos Para El Diálogo, 1968. Duncombe, Stephen, and Maxwell Tremblay, eds. White Riot: Punk Rock and the Politics of Race. London: Verso, 2011. F.R.V. “Diana Ross and the Supremes.” 96 Lágrimas, ca. 1981–84. ———. “Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.” 96 Lágrimas, ca. 1981–84. ———. “Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.” 96 Lágrimas, ca. 1981–84. Landeira, Luis. “El Negro de Cola Cao y Otros Anuncios Increíblemente Racistas.” Público, 16 April 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20190331231728/ https://blogs.publico.es/strambotic/2017/04/anuncios-racistas/. Losada, Juan. “Los EE.UU. en la actual encrucijada política.” Cuadernos para el diálogo, 1966.

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Martín Morales, J. “Los ‘Chimpancitos’ ganaron a los conguitos.” La Vanguardia Española, 30 October 1967. Muñoz Soro, Javier. Cuadernos para el diálogo, 1963–1976: una historia cultural del segundo Franquismo. Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2006. Pack, Sasha D. Tourism and Dictatorship: Europe’s Peaceful Invasion of Franco’s Spain. 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Sammond, Nicholas. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Santamaría Ansa, Carlos. “Crisis actual del pacifismo y teología de la revolución.” Cuadernos para el diálogo, 1968. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. Valencia-García, Louie Dean. Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel. La penetración americana en España. Madrid: Editorial Cuadernos para el diálogo, 1974. White, Sue. “Fifty Years Later, Question Mark and the Mysterians as Mysterious as Ever.” Michigan Live, 12 October 2012. https://web.archive.org/ web/20121015231817/https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw/index.ssf/ 2012/10/fifty_years_later_question_mar.html.

Chapter 10

“To Make a Language of My Own” Fernando Blanco White’s Flight to Freedom (1815) Joselyn M. Almeida

å a las aladas almas de las rosas del almendro de nata te requiero que tenemos que hablar de muchas cosas compañero del alma, compañero. [by the winged souls of the blooms on the almond tree I invoke you for we have to talk about many things brother of my soul, comrade.] —Miguel Hernández, “Elegía”1

The work of Christopher Schmidt-Nowara illuminates how the interimperial relations of European states that vied for power across the Atlantic exacted a violent cost from Indigenous and African peoples in Africa and the Americas.2 His capacious historical imagination redefines Spain and its colonies in a dynamic relation that recalibrates center-periphery models. Throughout his scholarship, Chris reveals an Ibero-American Atlantic system enmeshed in others that have dominated framings of this transoceanic system, such as the Anglo-American transatlantic and the Black Atlantic. As Stephen Jacobson writes in a masterful appreciation of his work, “His scholarship bridged academic communities previously divided by field and country.”3 Given this relational conception and methodology, his work calls attention to figures who mediated between worlds, from Estevanico, the multilingual African man who accompanied Cabeza de Vaca and Las Casas, to Cuban planter Francisco de Arango y Parreño. Through his analysis of these figures, Chris reveals the possibilities and the oppressive constraints that the processes of empire, colonialism, and resistance presented

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historical agents, and the degrees of freedom and unfreedom in the Atlantic world. These themes converge in the work of the Blanco White brothers, Joseph (José) and Fernando, to whom Chris turned in the last years of his life.4 The biography of each brother mirrors the tumultuous epoch of the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath for Britain, Spain, and the newly independent republics around the Atlantic littoral. They share features of the extraordinary lives of other pan-Atlantic figures like Francisco de Miranda, Andrés Bello, and José Joaquín de Mora, who like Fernando Blanco White, was a prisoner of the French.5 As bilingual, immigrant authors who were displaced in a time of war, Fernando and Joseph invite an analysis of the interrelation between genre, language, and power as they seek to imagine states of personal and political liberation amidst the complex geopolitical scenarios of Europe in the 1810s. While the work on bilingualism and autobiography has been extensive with regard to Joseph since Juan Goytisolo’s rediscovery of the writer in 1970,6 questions around identity and language have been mostly ignored with regard to Fernando. This essay explores the literary and sociocultural contexts for Fernando’s Flight to Freedom: A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire, 1815 his memoir of escape from prison in Chalon-sur Saône, which remained unpublished for two centuries until Chris’s discovery and edition. Drawing on the archive at Princeton University of Fernando’s letters and later essays on English literature, I analyze his adoption of English as the language of self-fashioning in Flight to Freedom in light of his elder brother’s affiliation to literary and political circles in Britain—a personal instance of what literary critic Harold Bloom has termed the “anxiety of influence.”7 Fernando’s process as student and author offers a compelling portrait of a bilingual subject’s authorial and political relationship to English in the emergent Pax Britannica after Napoleon’s surrender and the restoration of the Bourbons to the Spanish Crown. His choice to write the memoir in English becomes all the more striking when one considers that he began writing in a language in which he was not fluent and that he struggled to learn, reflecting on the question of whether it is “a harsh language” later in life.8 English allowed Fernando to create a narrative of his experience as he imagines a life for himself different from what his family and society expect. The enduring impact of living in London, writing Flight to Freedom, and absorbing the literary culture of British Romanticism made itself felt in Fernando’s later years, when he became the first opositor for the professorship of English at the Universidad de Sevilla in 1848. This overlooked fact gives Flight to Freedom added historical

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significance in the context of Fernando’s development as an intellectual and the larger accounts of the teaching of English at the Universidad de Sevilla and in Spain. Fernando, who was eleven years younger than Joseph, had joined the Spanish army as a lieutenant of the battalion of The Third Volunteers of Seville in 1808. He had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, physics, and jurisprudence in 1806 from the Universidad Hispalense, later Universidad de Sevilla. Before the war, Fernando had been studying mathematics with Alberto Lista and humanities with his brother Joseph, who was still in Spain and also taught at the university. Almost immediately after his deployment, he was captured when France defeated Spain in the battle of Somosierra on 30 November 1808.9 He was a prisoner from 1808–1814, fleeing to London in the spring of 1814, where he joined Joseph, although they did not live together. After two years in England, during which Fernando became apprenticed to Murphy & Co., learned English, and wrote the manuscript of Flight to Freedom, he returned to Spain when his father died. Upon his return in March 1817, he underwent a process of “Purificación” that cleared him of any suspicion of being a deserter, and Fernando VII named him a Lieutenant in the Infantry of Volunteers in Seville.10 He married Juana de Olloqui a year later on 16 November 1818; he appears to have had an understanding with her before going to war.11 In one of the letters to his parents, Fernando writes her a perfunctory postscript, “Por tus renglones veo que continúas siendo mujer de pocas palabras, pero no esto impide poco que tu cariño sea el mismo. Así lo espero . . . recibe el corazón de tu Fernando” [I see by your lines that you remain a woman of few words, but this does not prevent your affection from being the same. I hope it is thus . . . receive the heart of your Fernando].12 In Seville he also began a career in teaching, directing a Lancasterian school in the 1820s, and later, a military academy in 1835. That year, Fernando Blanco White also obtained his doctorate in philosophy and lectured in mathematics as he was preparing his oposición for professor of English at the Universidad de Sevilla in 1848, which according to the record, he obtained.13 His death in 1849 prevented him from enjoying the fruits of that endeavor and the literary prize he also received. These authorial ambitions were realized two hundred years later when Chris transcribed and edited his manuscript. Flight to Freedom gives scholars and students of the Napoleonic Wars and Romanticism one of the few firsthand accounts of captivity and the effects of the conflict by a Spanish officer. The recent work of scholars such as Catriona Kennedy, Gavin Daly, and James Leighton sheds light on the

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hundreds of English, French, and German accounts, and their centrality for understanding the construction of the war as an event.14 Among these, only three circulated in England by Spanish authors who had been translated: Juan Senén de Contrera’s Relation of the Siege of Tarragona (1811); El Empecinado’s The Military Exploits of Don Juan Martin Diez (1823); and Juan van Halen’s Narrative of Don Juan Van Halen’s Imprisonment in the Dungeons of the Inquisition at Madrid and his Escape in 1817 . . . his Journey to Russia, his campaign with the army of the Caucasus (1827).15 Although episodes of captivity occur in Diez and van Halen, including the imprisonment of Diez’s mother at the hand of the French, such episodes are parenthetical within the main story.16 Imprisonment and the desire to escape move the entire narrative of Flight to Freedom, which chronicles Fernando’s arduous escape during the winter and early spring of 1814 from Chalon-sur-Saône, France across Germany, Austria, and Holland, to his final safety and reunion with his brother Joseph in London. As in other soldiers’ captivity narratives, Fernando dramatizes how “the personal experience of captivity exemplified collective struggles and values, between a rhetoric of suffering and lamentation and narratives of heroism and stoic resignation.”17 A signal contribution to the literature of military memoir and travel narrative, Chris’s edition of Flight to Freedom also gives readers a crucial glimpse into the process of the acquisition of language and culture in early nineteenth-century Britain. In addition to his reading of genres like travel writing and captivity narratives, Fernando also drew on his knowledge of eighteenth and nineteenth century authors, from Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe to Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen to render the story of his escape. He admired Defoe above all British novelists on account of “his claim to originality” and “the appearance of reality that is given to fiction.”18 Description in Defoe “increases the probability of his story, adds to its interest and carries forward his reader.”19 Fernando’s praise of realism is in keeping with nineteenth century taste for the genre, but it is the combination of travel narrative, adventure story, and ethnography that finds its way to the pages of Flight to Freedom. Although Fernando names Mrs. Montagu as a reference, the epistolary style of her work is not reflected in his text. Rather, he aims to “carry forward his reader” in a story that embodies the archetype of the soldier’s return home, a modern variant of Homer’s Odyssey or Robinson Crusoe, his favorite novel in English.20 The journey that Fernando and his fellow soldiers undertook lacked the supernatural elements of the Homeric poem, but it was no less epic in the context of the looming threat of capture and constant bodily duress.

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The account highlights his honor, fortitude, leadership, and resourcefulness, illustrating how, as Jacques Derrida argues, Flight for Freedom supplements Fernando’s absence from the front.21 He records the extreme conditions of this forced march from Spain to Dijon: “The travails on the road were imponderable . . . We walked on foot and almost unshod seven leagues every day . . . The cold was insufferable, as strong as it is here, and the ice so hard we fell with every step.”22 Life in Dijon was miserable, cold, and filthy, even if prisoners were housed in barracks, and those who could afford it could rent private rooms— an option Fernando tried for a while by skipping meals, leading to “‘a continuous hunger that ceaselessly tormented me.’”23 In 1811, the prisoners were transferred from Dijon to Chalon-sur Saône, where a new set of difficulties awaited. Letters containing vital remittances from his parents never reached Fernando, and conditions seemed to deteriorate after “the Emperor ordered that the pay issued to prisoners be reduced” in 1812.24 Chris adds that Fernando “spoke of his ‘slavery’ in January of 1813, and in letters dated from the summer and the fall, mentions without elaboration the increasing ‘humiliations’ of his situation, though at the same time assuring his parents that he remained healthy and active, playing music (a theme in the account of his escape across Europe) and studying mathematics.”25 When the opportunity to flee presented itself on 7 January 1814, Fernando fled with a company of ten officers, including the three sons of the Marquis of Castilleja del Campo in Seville. Fernando and company escaped in January, and the possibility of getting caught and being imprisoned again weighed heavily on the fugitives until reaching London safely on 23 March 1814, eight days before Napoleon’s first surrender on 31 March. He records, “Our fear was occasioned by the following considerations: we believed we had nothing but Austrian cavalry before us, consequently the artillery we heard must be French . . . The more distinctly we heard the firing and the more our terror increased, till upon our arrival at St. Amour we learnt that the Austrians were in great number near Bourg.”26 Unrelenting hunger, numbing cold, fatigue, illness, and physical suffering characterize the state of the fugitives until the end of the journey. Conscious of this aspect of the narrative, Fernando observes, “Even in the first months after I had been in England, if anything went wrong I looked for consolation in the certainty of having after all a good bed and a good dinner. It is not to be wondered then, if the greater part of my journal speaks of nothing but the lodgings and meals.”27 Writing in English shaped Fernando’s relationship with the more literary Joseph and the question of authorship between the Blanco White

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brothers. It also mediated Fernando’s acculturation in England, where he briefly contemplated settling before his father’s death forced him to return to Spain.28 When Fernando arrived in London in the spring of 1814, Joseph Blanco White was a published author who benefited from and contributed to the creative ferment of the Romantic period, achieving both success and notoriety. He supported liberal reform in Spain through his extensive literary and intellectual production in genres ranging from journalism in the influential El Español (1810–14) and later Variedades (1822–24), and contributions to British journals such as the Quarterly Review and the Monthly Review; to antislavery polemic with the Bosquexo del comercio en esclavos (1814), on which I had the privilege of working with Chris before his passing. Joseph was connected to Holland House, the Whig nerve center of the Peninsular War effort in Britain, through his friendship with Lord and Lady Holland and his position as tutor to their son.29 Writers such as Lord Byron, Madame de Staël, Monk Lewis, and Richard Sheridan congregated in Holland House alongside British and Spanish politicians, and Blanco befriended writers such as Robert Southey, Felicia Hemans, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.30 Unlike Joseph, whose advanced competence allowed him to circulate in society, draft reports for the Foreign Office, and publish in the Quarterly Review in a relatively short span after emigrating, Fernando had little fluency in English to speak of when he first arrived in London in 1814.31 As Fernando informed his parents, he was not fluent enough to begin work for Mr. Murphy immediately. A month after arriving, he proposed to them that he would live from four to five months in a town “donde no oiré mas que inglés y donde el amo de la casa me servirá de maestro” [where I will hear only English and the landlord will act as my teacher].32 This self-designed immersion method of language learning seems to have worked at least in part, since in October he was working as a business apprentice for the Murphy concern, and by December he told his parents he could already write in the language.33 In April, 1815, however, he asks to remain in Britain for a while longer: “no he adelantado como esperaba, aunque aseguro a Vms. Sobre mi honor que le he puesto mucho empeño de mi parte tanto en el comercio como en la lengua” [I have not advanced as much as I would like, although I assure you upon my honor that I have put much effort both in my business education as in the language]. Fernando’s later essays on British literature reveal that part of the effort while he lived in London also had a cultural dimension, and was not as monastic as he would have his parents believe.34 He attended the theater and became acquainted with the work of British Romantic

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poets and novelists. In discussing Shakespeare’s mixture of poetry and popular humor, which he considers “vulgar,” he refers to Romeo and Juliet: The great actor [Edmund] Kean, the unparalleled Miss [Elizabeth] O’Neal produced the beauties of that great genius in its full light, they endeavored to hide at the same time his faults, yet it was impossible to bear them. . . . We could hardly relish these beauties, shocked as it were by so many trivial and vulgar incidents. . . . how often have we, on returning from the play, have taken up the book to read over and over those passages which had struck me most, to relish them without the alloy of vulgarity which I had been obliged to suffer on the stage!35

The anecdote is historically significant for it provides one of the few documented instances of members of the Hispanic exile in London analyzing a performance during this period. Fernando writes as if he had attended the same performance, naming Edmund Kean in Romeo’s role and Eliza O’Neill in Juliet’s, but he must have gone to the theater on at least two separate occasions. Kean acted as Romeo for the Drury Lane Theater in 1815, and O’Neil for Covent Garden. She was the far more successful actor in the play, playing Juliet from her debut in 1814 to her retirement in 1819.36 Fernando was also immersing himself in the literary culture of the time, as suggested by his judgment of the poet William Cowper, whom he considers “the forerunner . . . of great writers who within the last half century have so remarkably revolutionized English poetry, producing something like a revival of its Elizabethan spring, including Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Scott, Byron, Crabbe and others who still live.”37 At least one of these—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—had been personally known to his brother, and he famously referred to Joseph’s “Night and Death” as the finest sonnet to have been written in English.38 Joseph’s social circle also included the family of James Carrick Moore, the brother of Sir John Moore, the first general of British forces in the Peninsula. Their father had been the celebrated Dr. John Moore, who counted among his close associates none other than Edmund Burke.39 The relationship between the Moore family, particularly Louisa Moore, was central to Fernando’s writing process. Not only was she the “other to whom he directed his autobiographical writing,” an “editor and amanuensis,” as Chris writes, but also, “Louisa might have played a role in introducing Fernando to the great wave of British writing about the Peninsular War . . . . If Fernando ever intended to publish his account, it would have fit well into this British vogue for military

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reminiscences.”40 That the manuscript was developed at the urging of Louisa Moore and in the sphere of the Moore family, which had its own share of controversy about the military valor (or lack thereof) of Sir John Moore acquires added significance in light of Fernando’s anxieties about military service. It should be noted that Fernando’s first group of readers, the Moores and Joseph, were entirely bilingual: through his parents, Fernando obtained several plays of Calderón and the poetry of Cienfuegos for Mrs. Moore.41 He clearly had the option of writing the memoir in Spanish, yet the experience with the British literary public sphere of his brother Joseph and the Moore family were also considerations in his choice to write in English. Despite her youth, Louisa knew the British public’s appetite for stories from the front firsthand from the success of her father’s A Narrative of the Campaign of the British Army in Spain, Commanded by His Excellency Lt. General Sir John Moore. Moore’s narrative of his brother’s actions in Spain was intended for clarification and apologia, as he contends writing about himself in the third person. “He could not remain passive when his Brother’s memory was assailed by ungenerous attacks and dark insinuations.”42 The account went into five editions within the first year of its publication. Louisa knew a good story, and saw the potential for the one Fernando had to tell; it is more than likely she encouraged his efforts as a developmental editor as much as a linguistic one. He directly credits her with tasking him with the writing of the journal in the context of an intense personal relationship: Oh! You most tender of beings for whom I have undertaken this laborious work, fancy the delicious moments which ensued; fancy them for they could not be uttered; and when your imagination have [sic] decked them with powerful charms, then I will pray heaven to bless your every day with still sweeter raptures.43

Fernando registers his struggle to learn English by calling the narrative a “laborious work.” The framing of the effort in terms of labor also discloses something of the literary texture of the relationship between Fernando and Louisa through its echo of Ferdinand in Shakespeare´s The Tempest.44 Like his English namesake, Fernando survives an extreme situation and “labors” to win a woman’s love. Louisa’s use of “Ferdinand” to call Fernando further suggests the play as a context for their conversation.45 Louisa, like her family, validated not only Fernando’s efforts to learn English and become acculturated but also validated the account he gave of his actions as survivor of Napoleon’s prisons. It is Louisa’s imagination, after all, that “decked [the memoir] with powerful charms.” Fernando appeals to her sense of military honor as he

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differentiates himself from other officers and soldiers. Explaining his behavior as a prisoner under the French, he writes “All this digression I deem it necessary to my friend to whom I like to show me as I am: full of honour, tho’ I may have great many faults.”46 The narrative exchange between Fernando and Louisa allows him to reestablish the line between honor and treason blurred by the postwar repatriation process. Fernando alternates his self-fashioning in the text as between a man who has acquired worldly knowledge through travel, and a selfpresentation that highlights his image as a man of sensibility in the style of Austen’s military heroes like Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. As Chris writes, Fernando “was curious and enlightened, as his desire to study in Paris had demonstrated, though he admitted he was not enlightened enough to overcome deep Spanish prejudices,” sometimes revealing anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and classist attitudes that readers today find problematic.47 Following the style of Enlightenment travelers, he intersperses episodes of danger with reflections about the landscape; ethnographic vignettes; interactions with both allied and enemy soldiers, including “bad Spaniards” who had fought for the French;48 the effects of the war on local populations; the importance of languages; and a frank portrait of gender relations in a time of war. At the same time, he is willing to have compassion for French prisoners and forgive his former captors, noting, “Some wretched French prisoners whom we met, half starved, increased my melancholy for they reminded me of the time I was in their case [sic]. I remembered how most of the French had insulted my misery, and how humiliated they were now. Tomorrow I may be a prisoner again, said I, and compassion for those wretches was my predominant feeling.”49 Furthermore, as Chris avers, “Rather than engaging in the boastful, swaggering tone of conquests and prowess, as was to be found in the construction of military masculinity in this era, Fernando instead emphasized his restraint in the face of temptation, in contrast to the behavior of some of the acquaintances made during his journey.”50 Fernando’s later reflections on whether “English is a harsh language,” an essay with a linguistic focus that he prepared for the oposición suggest some of the difficulties he may have faced as a student, and help to contextualize the irregular spelling and syntax in some passages of Flight to Freedom. In the 1848 essay, he seeks to rehabilitate English against its reputation for difficulty, one established, he writes, since the days “of the great Charles V of Germany and I of Spain, who compared the English language as adequate to speak it with birds,” an opinion that “was sufficient ground for people who cannot judge by themselves to take it for granted that had no claims to harmony.”51

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Drawing on his multilingualism and experience of travel in Flight to Freedom, Fernando builds a comparative linguistic framework to explain the idiosyncrasies of English orthography and pronunciation in relation to other European languages, namely Spanish, French, and German. Echoes of his initial frustrations (and those of students even today) emerge in his enumeration of its peculiarities. “There is no orthography so irrational as the English, none that employs so many useless signs, none that has so many different ways of expressing the same sound, none that is so void of general rules, none whose exceptions are as numerous as the rules,” enough “to have deterred from it the most sanguinary chiefs of the French Revolution.”52 As a faithful transcription of the manuscript of Fernando’s journal, Flight to Freedom preserves an authentic record of his moments of struggle with English, and Fernando’s increasing confidence as an author. For example, early on in the journal, he writes, “The night was cloudy but not dark because of the moon. It Fulled a little rays which sometimes was rather snow.” His awareness of linguistic differences between English and Spanish grows as he gains mastery over the language, and he uses them consciously to humorous effect. As he is boarding the boat that will deliver him to England, he writes, “Now the passengers began to arrive and each other’s curiosity to be excited. Each began to display his own character, and the cold observer had a good employment. I could be called cold observer because I was observing and shuddering with cold at the same time.”53 For Fernando, being in Britain and learning English opened possibilities for personal and institutional freedom, allowing him to carve out a degree of independence from his parents and to imagine a different life from the military path that had been traced for him. He reflected, “Estoy cada vez más agradecido a mi amigo Murphy que me disuadió de seguir la carrera militar” [Every day I am more grateful to my friend Murphy, who has dissuaded me from following a military career.]54 In addition to studying English, Fernando became apprenticed to the Murphy trading house to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps. This appeal to family history further justified his decision to remain in Britain rather than return immediately to Spain as his parents in Seville thought necessary so that he would not face charges of desertion. He responded to his parents’ worries, “No sería un dolor que ahora que voy aprendiendo la lengua del pays, y que a los diez días de haber entrado en el escritorio de Muph lo abandonara todo por temores que confío en Dios sean infundidos?” [Would it not be a shame that now that I am learning the language of the country, and ten days into my employment in Murphy’s office, I abandoned it all because of fears that

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I trust in God are unfounded?]55 An epidemic in Seville contributed to the further postponement of his return to Seville. Fernando developed the manuscript that became Flight to Freedom in tandem with his conflicted reflections about returning to Spain in light of the restoration of Ferdinand VII, which he considered a major alteration that could have “una influencia muy considerable en mi carrera” [a considerable influence in my career], and a detrimental one at that. He had serious trepidations about being sent to Latin América “a una guerra horrible” [to a horrible war], or worse, to be put to pasture as an aggregate lieutenant in an inactive regiment.56 In this context, choosing English to dramatize his self-fashioning signals a shift from the practical rationale for learning the language that he shared with his parents, to the broader political implications of actually living in Britain, where his status as an honorable veteran, despite being a prisoner for much of the war, was never questioned as it was later was in Spain.57 Indeed the question of how little military action he had actually seen in relation to other officers vexed him as to his future prospects: “En efecto, ¿qué esperanza puede quedarle a uno como yo que no tiene más méritos que haber servido seis meses?” [In effect, what could one such as I hope for without more merit than being in service for six months?]58 He considered the situation of Peninsular War veterans an uncertain one in light of the restoration. Speaking of his comrades in captivity, he wrote “no tendrán trabajo en mucho tiempo [they will not be employed for a while].59 By contrast, he depicts Britain as a land of opportunity. “Let us hasten to England,” he writes, “this happy country blessed by Heaven with riches, power, and beauty. But they shall be mine, or shall I only be the wretched and covetous spectator of the bliss of these proud islanders?”60 He further reinforces the idea between Britain and the prospects of acquiring a fortune to his parents. Inquiring after his friends, he writes “¿Qué dicen de mi apostasía? Cuando me vean manejar un par de cien mil pesos confesarán mi buena elección. A esto aspiro con todas mis veras como única dicha en la vida” [What do they say about my apostasy? When they see me handling a couple of hundred thousand dollars they will have to praise my choice. I aspire to this with all my fervor as the only happiness in life].61 Fernando’s choice of the word “apostasía” to describe his choice to stay, although hyperbolically playful, hints at an anxiety underneath his otherwise confident attitude regarding his parents’ concerns about the repercussions of his sojourn in England. Moreover, it signifies his identification with the elder Joseph, who as Chris writes, was “Spain’s most famous and reviled expatriate.”62 By 1814, Joseph had converted

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to Anglicanism and was an apostate of the Catholic Church; while Fernando’s “apostasy” was not religious, it defied the expectations of family and country just as much. Flight to Freedom records not only the heroic flight of Fernando Blanco White and his fellow officers and soldiers but also his identification with and emulation of his more famous elder brother’s literary and social success in Britain, despite the risks that this choice entailed back in Spain. Withholding the publication of the memoir makes sense in light of this controversial association and the uncertainty of the outcome of his military “purificación,” which was not resolved until 1826.63 As Chris suggests, personal considerations might have also influenced his decision not to publish.64 Regardless, the self-fashioning Fernando rehearsed his English while writing Flight to Freedom, and his time in London had a lifelong impact, as evinced in his oposiciones to become professor of English at the University of Seville in 1848. The history of the English language and the essays on Byron, Shakespeare, and the English novel that he wrote demonstrate his intimate acquaintance with the canon of English and Spanish literature, and anticipate the work of scholars such as Alcalá Galiano, who publicized Anglophone culture in Spain. In his edition of Fernando’s diary, Chris fulfilled Fernando’s authorial ambitions, and legated a crucial chapter of the transcultural dynamics of the Blanco White family. That the edition is twice posthumous stands as a testament to the power of human language and scholarship to bear witness to history. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s untimely and tragic passing deprived scholars and students in the United States, Latin America, and Europe of one of the leading lights of Atlantic scholarship. As Flight to Freedom demonstrates, there are many conversations still to be had about his work in which he will always be an awaited presence. Joselyn M. Almeida specializes in the transcultural archive of British and Luso-Hispanic cultures and the relation of capitalism to slavery and abolition. Her monograph, Reimagining the Transatlantic, 1780– 1890 (Ashgate, 2011; Routledge, 2016), theorizes the pan-Atlantic as a region of political, material, and cultural interrelations between Britain, Africa, and the non-Anglophone Americas. Almeida is also editor of Romanticism and the Anglo-Hispanic Imaginary (Rodopi, 2010), and author of a poetry collection in Spanish, Condiciones para el vuelo (Libros del Misssissipi, 2019). She has published essays in English Literary History, Bulletin for Hispanic and Portuguese Historical Studies, Atlantic Studies, The Byron Journal, Studies in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, The Wordsworth Circle, and various essay collections.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

Hernández, “Elegía,” 129. See Doyle, “Inter-imperiality and Literary Studies.” Jacobson, “Bringing the Empire Back In.” In addition to his work on Fernando’s Diary, Chris had begun work on a translation and edition of Joseph Blanco White’s Bosquexo del comercio en esclavos (1814), on which I had the privilege of working with him. Mora was held in Autun, not Chalon-sur-Saône as previously thought. See Medina Calzada, Britain and the Hispanic World, 7–8. Goytisolo, Obra inglesa de Blanco White; Loureiro, The Ethics of Autobiography; Moreno Alonso, Divina libertad; Durán López, Blanco White o la consciencia errante. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. Fernando voices a complaint English learners have even today. “Anyone ignorant of English who looks in a book written in that language is at once surprised at seeing that combination of consonants which no person would be able to utter.” See “Lectures on English and Related Items,” Seville; circa 1848; Box 5, Blanco White Family Collection, Princeton University. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 8–9. “Cronología de Fernando Blanco White.” Baptism, Marriage and Death Certificates of the Blanco White Family, Plus Related Documents (Necrological Notes etc.); 1686 March 5–1941 February 18; Box 15, Blanco White Family Collection. Chris observes that “Louisa’s presence in the diary might also indicate one reason why Fernando never published it (if he ever intended to do so); as a married man in Seville, the hints of connection to a young English girl could have hardly pleased his wife and family,” A Spanish Prisoner, 20. After he returned to Seville, a year passed before he married Juana de Ollaqui on 16 November 1818. See Baptism, Marriage and Death Certificates of the Blanco White Family, Plus Related Documents (Necrological Notes etc.), Box 15, Blanco White Family Collection. Fernando Blanco White, To Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh and María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve, London 9 March 1815, Box 9, Blanco White Family Collection. “Cronología de Fernando Blanco White.” Baptism, Marriage and Death Certificates of the Blanco White Family, Plus Related Documents (Necrological Notes etc.); 1686 March 5–1941 February 18; Box 15, Blanco White Family Collection. See Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary; Daly, The British Soldier; Iglesias Rogers, British Liberators; and Leighton, Witnessing the Napoleonic Wars. Alberich, Bibliografía Anglo-Hispánica, gives a sense of the paucity of published accounts by Spanish officers. The translator writes “At this moment the commandant of the garrison of Aranda de Duero made prisoner the aged and infirm mother of our hero,

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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and lodged her in a dungeon of the gaol in that town—a barbarous mode of endeavoring to check the ardour of her son.” The Military Exploits of Juan Martín Diez, 24. Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary, 117. See F. Blanco White, “Lectures on English and Related Items,” Blanco White Family Collection. F. Blanco White, “Lectures on English.” F. Blanco White, “Lectures on English.” Derrida explains “When Nature, as self-proximity, comes to be forbidden or interrupted, when speech fails to protect presence, writing becomes necessary. It must be added to the word urgently . . . writing is added to it, is adjoined, as an image or representation. In that sense, it is not natural. It diverts the immediate presence of thought to speech into representation and the imagination.” See Derrida, “That Dangerous Supplement,” in Acts of Literature, 82. Fernando Blanco White, A Spanish Prisoner, ed. Schmidt-Nowara, 10. F. Blanco White, A Spanish Prisoner, 12. F. Blanco White, A Spanish Prisoner, 14. Schmidt-Nowara, introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 13. F. Blanco White, A Spanish Prisoner, ed. Schmidt-Nowara, 16. F. Blanco White, introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 97. Murphy, Blanco White, 102. Murphy, 99. See Joseph Blanco White, The Life of the Reverend Joseph Blanco White. Joseph’s first publication in English was an article for the influential Quarterly Review, in which Robert Southey was also a reviewer. See J. Blanco White, “Rev. of Walton.” For Blanco White and the Foreign Office, see Pons, Blanco White y América. Fernando Blanco White To Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh and María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve, London 23 April 1814, Blanco White, Box 9, Blanco White Family Collection. Fernando Blanco White To Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh and María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve, London, 20 December 1814, Blanco White Family Collection. F. Blanco White, “Lectures on English and Related Items,” Blanco White Family Collection. F. Blanco White, “Lectures on English.” Kean’s Romeo was by all accounts a leaden performance and suffered in comparison with O’Neill’s Juliet. See Hazlitt, “Edmund Kean’s Romeo,” in A View of the English Stage, 57–75. F. Blanco White, “Lectures on English,” Blanco White Family Collection. See Antonio Garnica, Night and Death. See Fulton, Dr. John Moore, 1729–1802, 495–96. As Fulton explains, Moore fell out with Burke over the French Revolution. Schmidt-Nowara, introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 19. Fernando Blanco White, To Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh and María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve, London, 6 April 1815, Blanco White Family Collection.

“To Make a Language of My Own”

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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Moore, A Narrative of the Campaign, vii. F. Blanco White, A Spanish Prisoner, ed. Schmidt-Nowara, 127. Shakespeare, The Tempest. Schmidt-Nowara, introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 18–19. F. Blanco White, A Spanish Prisoner, ed. Schmidt-Nowara, 53. Schmidt-Nowara, introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 25. F. Blanco White, A Spanish Prisoner, ed. Schmidt-Nowara, 135. F. Blanco White, A Spanish Prisoner, 76. Schmidt-Nowara, introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 29. F. Blanco White, “Lectures on English,” Blanco White Family Collection. F. Blanco White, “Lectures on English.” F. Blanco White, A Spanish Prisoner, ed. Schmidt-Nowara, 166. Fernando Blanco White to Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh and María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve, 15 March 1815. Fernado Blanco White To Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh and María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve, 6 October 1814. Fernando Blanco White to Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh and María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve, 23 April 1814. As Schmidt-Nowara explains, Fernando had to undergo a process of “purificación” upon his return, A Spanish Prisoner, 5. Fernando Blanco White to Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh and María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve, 23 April 1814. Fernando Blanco White To Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh and María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve, 5 December 1814. F. Blanco White, A Spanish Prisoner, ed. Schmidt-Nowara, 115. Fernando Blanco White To Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh and María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve, 5 December 1814. Schmidt-Nowara, introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 20. “Cronología de Fernando Blanco White.” Baptism, Marriage and Death Certificates of the Blanco White Family. Schmidt-Nowara, introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 20.

Bibliography Alberich, José. Bibliografía Anglo-Hispánica, 1801–1850. Oxford: The Dolphin Book Co., 1978. Blanco White, Joseph. The Life of the Reverend Joseph Blanco White, Written by Himself. Edited by John Hamilton Thom. 3 vols. London: Chapman, 1845. ———. “Rev. of Walton, Present State of the Spanish Colonies, Including a Particular Report of Hispaniola.” Quarterly Review no. 7 (June 1812): 265–34. Blanco White Family Collection. Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Daly, Gavin. The British Soldier in the Peninsular War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

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Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. Translated and edited by Derek Attridge. London: Routledge, 1992. Doyle, Laura. “Inter-imperiality and Literary Studies in the Longer Durée.” PMLA 130, no. 2 (March 2015): 336–47. Durán López, Fernando. Blanco White o la consciencia errante. Sevilla: Editorial Lara, 2005. Fulton, Henry L. Dr. John Moore, 1729–1802: A Life in Medicine, Travel, and Revolution. London: Rowan and Littlefield, 2014. Goytisolo, Juan. Obra inglesa de Blanco White. Buenos Aires: Formenor, 1972. Hazlitt, William. A View of the English Stage. London: John Warren, 1821. Hernández, Miguel. “Elegía.” In Antología Poética, edited by José Luis Ferris, 127–29. Madrid: Austral, 2015. Iglesias Rogers, Graciela. British Liberators in the Age of Napoleon. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Jacobson, Stephen. “Bringing the Empire Back In: Christopher SchmidtNowara, 1966–2015.” Historia y Política no. 36 (December 2016): 341–51. https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/Hyp/article/view/53817/32586. Kennedy, Catriona. Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Leighton, James. Witnessing the Napoleonic Wars in German Central Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Loureiro, Angel. The Ethics of Autobiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain. Nashville: Tennessee University Press, 2000. Medina Calzada, Sara. Britain and the Hispanic World: A Study of José Joaquín de Mora’s Anglophilia. Valladolid: University of Valladolid, 2017. The Military Exploits of Juan Martín Diez, The Empecinado. Translated by A General Officer. London: Carpenter and Son, 1823. Moore, James Carrick. A Narrative of the Campaign of the British Army in Spain, Commanded by His Excellency Lt. General Sir John Moore. London: J. Johnson, 1809. Moreno Alonso, Manuel. Divina libertad: la aventura liberal de Don José María Blanco White. Sevilla: Ediciones Alfar, 2002. Murphy, Martin. Blanco White: Self-Banished Spaniard. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Pons, André. Blanco White y América. Oviedo: Instituto Feijoo, 2006. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, ed. A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire: The Diary of Fernando Blanco White’s Flight to Freedom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2018. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. In Shakespeare’s Plays, Sonnets and Poems, edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d. Retrieved 19 September 19 2018 from www.folgerdigitaltexts.org.

Chapter 11

Unexplored Connections Spanish Prisoners of War and Political Refugees in France, 1808–1820 Juan Luis Simal

å Taking as a departure point Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s edition of the diary in which Fernando Blanco White—brother of the renowned writer José M. Blanco White—narrated his months as a fugitive prisoner of war wandering Europe in 1814, this chapter analyzes the significance of the experience of prisoners of war (POWs) for writing the history of refugees in nineteenth-century Europe.1 The following pages explore the continuities between the conditions of the military POWs of the Napoleonic Wars as presented in Fernando Blanco White’s diary and correspondence, and those of the subsequent political refugees who started to arrive in France in 1813 and 1814 as the Napoleonic Empire was collapsing. The chapter considers the years 1808–20 as a key turning point in an ongoing process in which the conception and treatment of POWs was being transformed and, at the same time, increasingly linked with the emergence of the modern category of refugee. The study is centered on the experiences of Spaniards—who were the most numerous community of POWs and refugees in France in the period—but the analysis can plausibly be extended to a broader interpretation of the roots of a quintessential European experience. Historians have not studied this process in detail, however. To my knowledge, there is only one monograph dedicated to the Spanish POWs in Napoleonic France, published in 1983.2 Some valuable work on Spanish POWs and foreign prisoners in Spain during the eighteenth century has been published recently, which helps to situate the early nineteenth-century experience.3 The French and British POWs of the Wars of the French Revolution and the First Empire have received more attention, as have the POWs of the American revolutionary war.4

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Likewise, the history of refugees and exiles in the early nineteenth century has been the topic of recent relevant contributions that have enhanced the existing historiography. For the Spanish case, the classic works of Artola, Llorens, and Sánchez Mantero,5 have been complemented by perspectives interested not only in the political or intellectual activities of the exiles but also in their impact on the host societies and institutions.6 From a continental viewpoint, thanks to studies published in the last decades we now know much more about the lives of European refugees in the first half of the nineteenth century.7 Yet the connection between the two phenomena—POWs and political refugees—remains largely unexplored. The following pages examine the continuities between the experiences of Spanish POWs taken to France in the context of the Peninsular War, and the Spanish Bonapartist (afrancesados) refugees who arrived in France after the fall of Joseph I’s monarchy in 1813. The focus is placed on their living conditions and the administrative instruments devised to manage both groups.

The Living Conditions and Administrative Management of Prisoners of War in Napoleonic Europe In many ways, the Napoleonic age’s ways of dealing with POWs were at the genesis of the practices, procedures, institutions, and administrative instruments that would later be applied in nineteenth-century Europe not only to other POWs but also to war and political refugees. The practices of the 1790s and early 1800s continued military and diplomatic habits that were characteristic of pre-revolutionary warfare but also departed from them in significant ways. It can be argued that these years were fundamental for the creation of new, modern methods of dealing with massive forced migrations, whether related to military operations or not. Gavin Daly, in his study of French POWs in Britain, has argued that the prisoners of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars “represent a key turning point in the history of European prisoners of war.” He affirms that unlike eighteenth-century prisoners of war, prisoners of the Napoleonic Wars remained captive for the duration of the conflict, unable to return home through the traditional means of prisoner exchange or officer parole. This radical departure from the past gave rise to the modern practice of interning prisoners of war for the entire duration of a war.8

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As noted, I argue that this military experience with long-term captivity would be transferred to the management of refugees, men and women under the supervision of state authorities who were not expected to return to their home country any time soon. In 1814 Fernando Blanco White was one of the roughly 65,000 Spanish POWs captured in the Peninsular War residing in France. There were many thousands more POWs from other nationalities located in different parts of the Empire, but Spaniards were the majority in France, followed by Brits and Austrians.9 This massive number of prisoners made it necessary to create a system to manage and control their presence, clothe and feed them. The circumstances—an ongoing continental war and the meek administrative structures of an emergent modern state—did not allow for the development of comprehensive mechanisms. There was a wide space for improvisation and accommodation that benefited from certain practices inherited from the eighteenth century, like the parole d’honneur. Parole was a common practice in the conflicts of the eighteenth century that started to break down during the American and French Revolutionary Wars.10 It was part of an aristocratic understanding of war by which officers captured by the enemy could avoid both the gruesome inconveniences of detention and a long captivity. If they, as gentlemen, gave their word of honor that they would not try to escape, they could reside in a designated town enjoying freedom of movements and the amenities of urban life.11 Besides, they could also be included in an exchange of prisoners, or even sent home without any compensation if they promised not to engage in combat again for the duration of the current war or an agreed period of time. Daly argues that the French started to breach this gentlemanly practice at the same time they were overall breaking with a privilege-based society. Loyalty to the Republic and the nation became more important than personal honor, and thus escaping could be understood also as a patriotic duty. The practice of parole, however, did not disappear completely. Actually, the attack on the aristocratic concept of honor made by the Jacobins—who considered it a threat to the civic virtue of the new French citizen—was partly reversed by the Napoleonic empire through innovations like the Legion d’honneur.12 As Elodie Duché has argued, “whilst parole d’honneur was suspended with the Revolution, honour was reinvented during the Napoleonic conflicts.”13 Consequently, from the onset of the Peninsular War in 1808, and following established practices, parole was applied to the Spanish officers taken to France. Fernando Blanco White, captured on 4 December 1808, was one of them.14 As with other prisoners of the period, the liv-

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ing conditions of the Spanish POWs in France depended fundamentally on their social status; officers enjoyed much better conditions than privates.15 This was true from the very first moment of their captivity: the journey to France. Most POWs were interned in France in convoys with a military escort. Since the French government decided for security reasons that the Spanish POWs should live far from the border, they had a long way to go. As it was also decided that they must avoid regions where they could become problematic, like the Vendée, Bretagne, or the annexed territories, the majority were sent to the north and east of France. For most of the journey the prisoners walked in miserable conditions, in occasions without shoes or proper clothing. In a letter to his family, Fernando described his two-month journey from Madrid to Dijon in the winter of 1808/9: he barely ate and walked all day long under freezing weather. Conditions improved when his convoy entered France. The prisoners were given a small pay and could sleep at inns; however, Fernando found it disgusting to share a bed.16 He was not unfortunate, however. Many prisoners got seriously sick or died during the march. Yet some privileged POWs (normally high officers and priests) were permitted to travel on their own with a feuille de route, even being able to cover the long distances in stagecoaches.17 Once in France, the POWs were allocated to different residences, depending on their military quality and social status. Since the French authorities needed to monitor them, especially those considered to be a potential threat, some security measures were applied to avoid POWs from promoting sedition, corrupting the local population or escaping. However, in practice, the system was far from being strict. To the contrary, it could be quite flexible, in line with traditional ways of dealing with POWs. A few POWs were incarcerated. This was the case for famous prisoners like General Palafox or guerrilla leader and national hero Javier Mina, who was sent to Vincennes tower, a high-security prison. Other notorious officers were sent to fortresses, where they lived under military surveillance. Generally, fortresses hosted many more POWs than those they were prepared for. It was not unusual that the prisoners lived in overcrowded spaces, having to share the bed. On 4 August 1811 a decree was passed to improve the conditions of detention. In any case, the surveillance was not severe. The prisoners could receive visits and evasions were not unusual.18 Most POWs, however, lived in depots (dêpots). That was the case with Fernando Blanco White. The depots were establishments of various types in which the prisoners could be monitored and provided with sustenance by the French authorities. At the beginning of the Spanish

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War the imperial government typically housed POWs in empty military quarters. But they soon started to fill up and by 1812 they were incapable of hosting the tens of thousands of POWs arriving in France. Authorities turned then to other premises, like secularized religious buildings. The living conditions were normally dire. Schmidt-Nowara’s introductory study to the Diary describes, using Fernando’s letters to his family, the living conditions of the depots of Dijon and Chalon-surSaône, where he resided during his captivity. As Fernando was an officer and a member of an affluent family, his conditions were better than those of the majority of POWs, yet his experience is telling. He described a hard life in the barracks. Food was scarce—the prefects were in charge of providing food for the depots, and plausibly they did not always comply as it reduced the resources left for the local population19—and infested with lice. The constant noise and the forced intimacy with his comrades enervated him. He compared life in the barracks with residing in a brothel. However, he also complained of petty inconveniences, like having to cook for himself.20 Certainly, the POWs were ragged and shabby. A French high officer proposed to provide them with uniforms, which would not only ameliorate their condition, but also be useful to better identify them. The sanitary conditions in which they lived were for the most part deficient. Epidemics were constantly breaking out and contagion was easy. Normally there were no doctors assigned to the depots. It was rather doctors living in nearby towns who assisted the POWs. Many got sick and if they were sent to hospitals, very soon crowded, it was to receive a deficient treatment. Many died. Two doctors were sent to the depot of Dijon in March 1812, when Fernando was no longer living there. They proposed the introduction of sanitary measures to control the fevers. But these medical visits were exceptional.21 Some very sick POWs, considered invalids, were sent back to Spain as they could not fight anymore. In this way the empire would be spared the costs of their maintenance. Generally, control and surveillance of the POWs who were not considered dangerous or especially valuable was lenient, dependent on the war necessities and the scarcity of resources. One central element of the security system was trust between detainees and guards. The French authorities expected the prisoners, especially if they were officers, to voluntarily comply with the regulations of their captivity adhering to the parole d’honneur system. Thus, officers living in the depots enjoyed a relative freedom of movement. Many were allowed to visit regularly or even live in designated towns if they gave their word of honor not to escape.

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Of course, this meant that prisoners could actually easily escape, and certainly there were many attempts, some of them successful. Those who failed suffered punishment, like a friend of Fernando’s, Juan María Maestre, who was sent to a fortress in 1812 after an unsuccessful attempt. In July 1810 Fernando wrote from Dijon to his family that “because the prisoners in the depots are constantly escaping they are treating us more rigorously than before . . . Anyone caught in the act of escaping is punished with one month in the dungeon and prison at the discretion of the Minister, which is to say, confinement until the end of the war.” This also meant that they had to be present at roll call three times a day and were not allowed to get “passes to visit friends in other depots.”22 Fernando complained of the new conditions because the previous ones, granted by parole agreements, must have been more generous. Yet the numerous escape attempts allowed by the lenient parole system forced the authorities to increase the security measures.23 Then, officers would protest that their honor was being insulted. Yet in 1811 in depots such as Autun, near Dijon, the Spanish POWs were notoriously ignoring the regulations, absenting themselves from their assigned locations and freely moving around.24 From 1813, when the military fortunes of France started to decline, the government was forced to dedicate less attention to the POWs, who started to see their liberation coming. As a consequence, security standards decreased and evasions, like Fernando’s own, increased. Fernando, like other POWs, received a modest monthly pay, after a classification designed by the French authorities following military rank. However, Fernando complained that he received only a fraction of his rightful officer’s pay. This was common. Since it was difficult to certify the authenticity of the rank declared by the POWs, they usually received only a half-pay of their apparent grade and a ration of bread. To make things worse, in October 1812 Napoleon decided to reduce even more the official remunerations. There were simply too many captive Spanish officers.25 But there were many options left to prisoners with access to cash, like Fernando, who, besides regular pay, received extra money from his family and loans from friends (he nevertheless would constantly complain in his correspondence of his difficulties in accessing money). As mentioned, paroled officers were allowed to rent rooms outside the barracks in private homes, an arrangement that also came with obvious financial advantages to the French authorities, who encouraged it. Fernando made use of this privilege and rented a room in Autun, where he was temporally transferred from Dijon in July 1809. There were many advantages for living in towns. Of course, there was the



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social life, but also the possibility of maintaining correspondence without strict control. However, these fortunate POWs needed to adjust their budget, because they had to pay for room and board. This often led to problems, especially for low officers like Fernando. His expenses forced him to eat only one meal per day. As a result, he wrote to his family that he lived in “continuous hunger.”26 But this was not always the case. In cities some officers were able to spend quite a lot of money, eat in restaurants, drink in taverns and cafés, play cards and even hire servants. One officer, Rafael Berdugo, claimed that his small pay allowed him to enjoy an excellent life.27 In this somewhat laid-back context, some POWs were able to carry out intellectual activities and work. The engineer Román read in the public library of Nancy, took several courses at the local university, and worked copying plans for the land register (cadastre) and giving Latin lessons.28 In Chalon-sur-Saône, where Fernando was transferred in October 1811, he played music, read, and studied mathematics. However, he considered that he was living in humiliating conditions that he equated to “slavery.” As Christopher Schmidt-Nowara has argued, we should interpret his understanding of slavery as “the antithesis of the liberty that he and other Spanish liberals affirmed and defended against the French and against Spanish serviles [reactionaries],” rather than as an objective comparison of his living conditions with those of an actual slave.29 There was still a luckier class of POWs: the officers who had decided to take an oath of loyalty to King Joseph Bonaparte of Spain. If they accepted to switch sides, they could enjoy almost total freedom of movement, receive a higher pay, and be allowed to reside in attractive locations, like the depot at Châlons-sur-Marne, where 626 resided in November 1812. In many aspects they were not treated like POWs any longer, although in November 1810 the minister of war ordered to increase the surveillance over them. In any case, officers in Châlonssur-Marne could regularly visit the nearby town and had to be present at roll call only once a week. However, they had to promise they would not abandon their residence.30 They could be considered refugees in what can be rather called a temporary military lodging. Notwithstanding these privileged conditions, which were surely exceptional, some voices were raised that condemned the mistreatment of the Spanish POWs by the French. For instance, general Contreras deplored the conditions in which they lived and argued that the humanitarian measures taken by the French government were only propaganda for European public opinion. He also denounced that the administrative aid system was constantly being broken by the French authorities themselves.31

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This denunciation was shared by Fernando, who would use it to justify his evasion as a paroled officer in a context in which the parole d’honneur system was being eroded by the effects of long-term captivity and a struggle increasingly perceived in national terms. Yet the fact that he broke his word of honor by escaping beleaguered him. In his diary he justified how his and his companions’ “behavior in running away from the places where we were on parole . . . was not against our honour, for many circumstances had already disengaged us from this parole.” He justified his escape from the depot at Chalon-sur-Saône claiming that the French had not respected the terms of the parole in the first place. Since “the French government had so often cheated us . . . we were, I imagine, in the right of cheating him once.” Fernando claimed that he and other officers were never fully trusted: “we could not walk more than a mile from our depot and sometimes not that; and we were obliged to go every day to the appel [roll call] once; two or three times accordingly to the arbitrary will of our Commandant.” As his word of honor “to remain a prisoner” was not trusted, he considered that he was not under parole anymore. Besides, Fernando claimed that the “treacherous government of Bonaparte” falsified the ranks of the Spanish officers, so everyone was “inscribed . . . in a military degree lower than his own.” Those who refused to accept this degradation were threatened to be “shut in a fortress.” Some who “did not agree to sign . . . were sent to the fortress in Flanders.” The reasons were pecuniary, Fernando argued: “to avoid any further reclamation of our full pay, which they had already lessened to every one to a degree lower.” He might be an evaded prisoner, but he was still a man “full of honour.”32

The Living Conditions and Administrative Management of Refugees: The Case of the Afrancesados Besides the Spanish POWs taken to France, several thousand Spanish civilian refugees crossed the border fleeing the war since 1808. In February 1812 the French minister of war established that only those who arrived with a family would be considered refugees. Single men would be treated as deserters, spies, or suspects, and not admitted with benevolence.33 To these war refugees another large community of displaced Spaniards was added in 1812–14. They were the afrancesados, the Spanish supporters of Joseph Bonaparte’s monarchy, who started to abandon Spain as the British, Spanish, and Portuguese allied forces defeated

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the imperial army in the Peninsular War. Actually, thousands of Spaniards who can be considered friends of the Empire had already arrived in France in the previous years. This was the case of the deserters from the Spanish army who took refuge in France (at the end of 1813, 2,699 were registered in a depot in Périgueux) or the already mentioned officers who took the oath of loyalty to Joseph I. A particular but significant case were the men of the regiment of the Marquis de la Romana, who were serving in the imperial army in northern Europe before the Peninsular War started. In mid-1808 many of them decided to return to Spain to fight the French invaders. Yet many others remained at the service of the emperor, who did not know what to do with them. Even if they showed commitment to the imperial project, they were not to be trusted now that their country was at war with the empire. From August 1808, 3,500 of them were sent to fortresses and depots, where they started to be mixed with regular Spanish POWs, even if the minister of war instructed against it.34 There existed no clear distinction between POWs and deserters/refugees, and both groups were dealt through the main fostering institution of Napoleonic France: the depot. Yet the case of the ten to twelve thousand afrancesados who took refuge in France in 1812–14, including many women and children, was different.35 As requested by Joseph, the French authorities received them. Many were lodged at private homes and some were given pay. However, the imperial government distrusted them and in July 1813 established that no refugee should cross the Garonne River, and all should be concentrated in the department of Gers. This was completely ineffective, as it was impossible to control the thousands that were crossing all along the borderline. In many regards, their reception into France used practices inherited from the administration of previous POWs and war refugees. A commission headed by the minister of state, Count Otto de Mosley, was created in order to distribute the help. Its monthly budget was 200,000 francs. While trustworthy statistics were being compiled by the local authorities with the help of committees of Spaniards, each refugee would provisionally receive 75 cents per day. Once lists of refugees were ready, and as it had been previously decided for POWs, social criteria were established to allocate the funds. Refugees were to receive a subsidy proportional to their wages in Spain. Low-class refugees, women, and children were excluded from the financial aid, although there were special funds for families.36 Yet, the thousands of refugees soon exhausted the provisions and Mosley asked for more funds. The imperial treasury, in a critical situation, evaded responsibility. Most refugees did not receive any aid in the

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first months, until new funds arrived in November. By January 1814 the commission had received a million francs and distributed half of it. Some members of the Spanish elites settled in Paris, but most of the refugees took residence in the southern departments. However, when the allies were about to cross the Pyrenees and invade France, the refugees were evacuated to the eastern bank of the Garonne and were relocated in depots and cities of the interior. In the chaos, many failed to receive their monthly pay. Once peace was achieved in June 1814 and Louis XVIII accessed the French throne, the refugees returned to the south of France, hoping to re-enter Spain. Yet the border was closed for them. On 30 May 1814, King Ferdinand VII—who returned to Spain after years of voluntary captivity in France in the hands of Napoleon—prohibited the entrance to Spain for the majority of them under the accusation of treason.37 They were suddenly transmuted from war refugees to political refugees.38 Several refugees, who soon started to be mistrusted in Bourbon France, addressed Louis XVIII and his government asking for protection. In these texts they called themselves réfugiés and argued they were persecuted in Spain because of their “political opinion.” Their categorization, however, was still fluid, and could be conveniently interpreted. Thus, after many prefects refused to provide food for the refugees, Marshal Suchet decided to consider them prisoners of war in order to obtain resources to feed them.39 Despite all of it, the restored Bourbon monarchy maintained the subsidies accorded to the afrancesado refugees by the empire, although the imperial aid commission disappeared and the management of the refugees was transferred to the Ministry of War. The peace treaty between Spain and France (20 July 1814) included a clause establishing that no individual would be persecuted for political reasons. The French ministers expected this meant that the refugees could return to Spain soon. However, this was not the case, as Ferdinand VII’s government still rejected any concession toward the majority of the afrancesados. As a consequence the French minister of war decided that the military refugees should be concentrated in only three depots. In October it was established that all refugees must reside in eight cities, where they would receive their subsidies. Significantly, the refugees could not leave their designated residences if they wanted to receive help. In that way, and lacking any other legal means to oblige them, they could be controlled. In January 1815 it was decided that the pay of the civilian refugees would be calculated following the system established for the military ranks.40 The condition of the refugees did not look very different from that of the POWs during the war.

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The political position of the refugees was also relevant for French internal politics. This was confirmed when many of them joined Napoleon during the Hundred Days (March to June 1815). The emperor, grateful, reinstalled the aid commission. However, after Waterloo and the second restoration of Louis XVIII, the assistance for the Spanish Bonapartist refugees was maintained, included the monthly pay.41 Still, the Spaniards were caught in the middle of the White Terror, the repressive backlash against Bonapartists and revolutionaries launched by the ultra-royalists in 1815. The repression was especially gruesome in the Midi, where most Spaniards lived as their residence had been once more reorganized into depots in southern France. The refugees created all kind of tensions. Besides an economic burden, they were a social problem and politically dangerous. The prefects of the southern departments protested because they had to use their budget to pay for the cost of the maintenance of the refugees. Many warned that the local population detested them for it. Besides, their presence near the border continued to be problematic, as the Spanish government feared they were planning insurrectionary plots.42 Consequently, it asked the French to maintain them away from the border. Spanish political and French economic interests collided. The French government wanted the refugees to return to Spain as soon as possible so they could stop being a social problem and a financial burden. The Spanish, however, accepted to admit only certain low-class refugees, which meant that most lingered in France as they were either explicitly excluded from the limited pardoning decrees passed by Ferdinand VII or hesitant to return fearing repression. For Spain, the longer they stayed in France the better. Although two members of the Bourbon family reigned now in the French and Spanish restored monarchies, collaboration in regard to the refugees was faulty. In the post-Napoleonic context neither monarchy—each in their own ways trying to leave behind years of political turmoil—wanted them. The French government repeatedly asked Spain to admit the refugees, who were now clearly of a political character. The ambassador in Madrid requested it many times. Even Louis XVIII wrote directly to Ferdinand VII in November 1815 asking him to be generous with his subjects and referring to the financial cost they created. As the Spanish government refused to comply, the French authorities started to harass the refugees. Several prefects from southern departments requested that the refugees were transferred north, and in February 1816 the government sent some of them into interior cities. A proposal to suppress all help for the refugees was presented in the Chamber of Deputies by an ultra deputy from a southern department. In March

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1816, hundreds of refugees that the French government believed were included in Ferdinand VII’s pardoning decrees ceased to receive their subsidies as they were not considered political refugees anymore. Four to five hundred tried to cross the border through Bayonne in vain. The economic burden the refugees posed to the precarious postwar French finances pushed the authorities to act. The commandant of the military district where the depots were placed, the Count de Loverdo, erased from the list of subsidies the names of all those who were not directly affected by the decrees of Ferdinand VII. This meant that the refugees now had to prove that they could not return to Spain, that they were, in fact, not war refugees anymore, but political refugees. However, it was precisely their political condition that made them suspect. Loverdo exaggerated the risk they posed and expelled several of them from Bayonne and Bordeaux. He requested that the government expel from the country the most dangerous refugees, including a group of seven who had been arrested at a meeting of French Bonapartists. In July 1816 the minister of war, Duke de Feltre, announced that his ministry would no longer pay the subsidies to the refugees included in the amnesties, nor to those with other incomes. However, at least five thousand retained the right to receive pay. He then proposed that from January 1817 all subsidies for the refugees included in the amnesties would be cancelled. Only those explicitly persecuted by the Spanish king and with no means of living would be assisted. The measure was finally discarded, but it frightened the refugees. Some tried unsuccessfully to cross the border. However, the French authorities also complained that the refugees were resisting to return to Spain because in France, where they received a monthly allowance, they found an alternative to the misery they expected to suffer in Spain. Those Spaniards who lost their status as refugees because they could return to Spain (even if the Spanish authorities in the border would not let them in) lost their pay, yet were free to choose their residence in France (although they continued to be surveilled). However, those who kept the right to receive a subsidy—after their individual case had been considered by a commission—were put under the supervision of the military authorities in designated depots, where they would receive their pay following a new classification established in March 1817.43 The French government’s diplomatic pressure and the opinion of certain Spanish ministers was behind the proposal to grant a general amnesty that was considered in the Spanish court in 1817. Among its supporters was the secretary of state, José Pizarro, who appears in the diary of Fernando Blanco White as a diplomatic agent sympathetic in

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1814 to the plight of Spanish POWs and who was also compassionate with the afrancesados.44 The general amnesty, however, was never proclaimed. It was opposed by the more reactionary sectors at the Spanish court, who convinced the king to discard it. Nonetheless, the number of refugees in the official lists progressively declined. In March 1815 there were 6,855 (2,000 civilians); in July 1816, 5,000 (one-third civilians); in January 1817, 1,754, including only those residing in depots.45 It may be that some were able to return to Spain, but many others were probably just expelled from the aid program or they abandoned it voluntarily, as it implied having to live in a designated location (normally a depot). Most likely some of them decided to carry on with their lives in France, finding a job and/ or getting married. On 15 February 1818 the Spanish government announced a new royal decree concerning the refugees.46 Its only novelty was that it allowed their family members living in Spain to make use of their properties and rents, which until then had been confiscated, and to send an allowance to the refugee living in France. It obviously was an attempt to appease the French government by decreasing its expenses. The French authorities however, also considered that the decree had extended the number of amnestied refugees and instructed them to abandon their depots before 1 May with the help a two-month travelling subsidy. It also decided that those refugees who were still forbidden to return home but received money from Spain would cease to receive their subsidy in July. However, most of the refugees who travelled to the border were turned down by the Spanish authorities. Yet by abandoning their depots many forfeited their right to receive a subsidy. Now they had to ask the French authorities to accept them again in a depot, or worse, they were forced to survive in miserable conditions. They lived marginalized lives, excluded from jobs and under surveillance.47 In 1819 some two thousand afrancesados still lived in France, in six depots. The last 1,300 could only return to Spain in 1820, when a revolutionary movement reinstalled the liberal 1812 constitution.48 This chapter has tried to show the continuities at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the Restoration between the military reclusion of POWs and the management of the first political refugees in France. The administrative system designed by the French state to deal with both groups is not yet well known. But thanks to the work of Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, historians have now access to an outstanding testimony: Fernando Blanco White’s letters and diary. They provide a

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superb source to enter this world and contain episodes and observations of enormous interest for writing the history of detention, captivity, and internment in Europe. Juan Luis Simal is associate professor of history at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). His PhD dissertation (2011) was awarded the Miguel Artola Prize. In 2012–14 he was a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Historisches Institut—Universität Potsdam. His research interests include the history of revolutions, political cultures and exile in Spain, Europe and the Americas in the nineteenth century, and more recently the history of the international financial markets. He has published many articles and book chapters dealing with these issues, and he is the author of Emigrados. España y el exilio internacional, 1814–1834 (CEPC, 2012) and La era de las grandes revoluciones en Europa y América, 1763–1848 (Síntesis, 2020).

Notes 1. Schmidt-Nowara, A Spanish Prisoner. There are other valuable testimonies from Spanish POWs during the War of Independence, including several cases of runaways; see Aymes, La guerra de la Independencia; Mayoral, Historia verdadera. 2. Aymes, La deportation; I have used the Spanish edition: Aymes, Los españoles en Francia. María Zozaya argues that the Spanish POWs in France maintained silence after returning to Spain, as their experiences were considered suspicious following Ferdinand VII’s absolutist restoration. Zozaya, “Prisioneros españoles.” 3. Martínez-Radío Garrido, “Prisioneros de guerra en el siglo XVIII”; Martínez-Radío Garrido, “Los prisioneros de guerra”; Díaz Paredes, “Reciprocidad e incertidumbre”; Moya Sordo, “Cautivos del corso español”; Recio Morales, “El prisionero de guerra.” A recent edition of the personal papers of a Spanish POW during the war between the French Republic and Spain in 1793–95 includes valuable information about the conditions of POWs in both countries at the time: García Hurtado, Soldados sin historia. 4. Krebs, “The Making of Prisoners of War”; Broers, “‘Civilized, rational behavior’?”; Morieux, The Society of Prisoners. For long-term general analyses of POWs see Scheipers, Prisoners in War, and Jalabert, Les prisonniers de guerre. 5. Artola, Los afrancesados; Llorens, Liberales y románticos; Sánchez Mantero, Liberales en el exilio. 6. Barbastro Gil, Los afrancesados; Aymes, Españoles en París; López Tabar, Los famosos traidores; Simal, Emigrados. 7. Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile; Bistarelli, Gli esuli del Risorgimento; Bron, “L’exil libéral portugais.” For studies that focus on the perspective of the host countries, see Porter, The Refugee Question; Noiriel, La Tyrannie du

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8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

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national; Burgess, Refuge in the Land of Liberty; Godderis, La Grande Émigration polonaise en Belgique; Diaz, Un asile; Jones, “Définir l’asile politique en Grande-Bretagne.” For the transatlantic dimensions of exile, see Diaz, Moisand, Sánchez, and Simal, Exils entre les deux mondes. General overviews can be found in Freitag, Exiles from European Revolutions and Aprile, Le Siècle des exilés. An important recent initiative is the project AsileuropeXIX, (https://asileurope.huma-num.fr). Daly, “Napoleon’s Lost Legions,” 361. Aymes, Los españoles en Francia, 111. Many women accompanied the Spanish POWs to France, mostly wives or prostitutes; in 1811, 820 were registered. The French also held many civilian hostages, especially the families of Spanish fighters; in May 1812 they were 1,500. Aymes, Los españoles en Francia, 102–5. In “Prisoner Exchange,” Knight argues that in the American Revolutionary War, although “the honor system for parolees was generally respected . . . for most of the war, efforts to formalize the exchange and parole of prisoners went badly.” For the way Spanish POWs in England experienced the system of “parole towns” in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see MartínezRadío Garrido, “Españoles prisioneros.” Daly, “Napoleon’s Lost Legions.” Duché “A Passage to Imprisonment,” quoted by Esdaile, “All Roads lead to Verdun,” 119. For an experience similar to that of Fernando Blanco White, see the journal of the military engineer José María Román: Román, Diario. Other circumstances besides class could be at work. For instance, those POWs captured after a capitulation (for instance, of a besieged city) used to enjoy better conditions than those who were captured in open battle. However, capitulation terms were only granted to members of the regular army, not to civilians fighting in militias or guerrillas; Aymes, Los españoles en Francia, 114. Letter to Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh and María Gertrudis Crespo y Neve, Dijon, 28 February 1810; quoted by Schmidt-Nowara in the Introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 10–11. Aymes, Los españoles en Francia, 119–21, 157. Aymes, 155–61. Aymes, 168. Letter to Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh, Dijon, 28 February 1810; quoted by Schmidt-Nowara in the Introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 12. Aymes, Los españoles en Francia, 135–40. Privates must have endured much worst conditions, but we know less about them than about the officers, who left more records in the archives and wrote pieces like Fernando Blanco White’s diary. Letter to Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh, Dijon, 17 July 1810, quoted by Schmidt-Nowara in the Introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 11. The same happened in Nancy after several escapes from the military barracks where Román resided; Román, Diario, 105–6. Aymes, Los españoles en Francia, 163.

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25. Aymes, 146. 26. Letter to Guillermo Blanco y Morrogh, Dijon, 28 February 1810; quoted by Schmidt-Nowara in the Introduction to A Spanish Prisoner, 12. 27. Aymes, Los españoles en Francia, 164. 28. Román, Diario, 73–74, 102. 29. Schmidt-Nowara, A Spanish Prisoner, 25. 30. Aymes, Los españoles en Francia, 232, 163. 31. Aymes, 57. 32. Schmidt-Nowara, A Spanish Prisoner, 52–53. 33. Aymes, Los españoles en Francia, 98–99. 34. Aymes, 112–13. 35. Barbastro Gil, Los afrancesados, 11–52; López Tabar, Los famosos traidores, 103–8; Simal, Emigrados, 65–74. 36. Artola, Los afrancesados, 265; Instruction relative à la distribution des secours accordés par S. M. l’Empereur aux espagnols refugiés en France, reproduced in Artola, Los afrancesados, 291–95; López Tabar, Los famosos traidores, 108–10. 37. López Tabar, Los famosos traidores, 111–14. 38. This was from the French perspective, as the afrancesados left Spain not only because of the war but as a consequence of a political conflict with the patriots, who legislated against them in the Cortes. In French, the term refugee (réfugié) was mostly used for the Huguenots expelled from France in 1685. During the nineteenth century the term would be increasingly applied to those who left their country for political reasons. A discussion of the historical meanings of “réfugié” in Diaz, Un asile, 19–42. 39. López Tabar, Los famosos traidores, 122–24, 126. 40. López Tabar, Los famosos traidores, 125–27; Barbastro Gil, Los afrancesados, 13; Morange, Paleobiografía, 320. 41. López Tabar, Los famosos traidores, 128–31. 42. López Tabar, 125, 164–65. 43. López Tabar, 163, 168–69. 44. For more details about him, see Simal, “José Pizarro.” 45. Morange, Paleobiografía, 334, 348, 367–69. 46. Simal, Emigrados, 106–7. 47. Barbastro Gil, Los afrancesados, 26. 48. Luis, “Le difficile et discret retour.”

Bibliography Aprile, Sylvie. Le siècle des exilés: bannis et proscrits de 1789 à la Commune. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2010. Artola, Miguel. Los afrancesados. Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1953. Aymes, Jean-René. La déportation sous le Premier Empire. Les espagnols en France (1808–1814). Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1983.

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———. Los españoles en Francia, 1808–1814. La deportación bajo el Primer Imperio. Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1987. ———. Españoles en París en la época romántica 1808–1848. Madrid: Alianza, 2008. ———. La guerra de la Independencia y la posguerra. Yo, para mi desgracia, estaba allí . . . Los escritos de los prisioneros deportados y de los emigrados afrancesados en Francia (1808–1820). Legardeta: FEHME, 2016. Barbastro Gil, Luis. Los afrancesados: primera emigración política del siglo XIX español (1813–1820). Madrid: CSIC/Instituto Juan Gil-Albert, 1993. Bistarelli, Agostino. Gli esuli del Risorgimento. Bolonia: Il Mulino, 2011. Broers, Michael. “‘Civilized, rational behavior’? The Concept of Surrender in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1792–1815.” In How Fighting Ends. A History of Surrender, edited by Holger Afflerbach and Hew Strachan, 229–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bron, Grégoire. “L’exil libéral portugais du début du XIXe siècle (1808–1834).” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 48, no. 2 (2018): 315–21. Burgess, Greg. Refuge in the Land of Liberty: France and Its Refugees, from the Revolution to the End of Asylum, 1787–1939. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Daly, Gavin. “Napoleon’s Lost Legions: French Prisoners of War in Britain, 1803–1814.” History 89, no. 3 (295) (July 2004): 361–80. Diaz, Delphine. Un asile pour tous les peuples? Exilés et réfugiés étrangers en France au cours du premier XIXe siècle. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014. Diaz, Delphine, Jeanne Moisand, Romy Sánchez, and Juan Luis Simal, eds. Exils entre les deux mondes. Migrations et espaces politiques atlantiques au XIXe siècle. Mordelles: Éditions Les Perséides, 2015. Díaz Paredes, Aitor. “Reciprocidad e incertidumbre: la experiencia del prisionero de guerra durante la Guerra de Sucesión Española (1700–1715).” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 44, no. 1 (2019): 109–28. Duché, Elodie. “A Passage to Imprisonment: The British Prisoners in Verdun under the First French Empire.” PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2014. Esdaile, Charles J. “All Roads Lead to Verdun: British Prisoners of War in the Peninsular War, 1808–1814.” Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar 9, no. 18 (2020): 109–32. Freitag, Sabine, ed. Exiles from European Revolutions. Refugees in Mid-Victorian England. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. García Hurtado, Manuel-Reyes. Soldados sin historia: Los prisioneros de guerra en España y Francia a finales del Antiguo Régimen. Gijón: Trea, 2011. Godderis, Idesbald. La Grande Émigration polonaise en Belgique (1831–1870). Élites et masses en exil à l’époque romantique. Berne: Peter Lang, 2013. Isabella, Maurizio. Risorgimento in Exile. Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Jalabert, Laurent, ed. Les prisonniers de guerre (XVe–XIXe siècle). Entre marginalisation et reconnaissance. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018. Jones, Thomas. “Définir l’asile politique en Grande-Bretagne (1815–1870).” Hommes et Migrations 1321 (2018): 13–21.

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Knight, Betsy. “Prisoner Exchange and Parole in the American Revolution.” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 2 (April 1991): 201–22. Krebs, Daniel. “The Making of Prisoners of War: Rituals of Surrender in the American War of Independence, 1776–1783.” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 64, no. 1 (2005): 1–30. Llorens, Vicente. Liberales y románticos. Una emigración española en Inglaterra (1823–1834). Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1954. López Tabar, Juan. Los famosos traidores. Los afrancesados durante la crisis del Antiguo Régimen (1808–1832). Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2001. Luis, Jean-Philippe. “Le difficile et discret retour des afrancesados (1816– 1834).” In L’émigration: le retour, edited by Rose Duroux and Alain Montandon, 331–43. Clermont-Ferrand: Université Blaise-Pascal, 1999. Martínez-Radío Garrido, Evaristo C. “Españoles prisioneros y cautivos en la Inglaterra del siglo XVIII: una aproximación a su ubicación y condiciones.” Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar 9, no. 18 (2020): 109–32. ———. “Los prisioneros de guerra en el siglo XVIII y la humanidad en el infortunio.” Verbum. Analecta Neolatina 17, no. 1–2 (2016): 18–52. ———. “Prisioneros de guerra en el siglo XVIII. Formas, usos y deberes del cautivo.” In La prisión y las instituciones punitivas en la investigación histórica, edited by Pedro Oliver Olmo and Jesús Carlos Urda Lozano, 133–48. Cuenca: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2014. Mayoral, Francisco. Historia verdadera del sargento Mayoral escrita por él mismo. Edited by Fernando Durán López. Sevilla: Espuela de Plata, 2008. Morange, Claude. Paleobiografía (1779–1819) del “Pobrecito Holgazán.” Sebastián de Miñano y Bedoya. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2002. Morieux, Renaud. The Society of Prisoners. Anglo-French Wars and Incarceration in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Moya Sordo, Vera. “Cautivos del corso español. El trato a los prisioneros durante el siglo XVIII.” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 44, no. 1 (2019): 159–79. Noiriel, Gérard. La Tyrannie du national. Le droit d’asile en Europe (1793–1993). Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991. Porter, Bernard. The Refugee Question in mid-Victorian Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Recio Morales, Óscar. “El prisionero de guerra en la España de la Ilustración: algunas consideraciones sobre su trato.” Revista Universitaria de Historia Militar 9, no. 18 (2020): 67–86. Román, José María. Diario del ingeniero militar don José María Román: desde que con sus compañeros de estudios salió de Alcalá de Henares la noche del 9 de junio de 1808, tomó parte de la defensa de Zaragoza durante los dos sitios, prisionero en el último, fue conducido al depósito de Nancy hasta su regreso a España en agosto de 1814. Edited by María Zozaya Montes. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales-Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, 2008. Sánchez Mantero, Rafael. Liberales en el exilio. La emigración política en Francia en la crisis del Antiguo Régimen. Madrid: Rialp, 1975. Scheipers, Sibylle, ed. Prisoners in War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, ed. A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire. The Diary of Fernando Blanco White’s Flight to Freedom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2018. Simal, Juan Luis. Emigrados. España y el exilio internacional, 1814–1834. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, 2012. ———. “José Pizarro, un antirrevolucionario entre la revolución y la contrarrevolución (1808–1818).” In La represión absolutista y el exilio, edited by Marieta Cantos Casenave and Alberto Ramos Santana, 19–40. Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, 2015. Zozaya, María. “Prisioneros españoles en la Francia napoleónica. El modelo positivo de los espacios de cautiverio de los suboficiales, a través del diario de José Mª Román (1808–1900).” Trocadero 26 (2014): 75–106.

Epilogue

The Conquest of History and the Construction of Identitarian Discourses An Interview with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara Vicent Sanz Rozalén Translated by Stephen Jacobson

å This chapter consists of an adapted transcript from the radio program, Let’s Talk about History (Hablemos de Historia) sponsored by the Universitat Jaume I (Castelló de la Plana). Vicent Sanz Rozalén chatted with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara in the latter days of June 2014 at the 45th Annual Conference of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies held in Modena.1 The days I spent with Chris in this Italian City were not our first encounter, but our conversations in the conference rooms and the terraces of Modena’s historic center set the tone for an incipient friendship that further developed during subsequent encounters in cafés surrounding the Marché d’Aligre in Paris. As we together prepared the radio program in the days before the conference, we mulled over which of his books would best fit the format of Let’s Talk about History. We decided that the ideal choice was The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century (2006).2 In addition to addressing an array of themes that have long characterized his research, Schmidt-Nowara also reflected on what it means to be a historian and on how history is constructed. By focusing on this book, we addressed various classical themes while incorporating innovative perspectives and questioning stereotypes. In this interview, Christo-

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pher Schmidt-Nowara offered us a concise and well-structured synopsis of his conception of the history of Spanish colonialism and of “Latinamericanism.” He addressed how identities were generated in the metropolis and in the colonies, and how they have conditioned the future of these societies in the contemporary world. HABLEMOS DE HISTORIA (HH): Christopher Schmidt-Nowara is one of the foremost specialists of the history of the Caribbean, and, by extension, Latin America. In 2011, he moved from Fordham University to Tufts where he continued to develop his renowned work on the history of slavery and abolition. Recently, he has published a coedited volume with Josep Maria Fradera, entitled Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire (2013) with Berghahn Books.3 A related research interest concerns the history of political ideas throughout the Spanish empire, a subject he has explored in various articles and books. As is customary with this radio program, we have chosen to discuss one of these books, The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2006. In this work, Chris reflects upon how history becomes converted into a fundamental component of the discursive construction of national identity. Departing from this observation, we should start by asking you to comment on how you came to this subject and how you chose to address it. After all, you do not offer a classical approach to this question. You do not simply address politics, but you combine political with cultural history, presenting a mixture of two methods that proves to be quite interesting. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: Thank you. The origin of this study dates from when I was undertaking my doctoral research in Spain. In the thesis, I addressed a theme related to what would later become The Conquest of History. The thesis studied Spanish abolitionism and the effects of the process of abolition on Cuban and Puerto Rican slavery, focusing on the decades of the 1860s and 1870s. From 1991 to 1993, I spent two years living and researching in Madrid with periodic interludes in Barcelona. This interesting time coincided with the fifth centennial celebrations on the first voyage of Columbus. I observed something particularly interesting—there were an abundance of official celebrations, but they resonated very little among ordinary people. Lacking was a strong or interesting public reception to something that had great political importance and that also captured the attention of historians, professors, and writers. In this sense, it was a period that proved very rich with respect to the history of America, although it generated little public enthusiasm, as I have said. As I had been working on

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the theme of Cuban and Puerto Rican slavery, and as a North American working in Spain, this shocked me. A few years later, commemorations honored the first centenary of the Cuban War of Independence. This conflict commenced in 1895, featured the intervention of the United States, and resulted in the loss of Spanish colonies. In this case, the academic response was also robust. A number of high-quality publications appeared in Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Curiously, this anniversary was almost ignored in the United States. Although the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have since rekindled the importance of this period in the United States, the subject did not seem so urgent at the time. And this contrasted with the urgency in Spain. Given this, I wondered why not? Why had Columbus provoked little interest among the Spanish, while the centenary of the Cuban War and the loss of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines had sparked such a passionate response? With these questions in mind, I returned to the nineteenth century beginning with my research on slavery and abolition in a colonial relationship, particularly that of Spain and Cuba. A starting point was my realization that Cuba was the most important country outside of Spain, to the history of Spain. It had been a great center for Spanish immigration since the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1930s, and its enormous riches had attracted a great number of Spanish investors and businessmen throughout the nineteenth century. It was a great political and military center that had caused the Spanish Army to mobilize troops to carry on an ongoing war against Cuban separatism in the second half of the nineteenth century. The movement of troops was extremely large, as some 400,000 troops left to Cuba in this period. All this served as a background to the study. These aspects structured the relationship between Spain and Cuba in the nineteenth century. What is more, it is important to add that a historiographical renovation was taking place in Spain, led by colleagues like Josep Maria Fradera in Barcelona and Jordi Maluquer, from the previous generation, also in Barcelona. And this renovation spread practically everywhere, in all the cities and regions in Spain: Valencia, Galicia, Santander . . . Historians discovered that the connections with Cuba in the nineteenth century were extremely important to local economies. Cuba was a market for products and the destination for indianos who returned with cash to invest in regional economies. This impact in the metropolitan economy was what made me orient my research toward this phenomenon, well, to be sure, toward the cultural symptoms of this strong link between politics and economy in the nineteenth century. HH: Given this articulate explanation, how do we arrive at “the conquest of history”? The title of the book is very interesting, very signifi-

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cant. It coincides nicely with your work as a whole, though specifically with the book at hand. It is interesting to see how, given all these elements that you have highlighted, these connections have a greater impact in some aspects than in others but nonetheless leave a mark on this relationship. The “conquest of history” becomes converted into a historical phenomenon in and of itself, a phenomenon that influences the construction of specific discourses. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: Yes. I believe that I arrived at this title—at this focus on the conquest and what it meant not only to the metropolis but also to the colonies—because it became clear that there was a strong collaboration between the metropolis and the colonies in the nineteenth century. This relationship does not consist simply as the imposition of Spanish authority on the colonies. Well, in a certain aspect it does, in some obvious moments it does, but there is much collaboration in the construction of this new colonial system beginning in the decade that lasts from 1810 to 1820, especially among Cuban planters. Men like Francisco de Arango y Parreño, a very important planter is also an official in the court with great influence. And, despite many moments of collaboration, tensions run very high, not only with respect to economic aspects but also with respect to political ones, over whether metropolitan constitutions will become applicable in the colonies. Normally, the response is no. They are not applicable because Spain governs by resorting to a “state of exception,” a situation which lasts until the 1880s. Conflict is particularly rife with respect to the idea of fatherland (patria) and nation. It is clear that the Creoles, especially in Cuba and Puerto Rico, do not share the opinions of many Spaniards. They wish to construct their own history distinct from that of the metropolis. In order to do this, they return to the period predating the conquest, to the period of the Indigenous Caribbean before 1492. And they get there by carrying out archival research and by recompiling classical texts from the era of the conquest. But they also study the language, recovering voices that are peculiar to Cuba and Puerto Rico, and serve as signposts for the perseverance of Indigenous culture. And they turn to archeology in search of the material culture of the Taínos. In many respects, this represents a way to collaborate with Spanish colonialism, but, in others, it represents an attempt to create a cultural space that distinguishes them from Spain. The method I have used in this work can also be seen in other studies of colonial responses to imperial authority in other European empires. These responses not only include resistance to colonial dominance but also to the imposition of metropolitan culture within the colonial sphere. For example, one

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important work in this regard is Partha Chatterjee’s, The Nation and Its Fragments, a very interesting study that explores how patriotic Hindus and Muslims in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India attempted to define a private space that would form a nucleus for a culture free from the designs of colonial dominance. 4 HH: In many respects, this process recovers roots that mixes history, anthropology, archeology, culture, folklore, etc. . . . It is a process conditioned by a very clear objective—to highlight distances and to highlight differences with what, shall we say, is a society that is the fruit of a colonial order. At the same time, the process brings together multiple and diverse elements in order to construct an identitarian discourse. So, at what point does the process of recovery represent a transformation of these elements? The process of research leads to the construction of discourses. Nor is this an isolated phenomenon. After all, it takes place with respect to the construction of European histories as well. However, the difference—and for this reason, I am interested in asking you this question—is that the construction of national histories in Europe does not occur within a colonial context. And this is what characterizes, and differentiates, the case of the Americas. With this fundamental premise in mind—and taking into account your comments on the attempts to separate, to forge an identity distinct from the metropolis, independent of the established hierarchies of political authority and administration—it is necessary to gauge the extent to which the colonial context generates a series of particular attributes. The cases of nineteenth-century Cuba and Puerto Rico are clear enough, but it was not too long before, at the beginning of the same century, that an entire continental empire disappeared that was also undergoing a similar process with similar characteristics. How are these cases intertwined, and how does the perseverance of the colonial system in Cuba and Puerto Rico endow these countries with distinct traits? Or perhaps there are no distinct traits? CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: As I said, I believe that parallelisms exist with other non-Spanish colonies. The case of India, for example, is illustrative, as are European histories. However, the fundamental thesis derives from the work of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities.5 Along with this classic work, I share the idea that the nation does not exist as such, but is rather the political and cultural construction of politicians, intellectuals, and writers. The difficult part is to study precisely the reception and the process of the construction of narratives, discourses, and images of the nation. We must always keep in mind that the idea of the nation, and national identity, is perpetually in conflict. There are always various versions of what the nation is.

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And this is evident in the case of Cuba, for example. Creole elites undertake a project that is meant to undermine the imposition of Spanish authority in the nineteenth century by spreading the idea that the nation’s origins date to the prehistorical era—prehistory is the privileged moment of the nation. However (and this has been well studied in the case of Puerto Rico as well), the emphasis on Indigenous roots runs headlong into the fact that Cuba is largest slave and plantation society in the history of the Spanish Americas. What about the role of Africans in this making of the nation? Precisely, this is where conflict occurs. It is very clear that when Cuban elite speak of prehistory, when they speak of the conflict between Indigenous populations and Columbus, they are not solely distancing themselves from metropolitan history but they are also ignoring the starkest reality of their times—the social and the racial conflicts of a plantation society. Beginning with the first war of independence in Cuba in 1868, the role of slaves and free Blacks is very important. Many persons of color come to occupy positions of command and authority in the Mambí Army. Take Antonio Maceo, for example. Those who take up arms to emancipate themselves from Spain have a very different idea about what is, and what will be, the Cuban nation. The evocation of prehistory, then, is not simply a nostalgic vision. It is also a way of overcoming those structures that support inequality, and the nation is meant to overcome . . . HH: In many cases, these projects, these nascent signs of national histories—and here I am thinking of Bachiller Morales—have a strong and pronounced racial component. And this racial component will endure, in some cases, until the first decade of the twentieth century . . . CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: . . . or even into the twenty-first . . . HH: Yes, because we recently have the murmurings surrounding the commemoration of the La Escalera Conspiracy6, the Independent Party of Color, and other commemorations. But to return to your original point, all of this implies an overt racial discourse that does not disappear for quite a long time. A little while later, in the decades of the 1930s and 1940s, and perhaps a little before, a number of authors dilute this racial component into something that is much more broad. And they succeed in integrating the Indigenous with the African, with the Creole, and with the Hispanic. Fernando Ortiz’s concept of transculturation, for me, is an idealization of all these ingredients—an idealization of the Indigenous, an idealization of the African, an idealization of the Creole. He offers a harmony of layers that become superimposed on one another. But this initial politicized intellectual thesis, to which you refer, begins to appear in the mid-nineteenth century, or even before your reference to Arango y Parreño. And this racial com-

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ponent is ever-present, very evident, and extremely robust. After all, there is much fear that the end of colonial rule could be accompanied by an African slave revolt. I am not sure if we could say that the fear of Haiti still persisted a century later. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: . . . and not only Haiti. There are memories of experiences that took place in the American wars of independence in continental Spanish America, especially in Venezuela, in Caracas. In this case, however, the fear of a slave revolt was less than the fear of a revolt of the free Blacks, of the coming into power of the pardos. This fear was present not only among royalists but also among many patriotic leaders such as Simón Bolívar. They feared what they called a “pardocracy” and the domination of this sector of the population in what was no longer a colony but an independent state. I believe that this also had a strong impact in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the nineteenth century. No doubt, the increasing number of slaves in Cuba remained a fundamental preoccupation. But the preoccupation was also conditioned by Caracas. The new fear was precisely of leaders of color. HH: Some time ago on Let’s Talk History, we had the opportunity to chat with Aline Helg concerning her work. As a subject of conversation, we chose her book on the Colombian Caribbean in which this racial component is omnipresent during this same time frame to which you refer now.7 It is interesting to note how economic systems founded, to a lesser or to a greater extent, on the use of forced labor, slave labor, over a long period of time, leave a profound legacy even after abolition. Given this, and going beyond the political and intellectual spheres, it is not only possible to find the intention to “whiten” the population but the implementation of practical measures to whiten, the attraction of immigrants to overcome “racial imbalances.” It is interesting to observe how the racial component is neither tangential nor . . . CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: . . . No, it is at the heart of the project, and there lies the tension. At the same time that the desire arises to forge a national identity differentiated from Spain, there exists the necessity to embrace the Spanish regime as a form of security against a new society that is being created as a result of the increasing traffic of slaves, the expansion of the plantation system, and the new norms governing free Blacks. At this juncture, Cuba was a society where conflict was intense and which harbored great potential to generate serious levels of violence. In the end, normally, it is the colonial state that ends up utilizing such violence. The result is not a massive uprising against the elites or against the state. Rather, the moments in which violence becomes most critical in Cuba in the nineteenth century normally concern the reaction of the colonial state against the possibility

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of a conspiracy or an uprising. The response is always very strong, overwhelming. HH: Good. When we speak of Cuba and Puerto Rico, we almost always treat them as part of the same package. However, the two colonies have very distinct features. It would be interesting if you could highlight the differences by taking into account their histories in the aftermath of ’98. They follow completely distinct [paths] and generate different types of discourse. Even though they both undergo this process of the “conquest of history,” which allows us to study them together, there are also divergences. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: Yes, clearly differences exist, but I believe that we can study the two islands together given that, in many ways, the first intellectuals and writers who elaborate this national identity are responding to a metropolitan vision of the Spanish empire and its impact on the Americas. Their strategies to avoid the imposition of a hegemonic metropolitan culture on the colonies run parallel to one another. Instead of celebrating Columbus . . . And although Columbus also has his critics in Spain (which is also curious), Columbus is the face that represents Spanish expansionism in the Americas. Another effort is to avoid the “imperial archive”—to find an alternative to writing the history of Cuba and Puerto Rico by simply resorting to the Archive of the Indies or to the great chronicles of the sixteenth century. With respect to both Cuba and Puerto Rico, the response is to find alternative ways to study the past, such as archeology, linguistics, folklore . . . All this, the two intellectual traditions have in common. I believe that their strategies and political actions run parallel even though the two societies are quite distinct. To be sure, the sugar plantation complex is much smaller in Puerto Rico than in Cuba, the slave population is always smaller, much smaller than the Cuban slave populations. Yes, they are very distinct societies, but they share preoccupations and challenges. HH: Is it possible to assert that such differences affected the elaboration of their identitarian discourses? CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: This is difficult to say. Considering that Cuba was a revolutionary society beginning in 1868, the effort to recuperate the impact of Africans and the role of people of color on the ideas of the nation is greater than it is in Puerto Rico. In Puerto Rico, this moment arrives with the United States occupation. It is a question of a few decades. For example, the ideas of an anthropologist like Ricardo Alegría in Puerto Rico concerning the nature of Puerto Rican culture echoes those of Fernando Ortiz concerning Cuba. I am not referring exactly to transculturation but to the development of the

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idea that Puerto Ricans are a people that share a common culture with three roots: European, Indigenous, and African. It is possible to say that they arrive in the same place but via different paths. HH: These are discourses that become converted into official histories that are still vigorous today. But, at this moment, within this chronological space, alternatives arise. They embrace the move toward independence but, at the same time, they embody these parallelisms to which you have just referred. I am thinking, for example, about Betances. Does his idea about a shared community play any role? Does his project for an autonomous Antilles Caribbean influence identitarian discourses? Does the latter influence the former? Or does each go its own way? Clearly, Betances has a tremendous knowledge of European society. I cannot precisely say how much time, but he spent many years in Paris. He returned to the island, and he was later deported. In other words, does the project to create a shared community that transcends Cuba and Puerto Rico have any influence? Or is there none? CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: This is difficult to say because I believe that there are many more efforts to construct nation-states than transnational ones. I suppose that a figure like Betances had some impact in so far as he helped spread a sense of equality among national or regional cultures. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the national projects that come into being are quite different from that which Betances proposed. In Cuba, above all, beginning in 1902, the aspiration is to get out from under the tutelage of the United States, to eliminate the influence of the US in the Cuban Constitution, the Platt Amendment. In Puerto Rico, ideas concern how to overcome a situation that in many respects has become worse under US domination than under Spanish domination. This is because at the end of the period, around 1897, an autonomous regime comes into being for a brief period of time, and this is exactly what Puerto Rican liberals and republicans had attempted to achieve for various decades. The moment of political triumph comes just as Spanish rule is coming to a close. What is more, the United States regime is much more centralist given that all key decisions come straight from Washington, DC. Influence in local or national politics in Puerto Rico consists of attempting to acquire more political and fiscal power within Puerto Rico itself. I believe this effort was much more influential than the idea of trying to create a transnational community. HH: As we have mentioned on various occasions, the process of constructing a national discourse begins with the recuperation of an Indigenous past. This becomes converted into the seed, into the root of what becomes identity. How do centuries of colonialism fit into this

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discourse? After all, the colony exists for many centuries, and Creole society is a product of colonial times. How is all this integrated? How is it perceived? Is it just a discourse of victimization? Or is there more? CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: With the respect to the assertion of the importance of prehistory? HH: Yes. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: Well, there is really a lot here. It is manner to identify the particularities of these people and their land. The search to recover the Taíno language requires a gargantuan effort, and the reconstruction of Taíno archeological sites is also a positive effort. In a certain mode, yes, this could be a way of portraying themselves as victims, but I would say, to be more precise, it concerns the formation of local particularities. The case of Puerto Rico is particularly interesting, and I have a student who is going to write a thesis on this subject. Identifying oneself as Taíno is also strong in the diaspora of Puerto Ricans who live in the United States. Especially, as we all know, almost half of all Puerto Ricans live on the island and the other half in the United States. Before, it was always in New York or New Jersey, but now in Florida and other zones. Their identification with Taíno roots is very strong. Yes, this aspect has had a profound impact. HH: In some ways, this identification has itself formed part of this transmission. And this idea brings me to the issue of transference. After all, it is one thing to construct this discourse and quite another to transfer it to a society that adopts it as its own. What are the mechanisms of transference to a society that led to this discourse to assume the attributes that you have just described? I imagine the school plays some role, but, even with respect to schools, what is their impact on the colonial societies in the nineteenth century? Are there other conduits? Perhaps the press, but the impact of the press is what it is. Do festivals and commemorations take place, creating something more visual? I am trying to posit the following: how does this discourse become transferred so that a society adopts it as its own? CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: Yes, how do the masses become participants in this discourse? I would say this has more success in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth. As you say, the nineteenth century is limited to texts, monuments, poetry, novels, histories . . . But I believe a strong state begins to be constructed in Puerto Rico in the twentieth century. And this is not simply a state with a strong repressive apparatus as was the Spanish colonial state but one with public policies, schools, and universities. I believe that in the twentieth century is when Taíno and prehistory become a symbol for the masses as a way of resisting the imposition of United States culture in Puerto Rico.

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With the construction of a network of public schools, public education becomes a very interesting space for conflict with the US colonial state. For example, in the United States, the government in Washington initially believes that such schools would impart their lessons in English, which is going to be the official language. This, however, is a very conflictive issue. What occurs is that while prehistory is being defended as a privileged space within Puerto Rican history, there exists a parallel goal to reassert the importance of the Spanish period. It is here where the language becomes a key part of Puerto Rican identity. HH: The implication of what you have been saying is that the crystallization of this discourse within society is more of a product of the twentieth century than the nineteenth. The differences in the nineteenth century do not permit this discourse to become manifest in national identity. In what way, and, to what extent did the United States domination permit or generate the conditions for this identitarian discourse to arise and to take root? Because it ends up being, and, well, I am not sure if it is politically correct to say this, the US domination ends up allowing for this discourse to crystallize. It creates the correct motivations for it to move out of restricted circles. In other words, it changes from a purely political discourse to a social discourse. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: Yes, exactly, because there has to be a strong state to create national symbols . . . HH: . . . By highlighting those differences from the dominating power serves to dilute other differences. I am not sure if this is polemical or not, but, in the very least, it is interesting to consider the reciprocity of situations. In many cases, we need to approach the study of colonialism from various perspectives, in a more complex way. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: Something else to keep in mind is what many Puerto Rican historians and anthropologists have explained. Principally, the anthropologist Jorge Duany has written a very good book, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move.8 He has studied national discourse on the island and within the diaspora. His idea is that precisely, beginning with the decades of the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, there is a strong movement for independence in Puerto Rico. However, with the advent of World War II, Washington’s new intention is to develop the state on the island. As such, the emphasis shifts from achieving independence to defining an independent culture. Again, there arises the idea of the nation as a space separate from the colonial sphere. In this sense, there is a continuity of strategies in Puerto Rico— if they cannot gain independence, they can, at least, create and carve out an autonomous space for the development of their own culture and language.

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HH: We are arriving at the end of conversation and I wouldn’t want to conclude without asking you to reflect upon what is within the realm of what we are speaking about. In a certain sense, we could say that what could be denominated postcolonial studies have had a null or limited impact within the fields of Cuban and Puerto Rican history, at least as far as I know. In other academic environments, their emergence has incentivized, politicized, and made more dynamic the reading of the weight of the past. Nonetheless, within the Cuban and Puerto Rican context, it appears that the impact has been much more restricted. Why is this the case? Or am I mistaken? CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: Well, with respect to postcolonial methodologies within the study of Cuba and Puerto Rico, I see a lot of influence. For example, my study. HH: Precisely . . . But beyond your work and a few others? CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: For example, the Jorge Duany book that I spoke about is a very clear example of an author who uses ideas that come from studies of colonialism and the independence of nationstates in other places in the world, above all India. This is the place where the influence has been strongest. But I also believe that this is case for the United States, to take another example. We have so many diasporas, so many large diasporic populations, and they are growing. The way that we define them and consider their role, their rights, their cultural impact within the confines of the state and US culture, all this is a form of postcolonial critique. Yes, the truth is that the idea of colonial populations within a nation-state . . . The official category for people of Latin American decent born in the United States is “Latino,” and Latin American studies has been . . . HH: I see, I was not so aware of this . . . Instead, I was referring to what is more proximate—Spanish historiography, or the Spanish historiography of America, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. Indeed, here we see only a trickle of this influence. Or not even the influence, but simply a change of perspective, a way of envisioning things differently. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: In this sense, I believe that the fundamental question lies exactly with these diasporic populations and what they may bring to the study of these themes. To be sure, Spain has only experienced a serious wave of immigration over the past few years, and this has stalled with the coming of the economic crisis. At this point, we don’t know how this will impact the thinking within Spanish historiography. However, as one generation succeeds another, it will be felt. HH: It is very interesting this connection that you have made—diasporic populations as the generator or motor force behind these type

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of perspectives. Very interesting. Well, Chris, we arrive to the end of our program. And thanks again for encouraging our listeners to read the book, The Conquest of History, published by Christopher SchmidtNowara and published by the University of Pittsburgh. Thank you, Chris. CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA: Thank you. Vicent Sanz Rozalén is professor of contemporary history at the Universitat Jaume I. He has co-edited several volumes: A Social History of Spanish Labour (Berghahn, 2007), En el nombre del oficio (Biblioteca Nueva, 2014), Tabaco e escravos nos impérios ibéricos (Centro de História d’Aquém e d’Além-Mar, 2015), Resistencia, delito y dominación en el mundo esclavo (Comares, 2019), and Grandes vicios, grandes ingresos: El monopolio del tabaco en los imperios ibéricos. Siglos XVII– XX (Centro de estudios polítocos y constitucionales, 2019); and he has contributed to several others. He has edited a special issue of the journal Millars. Espai i Història titled Microhistoria de esclavas y esclavos, is the coeditor of the Studies in Latin American and Spanish History series by Berghahn Books, and is the director of the radio program Hablemos de Historia.

Notes 1. Let’s Talk about History (Hablemos de Historia) is a “forum for debate” put out by the university radio station, Vox UJI Radio (www.radio.uji.es) since 2012. All programs can be downloaded as podcasts from the webpage, http://hablemosdehistoria.uji.es. This program originally aired on 15 January 2015. 2. Schmidt-Nowara, Conquest of History. 3. Fradera and Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery and Antislavery. 4. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments. 5. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 6. In 2014, Cuban regime-friendly historians promoted an “official history” of the Escalera Conspiracy (1844) in commemoration of the repression of this incipient slave revolt. In order to equate race and abolition to independence, they portrayed the conspiracy as an important precursor to Cuban nationalism and as an example of “popular” resistance to Spanish rule. A few isolated Cuban historians expressed their discomfort, given that the Escalera Conspiracy had absolutely nothing to do with Cuban nationalism. Still, these voices were relatively muted, and criticism remained restricted to private circles. 7. Helg, Liberty and Equality. 8. Duany, Puerto Rican Nation.

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Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Duany, Jorge. The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Fradera, Josep M., and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Helg, Aline. Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.

List of Works by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

å The following consists of a list of Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s published works. In order to give a clear idea of the diversity and evolution of his oeuvre, we have separated publications by genre and listed them chronologically. As is customary with such bibliographies, we have included all his publications with the exception of book reviews.

Books Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, and John M. Nieto-Phillips, eds. Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Burguera, Mónica, and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds. Historias de España contemporánea: cambio social y giro cultural. Universitat de València: Publicacions de la Universitat de Valencia, 2008. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011. Fradera, Josep M., and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds. Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, ed. A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire: The Diary of Fernando Blanco White’s Flight to Freedom. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018.

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Journal Articles Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “‘Spanish’ Cuba: Race and Class in Spanish and Cuban Antislavery Ideology, 1861–1868.” Cuban Studies 25 (1995): 101–22. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Reforma entre revolucionaris: Puerto Rico i els límits de la política.” L’Avenç. Revista d’Història 217 (1997): 43–47. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “National Economy and Atlantic Slavery: Protectionism and Resistance to Abolitionism in Spain and the Antilles, 1854– 1874.” Hispanic American Historical Review 78, no. 4 (1998): 603–29. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher Ebert. “Borders and Borderlands of Interpretation.” American Historical Review 104, no. 4 (1999): 1226–28. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “From Slaves to Spaniards: The Failure of Revolutionary Emancipationism in Spain and Cuba, 1868–1895.” Il·les i Imperis 2 (1999): 177–90. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “El mito liberal del imperio: España, Cuba y el 98.” Studia Historica. Historia Contemporánea 17 (1999): 53–63. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “The End of Slavery and the End of Empire: Slave Emancipation in Cuba and Puerto Rico.” Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 2 (2000): 188–207. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Conquering Categories: The Problem of Prehistory in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico and Cuba.” Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies 13, no. 1 (2001): 5–21. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “The Specter of Las Casas: José Antonio Saco and the Persistence of Spanish Colonialism in Cuba.” Itinerario 25, no. 2 (2001): 93–109. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “‘This Rotting Corpse’: Spain between the Black Atlantic and the Black Legend.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 5 (2001): 149–60. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “‘La España Ultramarina’: Colonialism and Nation-building in Nineteenth-century Spain.” European History Quarterly 24, no. 2 (2004): 191–214. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Still Continents (and an Island) with Two Histories?” Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (2004): 377–82. Burguera, Mónica, and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. “Introduction: Backwardness and Its Discontents.” Social History 29, no. 3 (2004): 279–83. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Empires against Emancipation: Spain, Brazil, and the Abolition of Slavery.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 31, no. 2 (2008): 101–19. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Spanish Origins of American Empire: Hispanism, History, and Commemoration, 1898–1915.” International History Review 30, no. 1 (2008): 32–51. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Introduction: Caribbean Emancipations.” Social History 36, no. 3 (2011): 257–59. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Introduction: Global Horizons and Local Interests in the Era of the Constitution of Cadiz.” Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 37, no. 2 (2012): article 1.

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Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Continental Origins of Insular Proslavery: George Dawson Flinter in Curaçao, Venezuela, Britain, and Puerto Rico, 1810s-1830s.” Almanack 8 (2014): 55–67. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Héritage coloniaux ou innovations révolutionnaires? Nouvelles recherches sur la race, l’esclavage et la citoyenneté dans les indépendances d’Amérique latine.” Le Mouvement social 252, no. 3 (2015): 21–32.

Chapters Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Libertad con esclavitud: contradicciones de la revolución liberal en Cuba, 1834–1837.” In Antiguo régimen y liberalismo: homenaje a Miguel Artola, edited by Manuel Pérez Ledesma y Javier Donézar, vol. 2, 685–94. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Imperio y crisis colonial.” In Más se perdió en Cuba: España, 1898 y la crisis de fin de siglo, edited by Juan Pan-Montojo, 31–90. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1998. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Speaking through Las Casas: José Antonio Saco and the Construction of the Spanish Empire.” In El siglo de Carlos V y Felipe II. La construcción de los mitos en el siglo XIX, edited by José Martínez Millán and Carlos Reyero Hermosilla, vol. 2, 351–64. Valladolid: Sociedad Estatal para las Conmemoraciones de los Centenarios de Carlos V y Felipe II, 2000. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “‘Nuestro objeto no es el interés, sino la civilización’: la ideología liberal española y la emancipación de los esclavos en las Antillas.” In Azúcar y esclavitud en el final del trabajo forzoso: homenaje a M. Moreno Fraginals, edited by José A. Piqueras, 291–308. Mexico, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “After ‘Spain’: A Dialogue with Josep M. Fradera on Spanish Colonial Historiography.” In After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, edited by Antoinette Burton, 157– 69. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Repensando ‘redescubrir América’: Cuba y la conquista en las historias nacionales españolas.” In Cuba: de colonia a república, edited by Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla, 321–31. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2006. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Continuity and Crisis: Cuban Slavery, Spanish Colonialism, and the Atlantic World in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Atlantic in Global History, edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, 199–218. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “From Columbus to Ponce de Léon: Puerto Rican Commemorations between Empires, 1893–1908.” In Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, 230–37. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

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List of Works

Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “A Second Slavery? The 19th-Century Sugar Revolutions in Cuba and Puerto Rico.” In The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, edited by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano, 333–46. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “The Broken Image: The Spanish Empire in the United States after 1898.” In Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline, edited by Alfred W. McCoy, Josep M. Fradera, and Stephen Jacobson, 160–68. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Foreword to Manuel Ciges Aparicio’s, On Captivity: A Spanish Soldier’s Experience in a Havana Prison, 1896–1898, edited by Dolores J. Walker, ix–xii. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Slave Trade to Cuba circa 1820.” In Connections after Colonialism: Europe and Latin America in the 1820s, edited by Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette, 236–49. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Wilberforce Spanished: Joseph Blanco White and Spanish Antislavery, 1808–1814. In Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, edited by Josep M. Fradera and Christopher SchmidtNowara, 158–75. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Los colonialismos caribeños desde la conquista española hasta el reino del azúcar estadounidense.” In Historia comparada de las Antillas, edited by José A. Piqueras, 303–32. Madrid: Doce Calles, 2014. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Spanish Prisoners: War and Captivity in Spain’s Imperial Crisis, 1808–1824.” In Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World 1808–1898, edited by Akiko Tsuchiya and William G. Acree, 131–37. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2015. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Slavery, Antislavery and Christianity: Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.” In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to World Christianity, edited by Lamin Sanneh and Michael J. McClymond, 142–52. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2016. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Spain and the Politics of the Second Slavery, 1808–1868.” In The Politics of the Second Slavery, edited by Dale W. Tomich, 57–82. Albany: SUNY Press, 2016. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “From Aggression to Crisis: The Spanish Empire in the 1860s.” In American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe, and the Crisis of the 1860s, edited by Don H. Doyle, 125–46. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Entangled Irishman: George Dawson Flinter and Anglo-Spanish Imperial Rivalry.” In Entangled Empires: The AngloIberian Atlantic, 1500–1830, edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, 121–41. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

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237

Encyclopedia and Handbook Entries Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Emancipation in Latin America and the Caribbean.” In Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History: The Black Experience in the Americas, edited by Colin A. Palmer, 2nd ed., vol. 2, 697–701. Detroit: Macmillian Reference USA, 2006. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Emancipation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas, edited by Robert L. Paquette and Mark M. Smith, 578–79. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Review Essays and Conference Reports Soper, Steve, and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. “Conference Report 1: The Return of Liberalism.” Social History 21, no. 1 (1996): 88–92. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Colonialism and Hegemony in Spain and the Antilles in the Nineteenth Century.” Social History 21, no. 1 (1996): 99–103. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, and Andrew Diamond. “Council for European Studies: Toward the Social and Cultural History of Capitalism.” International Labor and Working Class History 51 (1997): 163–66. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Big Questions and Answers: Three Histories of Slavery, the Slave Trade and the Atlantic World.” Social History 27, no. 2 (2002): 210–17. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Silver, Slaves, and Sugar: The Persistence of Spanish Colonialism from Absolutism to Liberalism.” Latin American Research Review 39, no. 2 (2004): 196–210. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Usable Pasts? Rethinking Histories of Empire after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.” Illes i Imperis 8 (2006): 175–78. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Las plantillas rotas de la Historia: ¿Qué viene después del giro lingüístico?” Historia Social 63 (2009): 169–74. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Politics and Ideas in Latin American Independence.” Latin American Research Review 45, no. 2 (2010): 228–35.

Tributes Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. “Manuel Moreno Fraginals: An Appreciation.” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 1 (2002): 125–27.

Index

å Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. 96 lágrimas, 175–76 A abolition: Afro-Hispanics’ involvement in, 6; depictions of (see A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin; La llave de La cabaña de Tío Tom; Uncle Tom’s Cabin); factors behind, 22, 23, 44, 45, 124; influence of Catholicism on, 94–97; resistance to, 155, 161–62; sentimental appeals as tool of, 95–97; Sociedad Abolicionista Español, 3, 44, 45; as transatlantic phenomenon, 45; see also Empire and Antislavery; slavery; Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition: afrancesados: described, 206–7; housing of, 206–8; payments to, 206–8, 210–11; as political refugees, 209–11; see also refugees Africa: North Africa, 167; slave trade in, 88–89; West Africa, 108, 115 Africans and people of African descent: Afro-Hispanics, 6, 43–44, 85–86, 90–92; agency of, 6, 85–86, 106; colonial anxieties about (see “race war”); enslavement of (see slavery); evangelization of, 83–85; exclusion from colonial histories, 69–70, 224–25; free people of color, 113–15; population in Spanish America, 89, 100n35;

racist caricatures of, 168–69, 175– 77; religious confraternities of, 85–86; during Seven Years’ War, 113–15; US activists’ influence, 168, 172–73 Afro-Hispanics. See Africans and people of African descent Almeida, Joselyn M., 194 Álvarez Junco, José, 17, 23, 37, 39, 143 Amelang, James, 27, 28, 142 Anderson, Benedict, 223 Anexión y guerra en Santo Domingo, 130–34 Antillón, Isidoro, 96–97 archives: colonial, 62 Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (ASPHS), 6. See also Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies B Baroja, Pío, 51–53 Bayly, Christopher, 38 Bellan, Estevan “Steve,” 25 Bennett, Herman, 84–85, 86 Berquist Soule, Emily, 7, 8–9, 98–99, 99 Bible: justifications for slavery in, 86, 99n9 blackface: in Spanish popular culture, 175–77 Black Legend, 3–4, 21, 61, 68–69 Blanco White, Fernando, 26, 185; bilingualism of, 184–85, 187–88,

240

Index

190–93, 195n8; capture and escape of, 187, 202–4, 206; cultural and social circles of, 188–89; diary of (Flight to Freedom), 9–10, 26–27, 29, 183–94; literary influences on, 186; self-fashioning of, 184–85, 190–93 Blanco White, Joseph (José), 9, 97, 184, 187–88, 193, 195n4 Bourbon Reforms, 9, 109 Britain: empire of, 11n16, 40, 110– 14, 116; Fernando Blanco White’s experiences in, 185, 187–94 Burguera, Monica, 4 C Canary Islands, 86–88 Carnicero, Antonio, 158, 159, 160–61 Carr, Raymond, 5 cartoons, political, 78 catechization: of Black slaves, 92–99 Cecilia Valdés, 148–49 Charles III, 110, 114 Chinese, 40–44 colonialism: historiographies of, 53–56 colonies: histories of, 69–71, 222–24; national identities of, 228–29; relationships between, 71–78; in tension with the metropole, 67–71; see also specific colonies Columbus, Christopher: commemoration of, 3, 57–58, 69, 220, 226 The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century: overview, 3, 67–68, 106; context and influences on, 23; discussed in radio interview, 219–31; doctoral research leading to, 220–21; exploration of nationalism in, 68–71; influence of, 8, 71–79; themes of, 53–55; title of, 221–22; transnationalism of, 56–59, 61–63 coolie trade, 40–44, 47n38 Cooper, Frederick, 2, 7, 20, 54, 56

Cuadernos para el diálogo, 170–75 Cuba: abolitionist movements in, 45; abolition of slavery in, 124; British capture of Havana, 110–14, 116; compared with Puerto Rico, 226–27; coolie trade and, 40–44; defense of slavery in, 44, 161; elites of, 109, 111–13, 115–16, 128, 135n15; fears of a race war in, 44; hispanismo and, 71–72; histories of, 3, 58, 69–70, 221–25, 227–29, 231n6; independence movements in, 73–78, 81n14, 81n15, 124; legal limbo of, 126–27; liberalism of, 22; plantation expansion in, 124; relationships with other Spanish American nations, 71–78, 125–26; relationship with Spain, 1–2, 71–78, 221; relationship with the US, 74–75, 77, 78, 227; scholarly attention to, 21–22, 221; slave trade and, 108, 109, 111–15 D Dalmau, Pol, 38 Daly, Gavin, 200 Delgado, Josep Maria, 24 Derrida, Jacques, 196n21 El Desastre, 38–39, 168 Díaz, Porfirio, 74–75 Dominican Republic: independence and reoccupation of, 123–34, 135n15; see also Santo Domingo Drake family, 40–41 Drescher, Seymour, 2, 7, 22–23, 45 Duché, Elodie, 201 E Eastman, Scott, 7, 8, 10, 143 Ebert family, 19–20 Ehrlich, Matthew, 9–10 Eley, Geoff, 21, 39 elites: Creole, 146–49; Cuban, 109, 111–13, 115–16, 128, 135n15; Dominican, 135n15; Puerto Rican, 45, 128

Index

Eller, Anne, 6–7, 9, 125–30, 135 empire, 37–38, 53–56 Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874, 2–3, 37–48, 105–6; context and influences on, 21–22; influence of, 8, 45–46, 98; interdisciplinary appeal of, 45–46; public sphere in, 44; responses to, 45–46; Spanish policy in, 123–25; transatlantic model of, 167, 168 enslaved people: Catholic practices of, 84–86; evangelization of, 83–85, 92–93, 98; family and community life of, 84–86, 90–93; Jesuit treatment of, 83, 89–93, 97–98 F Ferdinand VII, 89, 193, 208–10, 212n2 Ferrer, Ada, 7, 21, 27–28 Figueroa, Luis A., 6 Flight to Freedom: analysis of, 9–10, 183–94; description, 26, 187; literary context of, 185–86; as military memoir, 185–86; SchmidtNowara’s work with, 16, 26–27; written in English, 184 Flinter, George Dawson, 25–26 Fordham University: Latin American and Latino Studies Institute, 17, 28, x; Schmidt-Nowara’s employment at, x, 17, 19, 23, 28, 107, 177–78, 220 Fradera, Josep Maria, 2, 6, 23–25, 27, 28, 142, 154 Fraginals, Manuel Moreno, 29 Franco, Francisco: dictatorship of, 4, 9, 167–77 Fuente, Alejandro de la, 24–25 G Gándara, José de la, 130–34 Garavaglia, Juan Carlos, 25 Georgetown University, 83 Germany: liberalism of, 21 Goode, Joshua, 8, 51–52, 63, 142

241

H Hablemos de Historia (Let’s Talk about History), 231n1; interview of Schmidt-Nowara, 219–31 Haiti, 72, 124, 125, 127, 128, 133 Helten, James, 150 Hernández, Miguel, 183 Hijo del Ahuizote, 78 hispanidad, 51–53 hispanismo, 51–53, 68, 71–78, 132 historians: colonial, 68–73, 222–24; intellectual and social contexts of, 60–62 historiography, 53–56, 60–63, 64n10, 68–73 history: colonial, 68–73, 222–24; discipline of (see historiography); uses of, 3, 68–73, 222–24 Hulme, Peter, 60 hybridity, 59–60 I independence movements, 67–68, 72–73, 75–78, 124–34, 229, 231n6 Indians (SE Asia), 40 Indigenous people: catechization of, 92, 93; colonial histories of, 69–70, 222–24, 227–28; enslavement of, 93, 95 Inquisition, 96 Interpreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations, and Legends, 3, 53–56, 59–61 J Jaca, Francisco, 95–96 Jacobson, Stephen, 8, 10, 28, 30, 142, 143, 183 Jesuits: as slaveowners, 83, 89–93, 97–98 Joseph, Peniel, 28 Juárez, Benito, 74 K Kagan, Richard, 4 A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: editions of, 163n24; engagement with Spain

242

Index

in, 154–56; illustrations in, 156–58; religious elements of, 153–54; Spanish “translation” of (see La llave de La cabaña de Tío Tom); summarized, 149–52, 153–54; typefaces in, 153, 156 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 172–73 Knight, Franklin, 45 L La llave de La cabaña de Tío Tom, 9, 153–62; illustrations in, 157–61, 158, 159, 162; omissions in, 153–57, 163n31; typefaces in, 153, 156; see also A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin Larrosa, Gregorio Amado, 9, 153–62 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 3, 70, 93, 100n33 Let’s Talk about History. See Hablemos de Historia liberalism: Spanish iterations of, 38, 68–71, 74, 76, 132; transnationalism of, 4, 5, 21–22, 38, 68–71, 132, 168–69 Llopis, Ricard, 158, 159, 160–61 Losada, Juan, 170–71 Luengo, Jorge, 38 Lummis, Charles F., 25 M Manz, Beatriz, 9–10 Matos Rodríguez, Félix V., 45 mestizaje, 4, 55, 58–59, 68–69, 76. See also miscegenation metropoles: colonies and, 5, 9, 10, 53, 54, 67–72, 77, 107, 167–68 Mexico: relationships with Cuba, 73–75, 77–78 miscegenation: depiction in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 146–49; as imperial incorporation, 43–44, 69, 146–49, 225; US fears of, 146, 148–49; see also mestizaje Montúfar, Alonso de, 95 Moore, Louisa, 189–91, 195n11 Muerte de Maceo (play), 68–69

Muller, Dalia Antonia Caraballo, 8, 71–80 Mundy, Barbara, 28 N nationalism, 68–71 Nieto-Phillips, John M., 3, 23, 54. See also Interpreting Spanish Colonialism O Ortiz, Fernando, 59 Osterhammel, Jurgen, 38 Otter, Samuel, 151 P Philippines: El Desastre and, 168, 221; engagement with reform, 123; histories of, 59–60, 62, 67–68, 70–71; involvement in coolie trade, 47n38; legal limbo of, 126–27; as part of Spanish empire, 55, 97, 115–16 plantations: labor demands of, 40–44, 47n38, 109–10; owned by religious orders, 84, 89–92; Spanish commitment to, 22, 109– 16, 124; see also “second slaveries” Portuguese: involvement in the slave trade, 83, 88–89, 118n10, 146 postcolonial studies: SchmidtNowara’s contributions to, 3, 18, 23, 54, 54n10, 58–61, 230–31 (see also The Conquest of History) Prado, Juan de, 111 Prescott, William H., 4 Prescott’s Paradigm, 4, 61 prisoners of war: control and surveillance of, 201–4; living conditions of, 201–6, 213n15, 213n21; management of, 200–206, 211–12; parole of, 201–2, 204, 206, 213n10; payment of, 204–5; scholarly study of, 185–86, 199– 200; silence of, 212n2; see also Blanco White, Fernando

Index

Puerto Rico: abolitionist movements in, 3; abolition of slavery in, 44, 124; compared with Cuba, 226–27; diaspora and identity, 228–29; elites of, 45, 128; histories of, 2, 3, 69–70, 222–25, 227–29; independence movement in, 124, 228–29; legal limbo of, 126–27; liberalism of, 22; plantation system of, 124; relationship with the US, 227 R race: “balancing,” 43–44, 225; racist tropes and caricatures, 175–77; see also miscegenation; “race war” “race war”: anxieties about, 2, 43–44, 76, 125–26, 133, 225 Radcliff, Pamela, 2, 143 refugees: definitions of, 209–11, 214n38; housing of, 206–8; management of, 206–12; payments to, 206–8, 210–11; political versus war refugees, 209–11; scholarly study of, 199–200 Reid Andrews, George, 5 Rizal, José, 70–71 Rodrigo, Martín, 25 Romanus pontifex (1455), 88–89 S Saco, José Antonio, 70, 100n33 Sandoval, Alonso de, 95 Santo Domingo, 9, 93, 124–25, 131– 34. See also Dominican Republic Sanz Rozalén, Vicent, 10, 219–31, 231 Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher, x, 141, 142, 143, 144; articles and reviews, 4, 8, 25–26, 39, 84, 205, 234–37; books, 106–7, 233 (see also Empire and Antislavery; Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition; The Conquest of History); coedited books, 233 (see also Interpreting Spanish Colonialism; Slavery and Antislavery); as colleague, 17, 27–30, 51–52, 116, 117, 145;

243

contributions to postcolonial studies, 3, 18, 23, 54, 54n10, 58–61, 230–31; death of, 8, 17; doctoral research, 39, 220–21; education of, 8, 18–21; family of, 18–20, 27; historical figures explored by, 25–27; interdisciplinary approach of, 3, 17–18, 39, 55–56, 106, 116, 145, 157, 178, 183–84; interviewed for Hablemos de Historia, 219–31; as mentor and teacher, 6–7, 28, 71–79, 98–99, 107, 117, 125–30, 177–79; posthumous work of, 9–10, 16, 185–86, 191 (see also Flight to Freedom); “reading against the grain,” 52–53; scholarly legacy of, 29–30, 46; sociability of, 5–8, 18, 28–29, 37, 52, 105–6, 145; themes in the work of, 53–54; transnational approach of, 2–3, 5, 116, 183–84, 233; tributes and memorials to, 27 Schneider, Elena, 6, 9, 107–8, 118 Scott, Rebecca, 2, 20–21 “second empire,” 1–2, 40 “second slaveries,” 40–44, 97; scholarly investigation of, 2, 22–24, 124 (see also Empire and Antislavery); see also plantations Serrano, Francisco, 161 Seven Years’ War, 108–16 Shubert, Adrian, 4, 8, 37–38, 46 Simal, Juan Luis, 212 slavery: Catholic Church’s support for, 93–94, 100n33; Catholic opposition to, 94–97, 98; independence movements and, 128–30; of Indigenous peoples, 93, 95; industrial mode of, 108–9; by Jesuits, 83, 89–93, 97–98; pro-slave-trade policies, 108–16; religious justifications for, 86–89; see also abolition; coolie trade Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World, 7, 23–24, 107, 108

244

Index

Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 24–25 slaves. See enslaved people Sociedad Abolicionista Español (Spanish Abolition Society), 3, 44, 45 Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (SSPHS), 6, 51–52 Spain: coolie trade and, 40–44; Franco dictatorship of, 4, 9, 167–77; intellectuals of, 51–53, 67–71; liberalism of, 21–22; relationship with Cuba, 1–2, 71–78, 221; relationship with the US, 37–39, 167–69; responses to colonial independence movements, 37–39, 73–78; scholarly consideration of, 1–5, 21, 37–38, 53–58, 60–61, 67–71, 123–25; slave-trade policies of, 108–16; Spanish-American War’s impact on, 37–39; transnationalism and, 37–38, 59–63, 67–71 (see also transnationalism) Spanish Abolitionist Society. See Sociedad Abolicionista Español Spanish-American War, 37–39 Spanishness: as depicted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 146–49; see also hispanismo A Spanish Prisoner in the Ruins of Napoleon’s Empire, 9–10 Spieler, Miranda, 127 Stoler, Ann, 2, 20, 39, 54, 56 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 9, 149–62; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 145–49, 152; on the use of literature to convey harsh truths, 149–52 Surwillo, Lisa, 9, 145, 162 T Tannenbaum, Frank, 8–9, 83–84 Tomich, Dale, 2, 23, 24, 28, 142 transnational history, 2–3, 5, 37–38, 56–63, 67–71, 116, 183–84

transnationalism: liberalism and, 4, 5, 21–22, 38, 68–71, 132, 168–69; Schmidt-Nowara’s consideration of, 2–3, 5, 56–63, 116, 183–84 Tufts University: Prince of Asturias Chair in Spanish History, 17 U Unamuno, Miguel de, 51–53 Uncle Tom’s Cabin: depiction of miscegenation in, 146–49; depiction of Spanishness in, 146– 49; Spanish reaction to, 145–49, 152; see also A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin United States: cultural influence of, 169–77; fears of miscegenation in, 147, 148–49; involvement in the coolie trade, 42–43; relationship with Cuba, 77, 78, 227; relationship with Francoist Spain, 167–69; relationship with Puerto Rico, 227; as threat to Latin American sovereignty, 72, 74–75, 125–26 universities: connections to slavery, 83, 99n1 University of Michigan, 8, 18, 24, 39, 178 Urrabieta, Vicente, 158, 159, 160–61 V Valencia-Garcia, Louie Dean, 6–7, 9, 28, 79, 177–79 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel, 169, 170, 171–72 Villaverde, Cirilo, 148–49 von Germeten, Nicole, 85 W war: religious justifications for, 86–89 Weinstein, Cindy, 150 White Legend, 4, 53, 61, 70 Williams, Raymond, 59 Z Zulueta, Pedro José de, 40