Alex Borucki, David Eltis, David Wheat, eds. From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas. Diálogos Series. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. x + 350 pp. $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8263-6116-5; $90.75 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8263-6115-8.
Reviewed by William A. Morgan (Lone Star College - Montgomery)
Published on H-LatAm (December, 2020)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
In 2008, David Eltis offered a significant update to his landmark work on the Middle Passage in the edited volume Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. At the end of the introductory essay, a call was made for renewed attention to the individual branches of the slave trade as well as a greater awareness of the immense number of ports that connected each of these branches. By 2015, Eltis, now along with Alex Borucki and David Wheat, had staked out that Spanish America would be the initial direction this path would take, in their article “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America.”[1] Five years later, the full weight of their efforts has culminated in the publication of From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas in which they offer a, perhaps much-needed, reminder of the significance of the Spanish empire to the transatlantic slave trade: notably, that both the first (1520) and last (1867) slave ships from Africa arrived in Spanish America, and within this empire emerged the first and one of the largest free black populations in the Atlantic world. Despite these touchstones, the editors profess confusion, finding it “odd that there is less awareness about the size, nature, and significance of the African connection with Spanish America, especially the Spanish role in the slave trade, than there is about any other branch of the transatlantic traffic” (p. 1).
As both a general and specific attempt at redress, this current work advances a course corrective within the larger scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade by presenting new evidence on the size and scale of Africans imported to Spanish America.[2] The most striking affirmation is that in total, more than 2,000,000 African slaves were bound for Spain’s Atlantic empire (for context, this places Spain second only to Brazil but ahead of the British empire in its entirety). The demographic scale of this finding merits a significant revision of how and where the African slave trade unfolded. A secondary argument emphasizes intra-American slave trafficking in an effort to expand study beyond the direct trade and acknowledge the substantial number of slaves trafficked across and within nations. The importance of linked ports spread throughout this region is underscored by new estimates presented in this volume that of those 2,000,000, more than a quarter (566,000) entered Spanish territory only after first arriving from various other European colonial outposts. This network was extensive enough that in the history of the slave trade to Spain’s New World territories, Africans came from every European colonial power and every African region involved in this aspect of human trafficking.
The introductory chapter from the editors (along with the more methodologically centered chapter by Marc Eagle and Wheat that follows) speaks most directly to the broader aims of reassessing the transatlantic slave trade based on a reconfiguration of Spain’s role. The authors make several important contributions that as a whole force a deeper understanding of the demographic degree and diversity that made up this branch of the African diaspora. At the heart of this essay lies the central, but long-neglected, question of how African slaves arrived to (and in) Spanish America. As part of their reassessment, the authors offer the following conclusions: that in the earliest period, 60 percent more Africans arrived to this region than had been estimated under the 2010 Transatlantic Slave Trade Database and that the database had undercalculated their numbers by 14 percent over the entire course of the slave trade; that within this traffic there were at least two discernable peaks of African arrivals that resulted in overlapping processes of mestizaje (with some places and people experiencing both peaks); that of those slaves arriving from Africa there was an “extreme ... diversity,” perhaps more so than in any other European New World empire; and that fully a quarter or more slaves who arrived to this region did so from places other than Africa (p. 25). These conclusions offer a lot to unpack in a brief chapter, but, leaving aside the bold assertion that “intrinsic natural growth rates were also positive for Afro-Cubans even at the height of the island’s nineteenth-century sugar boom”—a singular position that is supported by neither official nor anecdotal evidence—they are expertly rendered and justifiably backed by credible analysis (p. 35).[3] Most important, the introduction provides a runway for others to use in the regional reassessment of the slave trade to, and within, Spanish America.
Building on the foundation of new data presented in the first two chapters, the rest of the volume is separated into halves, with an initial focus on various far-flung regions of mainland Spanish America followed by subsequent chapters devoted to Cuba. For this first grouping, chapters 3 through 7 attempt to reintegrate Spanish America to the historiographies of the transatlantic slave trade largely by taking peripheral spaces (geographically and chronologically) and demonstrating the scale of the slave trade in each. An additional running thread that emphasizes the importance of diverse points of embarkation—be it through “transimperial” links or routes connecting maritime ports to overland destinations—unifies these chapters. When taken as a whole, they offer a compelling case that the Atlantic Ocean, as a critical space within the African diaspora, must now be extended (and responsive) to multiple points along the way and in between.
Individually, many of these chapters represent original—and in some cases the only—research overlaying updated information on the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Collectively they address the nearly 50,000 slaves arriving to New Spain over five decades at the turn of the seventeenth century. More specifically (and reflecting the framework of micro-level case studies), they speak to a smaller-scale volume benefiting the narrower nature of their focus. These range from the dozens of slaves for sale daily in the hinterland market of Puebla de los Ángeles (well outside the port of Veracruz) to the 1,700 slave and free black community in and around Guatemala. They also include the similarly sized community of 1,500 Africans and their descendants in Antequera (present-day Oaxaca City, Mexico), as well as the variety of non-plantation slaves laboring as tailors and tanners in the Río de la Plata (the region bounded by Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay). Significantly, the concentration on smaller slave and free black societies in no way diminishes the potential for revelations about these previously understudied spaces. As just one example, albeit in singular form, the records of a 1622 slave ship arriving in Honduras—now found to be carrying nearly double the number of slaves officially listed on the manifest—illustrates a central claim of the edited volume: that although estimates for arrivals to New Spain have been revised upward, they remain undercounted.
Beyond the volume of the trade in slaves, each of these early chapters argues for the existence of intercolonial and interregional routes that served as secondary extensions and important multiplications of the transatlantic slave trade. These webs of activity proved to be wide-ranging and varied. Pablo Miguel Sierra Silva demonstrates just how diverse these routes could be as he details a two- to three-week overland journey across assorted rivers, roads, mountain passes, and mule trains used to broaden the reaches of the slave trade from port to hinterland in New Spain. Relatedly, Paul Lokken details how these secondary movements were also dynamic, by outlining how slaves (32 percent of whom were African born) bought in Guatemala were subsequently transferred to distant places throughout the empire, including Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, and Cuba. The underappreciated aspects of these secondary movements of slaves, in contrast to the more recognized transatlantic activities, also worked in the reverse of what was illustrated in Guatemala. Illustrating the wide-ranging journey of some slaves brought to New Spain in the same period, Sabrina Smith outlines the interregional slave trade of a single slave who was brought to Oaxaca by way of Mozambique and Manila, and then from Acapulco on the coast of New Spain. The importance of a global link to a local economy in the era of slavery is also identified by Borucki who sketches how the direct trade in slaves across the Atlantic by Rioplatenese merchants profoundly shaped the forms of economic activity both in this region and beyond. As one of only a few locations in mainland Spanish America to send ships directly to Africa, this long-neglected but important center of slave trading in the Spanish Americas connected Madrid with London, Paris, and Lisbon by way of transimperial networks operating within the transatlantic slave trade.
In an essay that speaks more directly to the role of Africans and their descendants in Spanish America, Rachel Sarah O’Toole expands on the interconnectivity embedded within the movement of slaves across and throughout Spanish America, profiling how regional and local economies around Panama “fueled the transimperial intra-American slave trades of the colonial Americas” (p. 150). Focusing on a geographically well-placed middle ground that connected the Atlantic with Pacific slave trades, O’Toole suggests that free blacks (serving as workers and vendors across a multitude of occupations) and slaves (both as corporeal cargo and in their labor) played a critical role in empire making. They built the roads, erected the garrisons, carried the wine and food, guided the supply trains, mined the silver, and made and sold the textiles that underlined the subsequent development of local economies and networks emerging in the wake of the maritime slave trading on either side of the isthmus. Between slaves laboring under the direction of the Catholic Church outside of Veracruz or as bakers and vineyard workers in the Río de la Plata, these freshly demarcated regional spaces interject new centers of the African diaspora, with each author substantiating a claim for renewed attention to the extension of the transatlantic slave trade beyond just ports of entry.
Chapter 8 marks the volume’s turn away from Spanish mainland America and toward Cuba. Eltis and Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez’s contribution primarily functions as an overview of the slave trade, especially in its attempts to pull together three ongoing investigative projects (each occurring in multiple research locations across the Atlantic world). Much of what is presented confirms recent analyses rather than revealing new information. (For new details related to where exactly ships carrying African slaves left from before arriving to Cuba, when they departed, and who the owners were, see the related chapter “Reassessing the Slave Trade to Cuba: 1790-1820” by Felipe-Gonzalez). However, that is not to say that confirmation does not add much-needed weight to many of the most important themes concerning historians of Cuban slavery. These include the always pressing need to stipulate that Cuba’s sugar economy was neither inexorable nor omnipresent; that as 90 percent of all slaves entered Cuba after 1800, the island was a preeminent, regional site of a “second slavery”; and that although a majority of these slaves came directly from Africa (the authors are able to identify, with new specificity, a ratio of 84 percent), an inverse dynamic occurred between 1701 and 1760 with 90 percent coming from intra-American routes. For Cuba, these broad demographic profiles lend credence to the accurate, but often unacknowledged, reality that the island’s initial use of enslaved labor was dynamic, and that the high degree of intra-American ports of embarkation also made its slave population far more diverse than previously believed.
Continuing the focus on Cuba, Elena Schneider comes closest to marrying the goals of reintegrating Spanish America in the Atlantic slave trade and, conversely, re-assimilating the Atlantic slave trade in Spanish America. In her chapter, she offers a tantalizing glimpse into just how new revelations affect the understanding of the island’s slave-based economy both before and after the emergence of the sugar revolution on the island. Outlining the geopolitical dimensions of a “subset” of African slaves arriving to Cuba between 1640 and 1789, she argues for a number that was “significantly larger” than previously believed and shows that this grouping was considerably more diverse, with a majority of slaves arriving indirectly through intra-American channels, rather than directly from Africa (p. 250). By enlarging early African involvement in Cuba, Schneider makes the case for an elongated and more robust reliance on slavery with the effect of augmenting the island’s standing in the larger plantation economy of the region. On the other end, the multiplicity of experiences that slaves brought with them to Cuba, as they crossed from and through various empires and cultures, suggests more nuanced webs of connectivity within the African diaspora. Specifically, Schneider reasons that these slaves “were more likely than at later moments to be either creoles or people with some experience, connections, or cultural knowledge acquired in regions of the Americas controlled by non-Hispanic powers” (p. 261).
As a de facto closing argument, Emily Berquist Soule’s contribution takes a wide lens to underscore the significance of antislavery sentiment within the Spanish Atlantic, the traces of which Soule finds in each major era of the slave trade (and beyond) that were outlined in the previous chapters. Reflecting the belief that the full measure of slavery’s dimension can be examined by the depth and extent of the reaction it produced, Soule argues for a “homegrown movement against the slave trade that had deep roots in Catholic belief and was fostered by antislavery and abolitionist advocates on both sides of the Atlantic” (p. 277). In this context, she offers a mix of seventeenth-century antislavery clerics alongside nineteenth-century Atlantic abolitionist intellectuals as forceful counterweights to the early slave-owning Jesuits and powerful slaveholding proponents, operating fully within Cuba’s burgeoning plantation economy in the late stages of Spain’s empire of slavery (notably Francisco de Arango y Parreño). Although these antislavery voices may have been few and far between, their conspicuous presence and chronology—from the very beginning of the slave trade to the very end of slavery as an institution—in itself speaks to the significance and presence of slavery to Spanish America, especially in the earliest periods and in the farthest corners of the empire, the very contours of which make up this volume in its entirety.
That the collection is unbalanced—geographically, it favors Mexico, Central America, and Cuba, chronologically it emphasizes the “long” seventeenth century—and that there are important sites (for example, Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru) as well as periods (the eighteenth century) that are in need of more investigation are self-acknowledged holes in an otherwise empirically strong and analytically novel contribution to the Atlantic slave trade historiography. As an important entry to the larger work of the transatlantic slave database project, it would have been beneficial to have a more robust introduction capable of tying each chapter into a more cohesive narrative. It would also have been particularly useful for the editors to have identified patterns of similarity as well dissimilarity related to the organization of the slave trade, especially for a volume concerned with intra-American connections and with a geographic footprint ranging from Guatemala, Uruguay, Cuba, and parts in between. Somewhat more curious than these omissions, though, are the strangely specific and limited appeals the editors outline for their work. Underlined by a footnote consisting of just two recent works (Michelle A. McKinley’s 2017 work, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700, on slavery in colonial Lima and Pablo F. Gómez’s The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic, also published in 2017), the authors profess a “hope that this volume complements recent works on the lives of Africans and their descendants in these colonies that demonstrate how and why enslaved litigants participated in Spanish American legal culture, and how African medical practitioners helped shape common knowledge about the human body and the environment” (p. 2).
This is unfortunate as this work is, at a minimum, a valuable contribution to scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade, which continues to expand and evolve through new data sources and revised analytical lenses that are very much on display here. Indeed, the demographic revelations alone—especially for how long and for how wide the African slave trade permeated Spanish America—add an increased scope to the African diaspora, broadening its dimensions to now include previously ignored hinterlands and maritime waypoints throughout the Atlantic world. The appeal of From the Galleons to the Highlands extends into geopolitical studies of imperial history as well as economic and political works on slavery and abolition. Beyond the implications for understanding Atlantic slavery, From the Galleons to the Highlands sets a model for reevaluating one of the central “branches” of the transatlantic slave trade and establishes a precedent for further investigation of the intra-slave trade among the various other empires that drove this trafficking of humans.
Notes
[1]. Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, “Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America,” The American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (April 2015): 433–61. An earlier attempt at investigating some of the initial spaces of slaves on the periphery of Spanish America can be found in several essays in Joseph M. Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, eds., Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).
[2]. Alongside investigating the Spanish empire in the Atlantic slave trade, the editors contend that the converse—analysis of the Atlantic slave trade in the Spanish empire—is also a central goal, but beyond a rough sketch in the introduction, this theme is arguably far less developed. For those desiring a fuller treatment of the African diaspora in this region, see, among others, Jane Landers and Barry Robinson, eds., Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); Herbert S. Klein and Ben Vinson III, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury, eds., The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
[3]. While the stipulation of “Afro-Cuban” may leave some room for interpretation, in the context of slavery and natural increase within this population, multiple Cuban census reports show a consistent decline in total slave numbers over the course of the nineteenth century, especially after 1846, a period defined by the plantation economy on the island.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-latam.
Citation:
William A. Morgan. Review of Borucki, Alex; Eltis, David; Wheat, David, eds., From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55405
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |