Note to seminar participants: The following work is roughly 10,500 words excluding the endnotes. I understand that the workshop's limit is 10,000 words so please feel free to ignore the notes and even the final section. Many thanks for reading this. I look forward to the discussion. Race beyond the Plantation: Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Santo Domingo Richard Turits
[email protected] Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University October 14, 2005 Work-in-progress (please do not distribute without author's permission). In recent decades, scholars have fully discredited the notion common in the early and mid- twentieth century that the history of race and slavery in Latin America was both fundamentally different from and relatively benign compared with that of the United States.1 Yet the idea that race and slavery were the same phenomena across time, space, and mode of production (namely, plantation, cattle, gold mining, or urban artisan economies) is also untenable.2 One key feature of slavery that did vary significantly across the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century was the potential for slaves to gain their freedom through legal manumission or by running away. In the Greater Spanish Caribbean, the relative feasibility of slaves' self-purchase, escape, and gratuitous manumission led to far larger free populations of African descent than those that formed in the British colonies and eventually the United States. Indeed, in Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Caribbean Colombia, free people of color constituted the plurality or even majority of society at certain points (a feature that also characterized large regions, and ultimately all, of Brazil).