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Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011

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Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011 344 Book Reviews Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011. xiii + 204 pp. (Paper US$ 28.95) Was slavery in the Iberian world different? Or does it only seem different because its historiography is badly integrated into the general literature on slavery and the slave trade? This book shows that Iberian slavery did indeed differ from other slave systems. First of all, it did not constitute a colonial antithesis to the growing individual liberty and the increasingly free labor market in Europe since slavery in Spain and Portugal had not disappeared during the Middle Ages. That continuity also explains another unique fea- ture: no other slave system was so well embedded in official legal and reli- gious practice. In other slave systems, which were new, the judiciary as well as the Church had to invent new rules and regulations regarding slaves. This study is clearly written with undergraduate students in mind. Adroitly, it summarizes the state of the art regarding the history of slavery and the slave trade in the British colonial world and then points to the dif- ferences, as Iberian slavery (1) did not replace the immigration of inden- tured servants from Europe as in the English, French, and Dutch colonies, (2) manumitted more slaves than other slave systems even in Brazil and Cuba where slavery was of vital importance to the export economy, and (3) seemed more influenced by cultural factors than by the exigencies of the economy, as nowhere else did so many slaves work outside the profit- able plantation sector. Schmidt-Nowara should be commended for his ability to analyze almost five centuries of Iberian slavery in a little over 150 pages of main text. The book contains no alphabetical bibliography, but there are many references to the existing literature in both the footnotes and the suggestions for fur- ther reading. Between each chapter, a short, well-written case history of a single person highlights in a few pages some of the historical trends dis- cussed in the preceding chapter. A survey like this can only be as good as the existing historiography allows for, and putting Iberian slavery in a comparative perspective brings to light several unexplored areas. It is indeed remarkable that neither Por- tugal nor Spain developed the institution of indentured labor. The fact that they continued to employ slaves seemed more a cultural phenomenon than an economic one as free labor on the Iberian Peninsula could not have © 2013 Pieter Emmer DOI: 10.1163/22134360-12340060 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:42:35AM via free access Book Reviews 345 been much more expensive than in those areas in Europe where slavery had disappeared. The same could be said about manumission. It is difficult to explain what economic reasoning stimulated slave owners to free their slaves. Sometimes, manumitting old and diseased slaves without much earning potential might have been financially advantageous, but after 1750 slave prices were on the increase, especially in Cuba and Brazil, making all slave labor more valuable. Schmidt-Nowara might well be right in asserting that Iberian slavery was embedded in a set of cultural and religious tradi- tions that differed from those in other slave societies. Culture might explain why the economics of Iberian slavery were dif- ferent from other slave systems, but it seems unlikely that it also affected slave demography. Yet Schmidt-Nowara suggests that demographic growth of the slave population in the Iberian world was negative due to bad treat- ment and undernourishment. In so doing he underestimates the dominant role of noncultural factors such as tropical disease. The strong demographic growth among the slaves in British North America seems to suggest that in large parts of the nontropical areas of Iberian America slave births also must have exceeded deaths. In describing the end of the slave trade and slavery in Iberian America Schmidt-Nowara does not invoke the deviating cultural parameters, but, instead, points to the usual factors such as slave rebellions and the inter- national role of British abolitionism. However, in this case cultural factors were at play, resulting in a weak abolitionist movement with little political impact in the Iberian world. That created a strange paradox. In Britain abo- litionists were so influential that economics were put aside when emanci- pating the slaves and slavery was abolished everywhere at the same time regardless of the economic viability of slave labor in a particular colony. While the economics of slavery seemed less important in Spanish and Por- tuguese America, slaves were first emancipated in those areas where their labor was less vital to the economy. That enabled Brazil and Cuba to profit from slave labor much longer than any British colony. Pieter Emmer Department of History, Leiden University 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands [email protected] Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 08:42:35AM via free access.
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