Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana: State Slavery in Defense and Development, 1762–1835 by Evelyn P. Jennings

Abstract

Reviewed by: Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana: State Slavery in Defense and Development, 1762–1835 by Evelyn P. Jennings Jonah Rowen Evelyn P. Jennings. Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana: State Slavery in Defense and Development, 1762–1835. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780807173947 Hardcover: 280 pages Historians who study construction have to confront the fact that built artifacts obscure the people whose labor produced them. Finding archival traces of those builders can be particularly difficult in cases in which they were enslaved. In the superbly researched Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana: State Slavery in Defense and Development, 1762–1835, Evelyn P. Jennings describes her task as revealing “the tremendous labor of thousands of enslaved people that is embedded in the massive structures of Havana’s defensive colonial infrastructure but today is largely invisible.”1 Historians of the material culture of slavery may choose to treat manufactured artifacts as sufficient evidence for making meaningful assertions about the enslaved people who created them. A converse, if not mutually exclusive, approach focuses on the evidence of labor management, using textual sources that document enslavers’ actions to illuminate the work of coerced construction. Jennings leans in the latter direction. Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana lays out an engrossing story detailing the fabrication of the fortifications and material for defending colonial Havana. Beginning in the sixteenth century, this history follows the secular devolution of state power to private agents into the nineteenth century. Jennings’s chronological narrative lends coherency to complicated stories of decrees, interpersonal tussles, and near-constant funding shortages. Where tales of empire can often become mired in official actions that operate at cross-purposes, Jennings masterfully develops historical arcs that will draw in even readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of Spanish imperialism. Drawing evidence from official records and correspondence that document enumerated lists of enslaved people, Jennings weaves details together into a cogent sequence of events. The book’s first chapter describes the Spanish state’s history of enslavement up to 1700, enumerating the major categories of employment of enslaved people, including nimble task forces, undifferentiated workers, families, and fighters. The second chapter deals with the first half of the eighteenth century, including the establishment of the chartered Royal Company of Havana. Concluding on the pivotal 1762 British Siege of Havana, this chapter documents the wealth increases and lagging defenses that made the city a target of attack. Chapter three discusses the Spanish response to defeat, which included substantial rebuilding projects and thus greater enslavement activity, and delves into the specific tasks—unskilled and skilled—expected of enslaved people. It also points in the direction of diversification, including convict laborers and people hired out from private enslavers. Chapter four procedes from the remaining part of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, during which enslaved people actively fought in military campaigns abroad in addition to continuing to work on defense projects in Havana. As funds dried up with diminished income from the loss of mainland colonies, Spain was forced to find new modes of managing its empire. Finally, the fifth chapter demonstrates even greater adjustments, as pressures to end the slave trade mounted. Colonial agents nevertheless continued their reliance on coerced work regimes, even as the state itself accounted for fewer enslaved people. One of Jennings’s most convincing arguments is that we can detect the emergence of a particular strain of capitalism by following the crown’s or individual enslavers’ respective treatment of people whom these putative owners claimed as [End Page 79] chattel. Accumulating wealth by stealing labor from agricultural workers, the bourgeoisie gradually amassed power over an entrenched monarchy. Even as the state relinquished its monopolies and ceded power to the private sector, however, it reserved the capability to grant favors to planters to solicit stolen labor. Thus Jennings argues that what differentiates the case of Cuba from, for example, the British planter class is the centrality of the state in acquiring or commandeering enslaved people of its own. Spain’s Caribbean competitor nations generally extracted capital from slavery indirectly, from duties on goods made by enslaved people. The Spanish state, on the other hand, owned and rented royal slaves and levied corv...