In the Blood of Our Brothers; Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870 by Jesus Sanjurjo

Abstract

Reviewed by: In the Blood of Our Brothers; Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870 by Jesus Sanjurjo Ricardo Raùl Salazar Rey In the Blood of Our Brothers; Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870. By Jesus Sanjurjo. Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2021. This economically crafted monograph recounts more of the history behind the shape and intensity of the Atlantic slave trade from the Age of Revolutions to its end. Jesús Sanjurjo centers the “ever loyal,” if widely entangled, island of Cuba, as the wealth of its plantocracy became the lodestar of the reduced nineteenth-century Spanish Empire. He weaves the words of the protagonists with his analysis into a compelling narrative that connects the sudden and seemingly unstoppable growth of the Atlantic slave trade into the Spanish Empire in the first half of the nineteenth century and its sudden and dramatic end in the 1860s. Focusing on the colonies that remained under the control of Spain, he illuminates what has been overshadowed by the drama of mainland IberoAmerican independence and its aftermath; Sanjurjo connects his work with the historiographies of imperialism, Atlantic slavery and Iberian history, creating links throughout the chapters. The book opens in 1811 with the Spanish metropolis occupied and the Empire buckling under the relentless pressure of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. From the beginning of European hostilities in 1792, the Spanish government had moved between unwilling alliance with, and active resistance to, French demands. After fifteen years of continuous efforts, not the least of which resulted in the annihilation of the combined fleet at Trafalgar, the Spanish monarchy pushed against French power. With disdain and disappointment Napoleon gambled, invading Iberia and dethroning Ferdinand VII “el deseado,” setting off the Peninsular War (1807–1814) also known as his “Spanish ulcer.” The unfolding crisis rippled outwards, straining imperial bonds that had held for 300 years. Starting in the lead up to the Constitution of 1812, Sanjurjo recurrently features a young liberal deputy named Agustín de Argüelles (1776–1844) who, in alliance and admiration of British abolitionists, led the efforts to suppress the Atlantic slave trade through the Constitution of 1812. His failure to persuade the Cortes comes despite regulation of slavery being a core competency of the Spanish empire. During the centuries that Spain controlled vast mainland American provinces, slavery and the slave trade were taxed and regulated to throttle their full potential. Further strengthening Argüelles’ arguments, the bloody but triumphant rebellion of enslaved and freed people that consumed the murderous prosperity of Saint Domingue and gave birth to Haiti, stalked the nightmares of the powerful. Nevertheless, the Spanish Cortes chose to continue the unlimited Atlantic slave trade into what was left of the empire. Furthermore, in the Constitution they stripped the franchise from Afro-Iberians. Argüelles and the moderates failed despite the moving descriptions, quoted by Sanjurjo, of the evils they were committing and limiting their goal to ending the Atlantic slave trade, not the institution of slavery. The creative destruction of the Age of Revolutions in the Atlantic created glittering business opportunities that a preponderance of elites across the Spanish Empire chose to prioritize. In a telling echo of the current practice of multinationals moving wherever regulation is weakest, the British abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, followed by the USA in 1808, did not disarticulate the human, material or financial infrastructure that had developed over the last 350 years to enable the Atlantic slave trade to keep the plantation complex fed. Concurrently, Spain lost all of its mainland provinces and this caused a change of guard amidst Spanish imperial officials. Liberalism, including the right to dispose of property in the form of people without restraints from state or church, increasingly became the new ideal. Between 1800 and 1870 the Atlantic slave traders, blocked from their usual outlets, poured approximately 700,000 African people into Cuba. Ill prepared to rule and weakened by Napoleonic trauma, Ferdinand VII freed himself from the Constitution of 1812 while keeping the UK on side by capitulating to the anti-slave trade Treaty of 1817. This treaty...