In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain's Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870

Abstract

Jesús Sanjurjo posits that the end of the slave trade to the Spanish empire was largely the result of “international political negotiations that excluded the Spanish authorities and ignored Spanish political actors”—an argument that echoes older, Anglocentric scholarship on the topic and fails to engage with the literature's recent focus on the role that the enslaved themselves played in pushing for abolition (p. 2). (White) Spanish anti–slave trade activists, he sustains, contributed only in terms of turning public sentiment against the slave trade. In so doing, they worked concurrently with the growth of liberalism in the Spanish empire, which Sanjurjo rightly points out looks different in the Spanish context. In Spanish liberalism, liberal political actors privileged preserving what was left of the empire, safeguarding the wealth of Cuba, and generally placating the Cuban elite. This argument about the ties between slavery and Spanish liberalism is intriguing, but it remains unclear whether the book's research, writing, and analysis do it justice.Chapter 1 treats the familiar early Spanish anti–slave trade activists: the statesman Agustín de Argüelles, law student Isidoro de Antillón, and expatriate journalist José Blanco White. With just a few allies, these men singlehandedly initiated public discussion about outlawing the slave trade and slavery itself in Spain—an essential aspect of the author's argument that they “contributed to building the public consensus” against the slave trade (p. 2). But strangely, Sanjurjo barely references—much less analyzes with any thoughtfulness—the body of work that they produced. This is a curious choice because their speeches and publications not only evince deep engagement with the broader abolitionist movements throughout the Atlantic world but also present uniquely Spanish arguments and proposals that merit attention.The next chapter outlines the British diplomatic pressure that resulted in the deeply flawed—and unenforced—Treaty of 1817, by which Madrid agreed to a plan to end the slave trade to the Spanish territories. Here, Sanjurjo references the related 1816 Council of the Indies report that recommended the abolition of the slave trade. He refers to it as “extraordinarily important”—even though it was a dead letter—but does so while attacking other scholars who have written on this topic for downplaying it, misinterpreting it, or failing to mention it altogether (p. 29). Unfortunately, such ruthless attacks against existing scholarship mar much of the book.Chapter 3 has some useful aspects, as it explains the “necessary evil” argument that Spanish elites forged in response to British abolitionist pressure. Sanjurjo shows how instead of attempting to directly counter British arguments about the immorality of the slave trade, proslavery Spanish and Spanish American elites argued that it was a “necessary evil” that would preserve the Cuban economy—and by extension, the economy of the entire empire. Its proponents, Francisco Arango y Parreño among them, framed British abolitionist pressure in terms of nationalistic discourse, suggesting that to be Spanish and Cuban would mean to push back against foreign interlopers who sought to harm Spanish interests under the guise of abolitionism.Chapter 4 examines Cuban historian and politician José Antonio Saco, who is sometimes considered as having contributed to antislavery sentiment. Sanjurjo rightly characterizes Saco as arguing against the slave trade not because he believed it was wrong but because he was convinced that the island's sugar industry and white population would be better off without it. But here again, when given an opportunity to execute original research with new archival sources that could have shed light on such important concepts, the author fails to do so, instead relying on just a few well-known published sources and secondary literature. Throughout the book, in fact, there is a notable lack of substantive engagement with archival sources in England, Spain, and Spanish America. The final chapter—the book is quite short, at only 123 pages of body text—outlines the rise of the Spanish Abolitionist Society in Madrid but strangely fails to engage with Christopher Schmidt-Nowara's groundbreaking work on the topic or the archives he used, instead delivering a basic outline of historical events largely based on secondary sources.The epilogue offers a thesis that frames antislavery and anti–slave trade thinking as “contradictory and complementary . . . Liberal and absolutist, progressive and conservative, egalitarian and racist” (p. 121). While in theory this gesture toward the confounding complexity of Spanish political sentiment regarding the slave trade is suggestive, the book is simply not up to the task of illustrating such historical nuance. It is hampered by an excessively combative approach to the existing literature and an impoverished understanding of the relevant archival documentation. Throughout, its organization is difficult to follow, and the argumentation is both scant and unclear. The book will be of interest to scholars who work on antislavery and abolition in the Spanish empire, but it brings little new to their table.