Reviewed by: The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World by Elena A. Schneider Matt D. Childs (bio) The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World elena a. schneider University of North Carolina Press, 2018 360 pp. In June 1762, Britain brought the Seven Years’ War to Havana, Cuba, the largest city in the Caribbean, the third largest in the Americas, and Spain’s gateway to its vast empire in mainland Latin America. Assembled outside of Havana’s harbor was a British force that would number 28,400 sailors, soldiers, and enslaved Africans—amazingly more people than lived in any British colonial city in the Americas at the time. After a six-week siege that even involved digging a tunnel under the famous Moro military fortress that guarded Havana’s deep harbor to dynamite its walls, the Spanish finally surrendered. The British would occupy Havana for nearly a year before it would be returned to Spain in exchange for Florida in 1763. Spain and Britain alike recognized the siege and occupation of Havana as a watershed moment in the history of the Atlantic world, often giving it as much historical weight as the arrival of Columbus in the 1490s and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Given the importance of the occupation of Havana for shaping Caribbean, Imperial, and Atlantic history, scholars have analyzed the event from military, political, economic, and diplomatic angles, which has produced a long and detailed historiography. Historian Elena Schneider’s The Occupation of Havana is the latest addition to this largest body of scholarship, and without a doubt it is the most detailed and comprehensive study to date. Other scholars have emphasized the importance of the siege and occupation of Havana, but mainly to illustrate a different story. For example, the event often figures as one of the last battles of the Seven Years’ War that forced Spain to the peace table, or the resistance by Cuban colonists is [End Page 499] highlighted as an early form of nationalism, or most frequently the economic changes initiated by the British during their brief occupation is portrayed as the first step in the development of the Cuban plantation system. Schneider breaks with this scholarly tradition whereby the occupation of Havana is leveraged to make an argument about a different historical topic. Instead, she explains that methodologically her study is a longue durée history of the preceding interactions between the British and Spanish in the Caribbean before the siege, a detailed narrative and analysis of the occupation and of the long-lasting consequences after Havana returned to Spanish rule. In developing this line of analysis, Schneider has performed exhaustive research in over two dozen archives in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean working in sources that range from papers relating to heads of state discussing political and military events down to the minutiae of individual sale transactions recorded by notaries. Drawing on this diverse source base, she skillfully juggles multiple levels of analysis that range from the macro analysis of global-structural events to the micro scale of individual actions by the enslaved produced out of contingency and expediency. Utilizing these sources and examining the occupation of Havana from a long historical view, Schneider argues that “the British invasion and occupation of a Spanish colonial space was not the radical rupture in Cuban history that it was once depicted as being . . . [but rather] the intensification of existing patterns and processes of interactions . . directly connected to slavery, the slave trade, and population of African descent . . . before during and after the events that transpired in 1762 and 1763” (9). In buttressing her argument on how the occupation of Havana was an intensification of preexisting patterns and accelerated interactions between colonies and empires in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, Schneider has structured her book through six detailed chapters separated into three parts. In part 1, “Origins,” the author provides an intellectual and cultural history of what she wittingly labels the “Deep History of British Plots against Havana,” which traces schemes, conspiracies, and actions to take Havana and New World Spanish lands fueled by religious and imperial rivalries. Collectively, these early...
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