The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States [New Approaches to the Americas]

• Published in: International Review of Social History Vol. 55; no. 1; pp. 133 - 135
• Main Author: Geary, Dick
• Format: Book Review Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.04.2010
• Subjects: Civil war; Demography; Modernization; Portuguese language; Slave trade; Slavery; Social history; Spanish language; Brazil; Cuba; Americas; Puerto Rico; United States > US; North America
• ISSN: 0020-8590; 1469-512X
• DOI: 10.1017/S0020859010000076

[...]after relatively successful British initiatives to destroy the North Atlantic slave trade after 1808, that in the South Atlantic thrived, driven by the demands of coffee cultivation. [...]as Laird Bergad reminds us, in 1600, when there were no African slaves in the Caribbean or North America, over 200,000 had already arrived in the Spanish and Portuguese territories of the New World. [...]slavery persisted longer here than in most of the Americas, being brought to an end by a Civil War in the USA and abolished only in the 1880s in Cuba (1886) and Brazil (1888). [...]the first thematic chapter is entitled "Diversity" and makes clear that initially in North America and right the way through to the end of slavery in Brazil and Cuba slaves were employed in virtually every economic activity, whether urban or rural, skilled or unskilled, and that therefore the classic tobacco/cotton/sugar/coffee plantation model of slavery is at best misleading. [...]slaves in Spanish and Portuguese America possessed routes to freedom through self-purchase (which the author tends to underestimate in the Brazilian case), which were denied to most North American and Caribbean slaves, where legal structures and plantation practice became more repressive with the passage of time.