Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World (Diálogos Series) - Softcover

Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826339042 ISBN 13: 9780826339041

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press, 2011

Synopsis

The last New World countries to abolish slavery were Cuba and Brazil, more than twenty years after slave emancipation in the United States. Why slavery was so resilient and how people in Latin America fought against it are the subjects of this compelling study.  Beginning with the roots of African slavery in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iberian empires, this work explores central issues, including the transatlantic slave trade, labor, Afro-Latin American cultures, racial identities in colonial slave societies, and the spread of antislavery ideas and social movements.  A study of Latin America, this work, with its Atlantic-world framework, will also appeal to students of slavery and abolition in other Atlantic empires and nation-states in the early modern and modern eras. A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2012.

About this title

From the Author:

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara is Professor of History and Prince of Asturias Chair in Spanish Culture & Civilization at Tufts University.

From the Back Cover:

"In this highly readable synthesis, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara succeeds remarkably in capturing both the diversity and the complexity of slavery in Spanish and Portuguese America.  He is able to disclose its distinctive temporal rhythms and spatial expressions by integrating his account into the unifying interpretive framework of Atlantic history.  This is the story of slavery in the Iberian world, but it is also the story of the world of which it is a part."
 
Dale Tomich, Binghamton University, author of Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy.
 
 
"Representations of slavery and abolition in the Americas are heavily slanted toward the English-speaking Caribbean and North America.  The institution first developed in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, and was not to be overthrown there until the 1880s.  In this informative and readable book, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara shows Iberian slavery to have been much more diverse than in the Anglophone world.  Drawing on correspondence and legal cases, he portrays the everyday life of Afro-Americans in the Iberian world.  Schmidt-Nowara contributes a fascinating chapter to Atlantic history by drawing out the frequent interaction between different zones of the New World as rival empires clashed, colonists revolted, and Afro-Americans reached for freedom, first in the 'age of revolution' and finally in the century of abolition from the Haitian Revolution (1804) to the ending of slavery in Puerto Rico (1873), Cuba (1886), and Brazil (1888)."
 
Robin Blackburn, University of Essex, author of The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800

About this edition

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0826339042
• ISBN 13: 9780826339041
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 222