Review essay: The political economy of slavery and freedom in Cuba

Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899. Rebbecca Scott. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. xviii, 319.

Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860–1958. Jean Stubbs (Cambridge Latin American Studies, number 51) New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. xiii, 203).     

How Cuba burned with the ghosts of British slavery: race,abolition and the Escalera

In the antebellum period, a system of slave trials operated in Virginia that was entirely at odds with the common law practices that governed the trial of most defendants, free and enslaved, throughout the southern states. This article examines the operation and implications of this system in Richmond, Virginia, between 1830 and 1861 and argues that the absence of due process protections for slaves enabled the legal system to better serve the interests of the slaveholding class than in common law jurisdictions. This was particularly significant in Richmond, as urban-industrial conditions made slaveholders extremely dependent on the law to combat slave crime. By the 1850s, however, the conflict between Virginia's slave trial system and Anglo-American common law culture, as well as between slaveholder and nonslaveholder interests, had resulted in adjustments to the system that signalled the start of its decline.     

World slavery and Caribbean capitalism

Conclusion The perspective presented here constructs the distinct way in which land, labor, and technology in nineteenth-century Cuba were constituted within specific historical processes of the evolving capitalist world economy. Technological development had dynamic consequences for Cuba. There the availability of land, essential to the extensive pattern of exploitation of the Cuban sugar industry, was blocked by the difficulties of transport. Nevertheless, this limit - instead of becoming simply destructive and leading to a regression - led to the surpassing of the previous order: it resulted in a new social-economic form on which an accelerated rhythm was imposed with the introduction of the railroad, the integration of the island's economy into the world-scale circuits of capital, and the expansion and intensification of slave labor.To the degree that Moreno ignores the world historical character of Cuban slavery, he obscures what is distinctive about its local history. The apparent continuity of the history of slavery and slave emancipation and its seemingly singular relationship to capitalist development conceal the complex, multiple, and qualitatively different relations and processes constituting slavery within the world processes of capital accumulation and division of labor. Despite apparent similarities, the sugar plantation and slave labor in Cuba are not the same as in Barbados, Saint Domingue, or Jamaica. The latter represent a cycle of slave production that precedes industrial capital and the integration of world markets characteristics of the nineteenth century, whereas the organization of land, labor and technology in Cuba presupposes integrated world markets and capital circuits increasingly centered in industrialized production. The nexus of market and productive processes in these two socioeconomic situations result in sharply contrasting temporal differences. In Cuba, a structural change in historical time itself took place. (One might speak of the denaturalization of historical time, which can be grasped from the perspective of technology and industry.) The development of the sugar industry was characterized by movement, acceleration, and openess to new social-economic arrangements within and new spaces without. In this context, specific rhythms, sequences, and periods appear within a plurality of temporal strata of variable extension and duration that interact in the same historical dimension of modernity, and which can only be understood in relation to one another.Thus, instead of undertaking to apply abstract and general categories to the interpretation of specific processes, in this article I emphasize the need to adopt theoretical perspectives and methodological procedures that take as their premise the historical unity and specificity of the development of the capitalist world economy. Only in this way does it becomes possible to comprehend the complexity of slave relations - the ways in which they are both continually formed and reformed within the processes of world economy and contain within themselves conditions of modern economy and polity. Similarly, such an approach permits the world economy itself to be understood as the unity of diverse relations and processes, the modernity of which is defined not by the ever-increasing dominion of a homogeneous and one-dimensional rationality, but by its inherent complexity and historical unevenness.

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Contemporary forms of slavery

Slavery in Brazil: A Link in the Chain of Modernisation: the Case of Amazonia, (A Report by Anti‐Slavery International, no.7 Human Rights Series). ALISON SUTTON. London, 1994. 154pp., bibliography, maps, glossary, photographs. £5.95. ISBN 0–900918–32–2.

Britain's Secret Slaves: An Investigation into the Plight of Overseas Domestic Workers (with contributions from Anti‐Slavery International & Kalayan and the Migrant Domestic Workers, no.5 Human Rights Series). BRIDGET ANDERSON. London, 1993. 122pp., references, appendices, photographs. £5.50. ISBN 0–900918–29–2.

Child Labour in Nepal (A Report by Anti‐Slavery International and Child Workers in Nepal Concerned Centre no.13 Child Labour Series), OMAR SATTAUR. London, 1993. 71pp., bibliography, maps, glossary, appendices, photographs. £5.00. ISBN 0–900918–31–4.

Ethnic Groups in Burma: Development, Democracy and Human Rights (A Report by Anti‐Slavery International, no.8 Human Rights Series), MARTIN SMITH. London, 1994. 139pp., bibliography, maps, chronology, photographs. £5.95. ISBN 0–9009–18–34–9.     

The denial of slavery in contemporary American sociology

Theory and Society - American sociology has largely neglected enslavement as a topic of study, despite slavery’s being one of the most foundational, pervasive, and far-reaching social...     

Edmund Burke on slavery and the slave trade

This article reconstructs Edmund Burke’s thoughts on slavery from his Account of the European Settlements in America to his parliamentary speeches in the late 1700s. It seeks to demonstrate that Burke’s program for slave reform, Sketch of a Negro Code, was one of the earliest plans for gradual abolition and gradual manumission formulated in eighteenth-century England and, quite possibly, the first ever in modern British history whose scheme was detailed and comprehensive. This article further explains how the plan reflected both Burke’s antipathy to slavery and his unusually wide comprehension of the many obstacles to abolition. It concludes by stressing Burke’s belief that Africans were not condemned to servitude by their background.