The Power of Their Will is an accessible yet scholarly work that sheds new light on the relatively little-known world of women slaveholders in nineteenth-century Cuba. The succinct style—the text including notes comprises just 115 pages—encapsulates a rich range of social and cultural history research, juxtaposing discussions of travel writings, fiction, and visual sources with work with newspaper advertisements for enslaved runaways and slave sales and various archival materials—particularly wills and claims for the restitution of confiscated property—sourced in Madrid, Havana, and Santiago de Cuba. It offers a more genuinely island-wide approach than do many other studies, exploring the island's east as well as the better-known west. It incorporates some useful insights from Spanish-language Cuban scholarship, less well known beyond the island's shores.
The book argues for women's significant, specific role in sustaining slavery in Cuba, as a means of better understanding how this institution functioned overall. Women's slaveholding practices,...
