In an analysis of very crucial years in the history of colonial Cuba, and indeed in that of colonial Spanish America as a whole, Celia Parcero Torre argues that the roots of the so-called “Bourbon Reforms” in Cuba and, thereby, the sugar boom they cultivated on the island are found not in the eleven months that the British occupied Havana during the Seven Years War but in the period leading up to its capture. Parcero Torre credits the occupation with merely accelerating a reform program already in place: “To accept this [that the capture of Havana by the English was the point of departure for the sugar boom in Cuba] is to deny what was happening in Cuba in the previous years and, moreover, is to ignore some of the postulates and achievements of the reform policies carried out by the Bourbons” (p. 11).
Parcero Torre’s work draws from the...
