Manuel Moreno Fraginals authored one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century historiography, El ingenio, in which he reconstructed the efforts of Cuban planters to build one of the Atlantic world’s major slave societies of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He also argued vigorously that the system’s unmaking was due to its own internal contradictions, specifically that the need to shift investment away from slave labor and to advanced processing technology was the driving force behind Cuban slave emancipation in the late nineteenth century.
Over the years, several works—most notably those of Rebecca Scott and Laird Bergad—have challenged Moreno Fraginals’s thesis about the internal contradictions of the slave mode of production ultimately leading to the transition to free labor. On the one hand, they have shown that slave labor adapted successfully to technological innovations throughout the nineteenth century. On the other, they have demonstrated that slave emancipation, not slavery, led...
