Our image of African slavery in the Americas, Carmen Bernand argues, has been unduly shaped by studies of the plantation economy. Historians, she says, have neglected the African experience in the Spanish American city, a key locus of Spanish American social and cultural development since the early colonial period. That neglect has hardly been complete; the author depends heavily on existing scholarship to make her case. Her book, nonetheless, offers a useful and often rich, if too brief, survey of the African experience in urban Spanish America from the sixteenth through the mid-nineteenth century, along with some thoughtful analysis concerning the distinctive nature of that experience.
For Bernand, Spanish American uniqueness resulted, in part, from the fact that slavery and liberty were never entirely antithetical in societies rife with alternative legal conditions like yanaconaje. As mestizaje and manumission were added to the mix, descendants of enslaved African immigrants came...
