Cuban slave codes have attracted scholarly attention for more than two hundred years, dating back to Alexander von Humboldt’s writings in the early part of the nineteenth century. Historians have largely used the slave codes to illustrate specific arguments about different aspects of Cuban slavery, rather than making their formulation, debate, and implementation the central topics of study. For example, comparative historians such as Herbert Klein, Slavery in the Americas (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1967), pointed to the laws to argue slaves’ legal rights made Cuban slavery less harsh than in the United States. Franklin Knight’s Slave Society in Cuba (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1970) demonstrated that not all slaves could exercise these rights, and consequently, the laws offered misleading conclusions for the social history of Cuban slavery. Jean-Pierre Tardieu’s “Morir o dominar” focuses on the political and economic climate of the first half of the nineteenth century, which...

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