Jesús Sanjurjo posits that the end of the slave trade to the Spanish empire was largely the result of “international political negotiations that excluded the Spanish authorities and ignored Spanish political actors”—an argument that echoes older, Anglocentric scholarship on the topic and fails to engage with the literature's recent focus on the role that the enslaved themselves played in pushing for abolition (p. 2). (White) Spanish anti–slave trade activists, he sustains, contributed only in terms of turning public sentiment against the slave trade. In so doing, they worked concurrently with the growth of liberalism in the Spanish empire, which Sanjurjo rightly points out looks different in the Spanish context. In Spanish liberalism, liberal political actors privileged preserving what was left of the empire, safeguarding the wealth of Cuba, and generally placating the Cuban elite. This argument about the ties between slavery and Spanish liberalism is intriguing, but it remains unclear...
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Book Review|
November 01 2022
In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain's Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870
In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain's Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870
. By Jesús Sanjurjo. Atlantic Crossings
. Tuscaloosa
: University of Alabama Press
, 2021
. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index
. x, 196
pp. Cloth, $54.95.Hispanic American Historical Review (2022) 102 (4): 749–750.
Citation
Emily Berquist Soule; In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain's Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 November 2022; 102 (4): 749–750. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-10025787
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