In this book, Peter Blanchard gives a detailed analysis of Peruvian slavery in the last decades of its existence. Abolished in 1854, Peru’s slave system had already witnessed important transformations. Two harbingers of abolition stand out: the changing persuasion of slaveowners and the positive achievements of slaves.
The slaveowners’ attitudes are eloquently illustrated by the strategies they in vented to circumvent liberal tendencies that might have led to abolition much earlier, and by the dissension in their ranks. The 1810 Cádiz Constitution and the decrees issued by General San Martín in 1821 gave slaves a notion of what freedom could mean. At both moments, liberal ideals were postulated but implementation hampered, because slaveowners were unwilling to free their slaves, and they managed to regain political control. The year 1831 also saw the revocation of Bolivar’s 1824 decree allowing slaves to change owners at their own prerogative. Other liberal decrees issued between 1821 and 1826, however, were continuously invoked in the slaves’ accusations against their masters. Still, in the Chicama Valley rebellion of 1851—which Blanchard analyzes in great detail—“abolitionism was based on San Martín’s antislavery decrees that, they argued, had introduced the epoch of liberty (p. 116). The Civil Code of 1852 permitted slaves and libertos to change masters on their own initiative once again” (p. 44).
Abolition was a gradual process that gave slaveowners time to adapt. Slavery had to be protected against a wavering liberalism, and “even the slaveholders themselves had weakened the system, by ignoring the laws that protected their interests and hiring runaways to work on their estates” (p. 189). Against this background, Blanchard sheds light on the Peruvian slaveholders’ hesitant behavior. In the course of the colonial period, slaves had become a “vital necessity” (p. 2), both in the countryside and in urban settings. In the cities they were artisans, house servants, and the bulk of the service sector.
Endless and well known are the laments of slaveowners about the decay of their rural enterprises, which they blamed on labor scarcity. Peru’s slaveholders could not imagine life without slaves and “were prepared to expend time, energy, and money in ensuring that their property rights over their slaves were recognized” (p. 46). On the other hand, Peru had few active abolitionists. They were, says Blanchard, “a few voices crying in the wilderness, operating individually rather than as a group, with no apparent strategy or set of goals” (p. 152). Even when abolition was finally decreed, it “fixed the rights and obligations of the former slaves by satisfying many of the demands of the owners. In effect it created a kind of apprenticeship system by supplying a guaranteed work force and placing restrictions on the former slaves” (p. 200).
The slaves’ achievements receive less attention. One of the salient features of Peru’s slave system was its increasingly urban character (p. 26). Why and how this developed is only marginally addressed here. Although Blanchard asserts that slaves participated in the transformation of the slave system, he fails to provide concrete evidence. How, for example, did slaves emigrate to cities? Whose decision was it? Under what conditions did it happen? The contradiction between hacendados bewailing the lack of labor, the increase in urban slaves, and the diminishing total number of slaves remains unexplained.
In a similar vein, the decline in slave prices over the first decades of the nineteenth century lacks a thorough “slave perspective” (pp. 28ff). Were slaves able to influence their own market prices? What arguments and strategies did they use? Blanchard provides (for the first time) an accurate range of slaves’ wages, but how did the declining number of slaves relate to wages? How important were wages in the process of self-manumission and its benefits?
For the slaves, we learn, “freedom was the principal goal …, despite the contrary belief of foreign observers, and various ways existed for them to become free, providing further evidence of a humane system and a society that was not unalterably committed to the preservation of slavery” (p. 67). Such aperture is further reinforced by court rulings; that is, “the system was not rigidly set against the slaves” (p. 63). In short, it was a flexible system in which slaves were exploited but were not passive victims. Various forms of slave resistance confronted owners and the state and helped to undermine the institution of slavery (p. 87). Slaves ran away in increasing numbers, and depredations eventually obliged landholders to abandon their estates (pp. 104-5). Rebellions were unimportant, but when combined with other forms of resistance they revealed a growing slave animosity (p. 113). Although readers may agree with this general interpretation of “slave participation,” there are many more questions that can be posed, such as how extensive the animosity was, how much it grew, and what other forms of resistance emerged.
Blanchard’s book is rich in various ways, not least because it gives clues for understanding the intricacies of power, ideology, and uncertainty. Nevertheless, a closer look at what slaves did in these last decades before abolition, I suspect, might have changed some of the conclusions concerning the forces driving toward abolition. Nevertheless, Blanchard’s is an extremely well organized and well documented analysis of abolition in Peru. It should succeed in moving the Peruvian case into an increasingly widespread debate on slavery and abolition in Latin America.
