Odious Commerce


Book Description

This study shows how British influence affected the course of Cuban history.




The Merchant of Havana


Book Description

LAJSA Book Award Winner, 2017, Latin American Jewish Studies Association As Cuba industrialized in the nineteenth century, an epochal realignment of the social order occurred. In this period of change, two seemingly disparate, yet nevertheless intertwined, ideological forces appeared: anti-Semitism and abolitionism. As the antislavery movement became organized in Cuba, the argument grew that Jews participated in the African slave trade and in New World slavery, and that this participation gave Jews extraordinary influence in the new Cuban economy and culture. What was remarkable about this anti-Semitism was the decidedly small Jewish population on the island in this era. This form of anti-Semitism, Silverstein reveals, sprang almost exclusively from mythological beliefs.




The Deepest South


Book Description

During its heyday in the nineteenth century, the African slave trade was fueled by the close relationship of the United States and Brazil. The Deepest South tells the disturbing story of how U.S. nationals - before and after Emancipation -- continued to actively participate in this odious commerce by creating diplomatic, social, and political ties with Brazil, which today has the largest population of African origin outside of Africa itself. Proslavery Americans began to accelerate their presence in Brazil in the 1830s, creating alliances there—sometimes friendly, often contentious—with Portuguese, Spanish, British, and other foreign slave traders to buy, sell, and transport African slaves, particularly from the eastern shores of that beleaguered continent. Spokesmen of the Slave South drew up ambitious plans to seize the Amazon and develop this region by deporting the enslaved African-Americans there to toil. When the South seceded from the Union, it received significant support from Brazil, which correctly assumed that a Confederate defeat would be a mortal blow to slavery south of the border. After the Civil War, many Confederates, with slaves in tow, sought refuge as well as the survival of their peculiar institution in Brazil. Based on extensive research from archives on five continents, Gerald Horne breaks startling new ground in the history of slavery, uncovering its global dimensions and the degrees to which its defenders went to maintain it.




Policing the Seas


Book Description

This study explores the British and American attempts to suppress both piracy and slavery in the equatorial Atlantic in the period 1816 to 1865. It aims to demonstrate the pivotal role of naval policy in defining the Anglo-American relationship. It defines the equatorial Atlantic as the region encompassing the coastal zones of the Gulf of Mexico, Central America, Northern Brazil, and the African coast from Cape Verde to the south of the Congo River. It explores the use of sea power by both nations in pursuit of their goals, and the Anglo-American naval relations during this relatively co-operative period. At its core, it argues that naval activities result from national interests - in this instance protecting commerce and furthering economic objectives, a source of tension between America and Britain during the period. It confirms that the two nations were neither allies nor enemies during the period, yet learnt to co-exist non-violently through their strategic use of sea power during peacetime. The study consists of an introductory chapter, eight chapters of analysis, and a select bibliography.




Disease, Resistance, and Lies


Book Description

In the early nineteenth century the major economic players of the Atlantic trade lanes -- the United States, Brazil, and Cuba -- witnessed explosive commercial growth. Commodities like cotton, coffee, and sugar contributed to the fantastic wealth of an elite few and the enslavement of many. As a result of an increased population and concurrent economic expansion, the United States widened its trade relationship with Cuba and Brazil, importing half of Brazil's coffee exports and 82 percent of Cuba's total exports by 1877. Disease, Resistance, and Lies examines the impact of these burgeoning markets on the Atlantic slave trade between these countries from 1808 -- when the U.S. government outlawed American involvement in the slave trade to Cuba and Brazil -- to 1867, when slave traffic to Cuba ceased. In his comparative study, Dale Graden engages several important historiographic debates, including the extent to which U.S. merchants and capital facilitated the slave trade to Brazil and Cuba, the role of infectious disease in ending the trade to those countries, and the effect of slave revolts in helping to bring the transatlantic slave trade to an end. Graden situates the transatlantic slave trade within the expanding and rapidly changing international economy of the first half of the nineteenth century, offering a fresh analysis of the "Southern Triangle Trade" that linked Cuba, Brazil, and Africa. Disease, Resistance, and Lies challenges more conservative interpretations of the waning decades of the transatlantic slave trade by arguing that the threats of infectious disease and slave resistance both influenced policymakers to suppress slave traffic to Brazil and Cuba and also made American merchants increasingly unwilling to risk their capital in the transport of slaves.




White Christianity Is Fraudulent


Book Description

The heinous transatlantic chattel slave trade in African bodies was executed by a presidium syndication of royals, Quakers, churches, theologians, philosophers of religion, historians, intellectuals, anthropologists, scientists, European invented Jews ( The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West. 1450-1800, edited by Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering) The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign parts and Intellectuals. The slave trade was a nefarious system and institution based on cultural racism, avariciousness, inveterate mendacities, economic rapacity for empire building and political hegemony of Britain in Europe and the world. There was no sodality or encomium in the slave trade. Rather, it was the most egregious and unparalleled holocaust-genocide, racial- war in mans chronological history. The syndication of peoples and institutions used the apparition of an invented Caucasian Jesus Christ as Redeemer of the world without any historical evidence to brutally enslaved and murdered Africans that they had kidnapped into forceful displacement, deracination, morcellation and enslavement. Africans were deracinated (forcefully displaced) (brutally uprooted without any regard for the community, customs, traditions, religious customs- practices) with morcellation that truncated gregarious African families, societies institutions, kingdoms and communities. Reparations were made by Britain at the end of the slave trade to the planters and nothing to the African slaves. (20,000.000). (Nicholas Draper-The Price of Emancipation Slave-ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery). African slaves were left in a state of penury, facing systems and institutions of racism, inverse-development, abandonment and destitution. The legacy and impact of the profligate slave trade on Africa is pandemic in Africa today with the psychological and theological impact on Africans confidence, self-determination, economic empowerment, heuristic critical theological liberation and technological advancement are at a point of paralysis throughout Africa and it is horrendous to experience it in the twenty first century.




Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean


Book Description

This volume presents a social history of life in mid-19th-century Cuba as experienced by George Backhouse (and his wife, Grace), who served on the British Havana Mixed Commission for the Suppression of the Slave Trade. Documented with extracts from the Backhouse's correspondence, diaries and other contemporary papers, Martinez-Fernandez paints a detailed picture of the Cuban slave trade, its role in the sugar industry, and the interrelated contradictions within Cuba's economy, society and politics. The Backhouse story provides addition al insights into important aspects of life in the "male" city of Havana, social antagonisms between Britons and North Americans, interactions with European social circles, religious tension, and the reality of tropical disease. Drama is added to the narrative in the author's description of the tragic and mysterious murder of George Backhouse in August 1855, possibly the result of a slave traders' conspiracy.







Envoys of Abolition


Book Description

Drawing on substantial collections of previously unpublished papers, this book examines personal experiences of British naval officers employed in suppressing the transatlantic slave trade from West Africa in the nineteenth century. It illuminates cultural encounters, the complexities of British abolitionism, and extraordinary military service at sea and in African territories.




The History of America


Book Description