The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere by Robert J. Cottrol (review)

This is a large, complex, ambitious book, which sets itself the herculean task of presenting a comparative history of slavery and its racial legacies in the Americas from the colonial period to the present. And it succeeds brilliantly.

Robert Cottrol begins by presenting separate accounts of slavery in Spain’s far-flung American colonies, in Britain’s North American settlements, and in the Portuguese colony of Brazil as a means of developing comparisons between the law and practice of the institution in each of these three cultural/legal zones. The balance of the book follows the same structure, offering accounts of abolition in each zone and of the distinctive patterns of race relations that developed in each. There were differences between the experiences of slavery and race in the Spanish and Portuguese zones, but the more fundamental contrast Cottrol examines is that between slavery and race relations in these zones and those in British North America.

This contrast has been the subject of a large historical literature and of ongoing controversies. One well-known tradition maintained that slavery and attitudes toward blackness had been considerably milder in the Spanish colonies and in Brazil than they had been in the United States. Recently, this view has given way to one that finds slavery in the Spanish and Portuguese zones to have been as, or more, brutal and violent than slavery in North America, and race-based exclusion to have become a significant feature of life in these societies following slavery. Cottrol refuses to adopt either of these views wholly. Instead, he develops a detailed, nuanced comparison of the two systems that does not downplay the brutality of Spanish and Portuguese slavery or the legacy of racial exclusion in the societies that emerged from these colonies but instead strives to identify what makes the North American experience of slavery and race so fundamentally different nevertheless.

Important legal differences in slave regimes contributed to the formation of distinctive racial legacies in the Portuguese and Spanish zones on one hand and the North American on the other. Spanish (and to a lesser extent Portuguese) law was generally more amenable to manumission than was the law in the United States, creating an impression in these societies that slave status was not necessarily stamped in the blood. Spanish law, moreover, offered greater protection for the integrity of slave families than did law in the United States. But at the deepest level, Cottrol finds, the differences between the two experiences depended finally upon the distinctive ways in which race was conceptualized in the two regions. Although there was also a language of racial spectrum in the United States (octoroon, quadroon), for the most part nineteenth-century Americans assumed that one drop of African blood made someone black. By contrast, in the areas settled by Spain and Portugal, race was viewed as a continuum from white to black through numerous gradations of mixture, mestizo, mulatto, and so forth; where a person fell along this spectrum could be a somewhat fluid matter, subject to socially negotiated whitening.

Cottrol is rarely satisfied by monocausal explanations. He traces the sources of these very different ways of understanding race to law, demography, and views of social order. Relatively few “white” Spaniards and Portuguese settled in the New World colonies, and African slaves usually greatly outnumbered them. Indigenous peoples survived the settlement process in great numbers, and the subsequent relations between these three groups produced a rich array of racial types. Reflecting the hierarchy of Spanish and Portuguese society, this racial array was viewed as constituting its own social hierarchy, pure “whiteness” at the top, pure African blood at the bottom, and the rest somewhere in between. By contrast, in most of the British colonies of North America and in the United States, white settlers were in the majority, outnumbering African slaves decisively. Because indigenous peoples were not...