Disease, Resistance, and Lies: The Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba by Dale T. Graden (review)

The substantial growth in the number of enslaved Africans transported to Brazil and Cuba following the Haitian Revolution and Britain’s abolition of its own slave trade in 1807 is now well documented. Such growth, which reflected the demand for slaves among Brazilian and Cuban sugar and coffee planters, was sustained by, among other things, inflows of capital, ships, and other resources from U.S. capitalists willing to assist transatlantic slave trafficking after 1815. Much less well-documented is how the growth in concern among local white populations within Brazil and Cuba about the sheer scale of slave imports after 1790, in combination with international efforts to outlaw slave trafficking, helped to bring about the ending of such imports between 1850 and 1867.

Graden’s purpose in this book is to explore this concern and its impact. In doing so, he offers valuable insights not only into the sociopolitical tensions that sustained slave imports caused in both Brazil and Cuba but also into the alliances forged between newly arrived Africans, especially those from Yorubaland, and freed blacks in resisting slavery. He also shows how the specter of the Haitian Revolution hung over arguments and debates about the wisdom of continuing to rely on imported Africans to meet planters’ demands for labor.

To investigate these issues, Graden largely consults conventional historical sources, including publications by contemporary Brazilian and Cuban scholars as well as reports by British diplomats and officials resident in Havana, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro. But his methodology is implicitly comparative, involving analysis of the perceived risks to social order and stability in both territories due to the unhealthiness of newly arrived slaves and the propensity of those who survived the Atlantic crossing to wage war on the slave system. In support of his argument, Graden offers detailed evidence about the machinations of U.S. capitalists and local Brazilian and Cuban traders and officials to circumvent efforts to suppress slave imports. Moreover, to allay fears of importing disease through slave trafficking, local officials worked with the British navy to establish quarantine arrangements in Bahia and Havana for disease-ridden ships arriving from Africa.

Most importantly, Graden describes in detail the recorded history of slave rebellions in Brazil and Cuba from 1790 onward, noting the scale, frequency, and ubiquity of such activities and their wider sociopolitical consequences from the late eighteenth century onward, which culminated in political action during the 1840s to stem the flow of the slave trade. Some people’s disenchantment about the importation of slaves betrayed racist caricatures of Africans, but others pointed toward deep misgivings about the practice of slavery itself. Particularly noteworthy was a speech made in 1843 by a Brazilian senator from Maranhao, who argued that instead of “accepting that the agricultural sector in Brazil will be destroyed by a lack of African slaves, we must show that a country worked by slaves is never happy” and that “such a system only brings bad outcomes” (145).

Graden is fully aware that such sentiments alone were insufficient to prompt Brazilians and Cubans to end slave imports, thereby alleviating the social risks attached to them. International pressures and external events, including the American Civil War, have to be given due weight. But Graden is surely right to insist that any explanation of the closure of the slave trade to Brazil and Cuba that ignores local perceptions of the hazards to national security posed by it is incomplete. By advancing that claim, he places slave resistance and memories of the Haitian Revolution firmly in the mix of factors that shaped political discourses about transatlantic slavery in the century after 1790.