Slavery and Politics: Brazil and Cuba, 1790–1850 by Rafael Marquese, Tâmis Parron, and Márcia Berbel (review)

Founded on the premise of geographic integration, the scholarship of the Atlantic World has taken on its own thematic synergies, showcased here. This trio of Brazilian scholars showcases the integrated approach. They offer a politically engaging assessment of the ways in which the crumbling Northern Atlantic slave economies in the British and French Caribbean (sparked by rebellion in Saint-Domingue), the ensuing abolitionist movement, and burgeoning nineteenth-century sugar and coffee plantation societies in Brazil and Cuba ignited distinctive pro-slavery movements in the Western Hemisphere during the period referred to by Dale Tomich as "second slavery." The result is a complex portrait of the political and diplomatic interplay of Spanish imperial politics, early Brazilian parliamentary history, and British anti-abolitionism that underscores the actions of Cuban and Brazilian pro-slavery advocates. Of even perhaps greater impor-tance, the authors effectively illustrate why the gaze of Brazilian and Cuban conservative politicians gravitated towards each other as points of reference in their respective pursuits of economic advantage and social stability in an increasingly liberal world.

The authors situate their comparative study of parliamentary politics in Cuba and Brazil within the broader context of previously fragmented "temporalities" of Iberian and northern European theatres of the Atlantic World, a key contribution of the work. By integrating the two worlds during the crucial moment of the early nineteenth century, the authors construct an authentic framework for assessing the isolation of Cuba and Brazil's embrace of slavery at the very moment others have seen as marking the inexorable decline of the institution thanks to British abolitionism. In the balance of the book, the authors analyze Cuban and Brazilian parliamentary proceedings, pro-slavery treatises, and diplomatic overtures between the two countries and Great Britain to explain the formulation of pro-slavery strategies in their respective territories. Even though imperial actors play a significant role in advancing the narrative, the authors give significant attention to the arguments and actions of local groups, including the notoriously pro-slavery Regresso Party in post-independence Brazil and the Havana Club, a cabal of plantation owners, in frustrating domestic and international efforts to eliminate the slave trade, if not slavery itself.

The stated purpose of this work is "to examine the arguments and strategies in favor of slavery and the slave trade that supported the political projects of Brazilian and Cuban slaveholders in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, in the Iberian constitutional experiences of the 1810s and 1820s, in parliamentary experiences of the nineteenth century, and in other situations when the problem of slavery was at the center of debates" (3). But this study goes further, placing British anti-abolitionist sentiment at the center of both territories' calculations to perpetuate the status quo. The leveraging of this sentiment often led to pragmatic responses between metropole and colony in regard to slavery, as in the case of Great Britain's reluctance to pursue vigorous enforcement against contraband slave trading around Cuba for fear of exciting annexationist stirrings among pro-slavery Cubans. In contrast, anti-slave trade efforts took hold in Brazil in the 1850s, and, supported by France and the United States, forced even conservative Brazilian parliamentarians to accept the end of the slave trade.

Of equal interest is the authors' discussion of debates on citizenship that arose as a result of Spain's Cortes de Cádiz, and Brazil's constitutional deliberations that took place a decade later. They conclude that the racialized character of the Cortes, which discouraged manumission and repressed free blacks (in practices similar to those in the United States), contrasted markedly with the later Brazilian deliberations regarding the systematic integration of all Brazilian-born subjects into the ranks of citizenry, regardless of color. The lack of a corresponding mechanism in Cuba heightened anti-liberal sentiment among...