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12 Bartolomé de las casas and the slave trade to cuba circa 1820 christopher schmidt-nowara was it the age of revolution or the axial age? the global upheavals that took place from the later eighteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth unleashed apparently contradictory political, economic, and social transformations that reshaped but did not terminate the connections between Europe and latin America. on the one hand, this was an era of liberation when creoles across the Americas threw off the yoke of colonial domination and enslaved people struggled for their freedom and for political enfranchisement.1 on the other hand, the period witnessed the enhancement of imperial state power in those parts of the Americas that remained under European control and the greatest surge of plantation slavery in the history of the Atlantic system .2 cuba was a place where these tensions manifested themselves vividly. Beginning in the later eighteenth century, creole planters successfully lobbied the metropolitan state to liberalize the economic system so that they could expand the plantation belt around havana and points east. they took a leading role in the management of the colony, enjoying terrific influence both in havana and in Madrid. But this wave of economic and political liberalization brought with it a new system of violence and domination heretofore unknown in the spanish overseas empire. the end of reform was a free trade in slaves that the spanish crown had never before permitted. cuba became the biggest slave society in spanish American history, as hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans reached cuban shores between the late eighteenth century and the closing of the traffic in 1867. the 1820s were a pivotal moment in this process, during which the span- Bartolomé de las casas and the slave trade to cuba / 237 ish government and colonial planters and merchants fought off British antislavery and affirmed the centrality of the slave trade to cuba’s economy. indeed , the 1820s would come to be the greatest decade of slave trading in the colony’s history (though the 1830s would be the peak decade) in spite of an Anglo-spanish treaty that was supposed to close the traffic in 1820. the decade also witnessed a significant rearrangement of state power in cuba. Madrid eclipsed creole influence by concentrating greater power in the office of its representative, the captain general based in havana, and undercutting the institutions that had promoted local interests.3 in confronting this entwining of freedoms with new forms of domination , commentators on slavery and the slave trade turned to a historical figure who seemed to speak both the language of freedom and that of slavery in the spanish Empire: Bartolomé de las casas. the writings of las casas influenced debates over the justice of spanish rule and conquest in the Americas across the centuries. As rolena Adorno has recently argued, las casas’s contest with Juan gínes de sepúlveda at valladolid shaped the “polemics of possession ” well beyond the era of charles v. in the age of the spanish American revolutions, American patriots such as fray servando teresa de Mier appropriated las casas and his works as the first voice of independence, vindicating the rights of the Americans against the spanish conquerors. Adorno’s study emphasizes the conflict over how to govern the natives of the indies: “that polemic always centered on the rights of conquest and the treatment of the Amerindians.”4 yet, las casas also defined the terms of debate over the African slave trade to the indies because the resort to the traffic in captives was always closely connected to the struggle over encomienda, the enslavement of indians, and the rights of the conquerors. las casas wrote extensively, and caustically, about Portugal’s exploration of the eastern Atlantic and how it opened the slave trade from Africa in the fifteenth century in his Historia de las Indias. however, because the Historia remained unpublished until the 1870s, commentators on las casas’s role in the traffic’s origins argued through inference.5 nonetheless, they placed him at the heart of the controversy, some arguing that las casas convinced charles v and his flemish courtiers to commence the slave trade, others insisting that he was the traffic’s bitter enemy, still others believing that he acted out of ignorance and good intentions. no matter the position, las casas was a major protagonist in the telling of the traffic’s history, especially during the revolutionary crises of the 1810s and 1820s. During...

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