Babylon, Christianity, and Republicanism in New World Slave Societies

The expansion of Europe in the fifteenth century, the establishment of colonies in the New World and generally speaking, the emergence of a dynamic Atlantic region produced, for better or worse, an unprecedented circulation of peoples, commodities, discourses, and practices across that ocean. Atlantic racial slavery was one sordid aspect of all that oceanic activity. That forced migration of millions of captive people entailed irrevocable transformations for all those involved in the crossing, for the new societies they entered, and probably for the communities they left behind forever. Research on differing aspects of Atlantic racial slavery and on the new lives, identities, and communities that people of African descent constructed in New World colonial and postcolonial societies has constituted one of the fastest-growing areas in Latin American history in the last three decades, but particularly in the last ten to fifteen years. Although probably more work has been recently coming out on the postcolonial modern period, the Latin American colonial field has produced its share of solid research as the study of slavery moves out of the plantation loci (the Babylon of the title) into new sites of life and work (urban areas, military frontiers, mines, maroon and corporate communities, lay brotherhoods) and also into new geographical regions. There is not only a new interest in colonial peripheries and frontiers such as those in Colombia, Ecuador, eastern Cuba, and Florida but magnet regions such as Mexico, which are usually construed as mestizo or Indian, are also increasingly the focus of research on enslaved and free people of African descent (albeit there is no example of such work in this group of books). This expanding interest is also benefiting from the ever wider academic frameworks of Atlantic history and African diasporic studies, as well as from extra-academic movements and mobilizations in some Latin American regions (Colombia and Brazil in particular). This new wave of research is still developing its own specialized historiography, but future work on Latin America may soon turn to more hybrid social and racial formations and to intersections and comparisons with other groups, particularly Indians and castas. When appropriate, I will indicate potential moves in that comparative direction as suggested by some of the work reviewed here.

The specific set of books under review in this essay represents a relatively wide range of themes, approaches and lines of research within this area of work in colonial historiography. The meaning of the disparate triad in this essay's title: "Babylon,""Christianity," and "Republicanism," will become clearer as the works are discussed. These books explore the limits and outcomes of a range of expanding projects and discourses that attempted to reconstitute subjects of African descent in various Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonial Atlantic locations, first as slaves, commodities, and laborers; as enslaved black, Christianized subjects; and later at the dawn of the old (colonial) regimes as free Republican citizens.

Stuart Schwartz' anthology Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 is a...