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

In 1849, just a year before Brazilian politicians acted to suppress the illegal slave trade to their country, two of them died following an outbreak of yellow fever introduced into the state of Bahia by infected mariners. Readers of this intriguing and innovative book by Dale Graden will not shed any tears for Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos and the Viscount of Maché: Both men fervently defended the slave trade and opposed efforts to stop it. However, Graden traces the midcentury suppression of Brazilian and Cuban slave trades to the threats—including infectious diseases—brought by slave ships rather than to the politics and policies of men such as the two stricken senators. The governor of Bahia at the time, Francisco Gonςalves Martin, denied any such links and suggested that the carrier ship had sailed from New Orleans, not Cuba; Graden posits that this denial was typical of the lies told to defend the slave trade, in which Martin had a personal stake (71–78).

Beyond the attractions of a comparative study of two of the most significant and late-lingering slave societies in the Americas, Graden’s approach highlights how histories of disease and resistance should be “intertwined” (61). Alternating between his two Latin American case studies in the first half of the book, Graden skillfully traces fears of diseases such as cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox alongside a “second vector of infection” (58) in the examples of slave resistance in other parts of the Atlantic world. The book makes a clear and valuable historiographical intervention in asserting epidemiological and subaltern pressures alongside domestic political changes and British pressure in the two countries.

Graden’s principal primary sources are drawn from the FO Foreign Office 84 files of the British Slave Trade Department, held by the UK National Archives and now available online. These naturally illuminate the well-documented campaign judgments and speculations of Foreign Office diplomatists, Royal Navy officers, and their informants during the long campaign of anti–slave trade suppression in the fifty years following the Napoleonic Wars. At times, Graden might do more to explain the grounds for his suspicion or faith in these sources: on page 79, Consul James Hudson is cited as a reliable judge of public disillusion with the slave trade in Brazil following so many epidemics linked to the landing of newly arrived Africans; however, on page 195 the judgment of Consul James Kennedy about the lack of threats from slave resistance in the 1850s and 1860s is rejected (alongside recent research by historians Manuel Barcia and Gabina La Rossa Corbo).

Whatever the perils of British sources as the principal evidence in this study, Graden is adept at drawing important, unacknowledged themes from them. For example, he reveals the horror expressed by Cuban authorities at the presence of free black British sailors on HMS Romney, a surplus hulk in the harbor of Havana, after 1837 (59). The decommissioned ship was provided to quarantine and confine Africans liberated from slave ships by the Royal Navy, but the dangerous example of armed, free men of color introduced a new peril into the Spanish colony: the example of the successful revolution in Haiti or successive insurrections in the British West Indies meant that black outsiders seemed likely to bring murderous conspiracies with them. We may query how far British naval suppression inspired African resistance, as Graden suggests (97), but Spanish complaints to the Foreign Office certainly demonstrate how the Romney and its black crew heightened local anxieties.

With similar skill, one of the most impressive chapters of the book uses records of the mixed commission courts and other official correspondence to trace the role of African translators and interpreters in the anti–slave trade campaigns. Graden persuasively argues (177) that the mixed commission courts were only possible thanks to African interpreters (a conclusion that will complement publications in...