Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition: Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815-1859 (review)

Although overshadowed by Cuba and Brazil, Puerto Rico offers historians an intriguing variant on the operations of the nineteenth-century Atlantic slave trade. Under Spanish dominion, the colony had ample opportunity to import slaves for decades after some of its major competitors were deprived of such supplies. Joseph Dorsey investigates the Puerto Rican slave trade between the formal internationalization of British abolitionist policy in 1815 and the last known shipment of African slaves in 1859. A close textual reading of diplomatic and administrative correspondence reveals the tactics used by Spanish officials on both sides of the Atlantic during the time in which British and international pressures tightened on transatlantic slavery. They created loopholes for an ever-shifting network of trade in Africa, the French, Danish, and Dutch Caribbean islands, and in plantation sanctuaries of private property beyond the reach of naval offices and British consuls. Slave Traffic also probes the ethnic provenance of Puerto Rican slaves in Africa and the impact of Africa itself upon the ebb and flow of coerced migration.

Researchers of slavery in Puerto Rico are doubly challenged. First, the island's archives offer no counterpart to the import registers from other Caribbean islands, especially Cuba, and so Dorsey must make do with scattered data that only tangentially offer evidence about the flow of Africans. Second, the documents that do exist can be frustrating in light of abolition. Officials, merchants, and planters all had ample reasons for systematically concealing information about illegal slave transactions. Faced with this combination of blank spaces and doctored discourse, Dorsey focuses as much upon the discursive tactics, as well as silences, of his subjects as on the collective outcome of their actions. Dorsey emphasizes the persistence of the trade down to 1850 and the ideological hegemony of antiabolitionism down to 1860.

Slave Traffic is at its best in dissecting the carefully crafted verbal loopholes that Spanish officials embedded in their treaties and correspondence with British diplomats. Dorsey convincingly argues that the British focus upon West Africa and Cuba, combined with the long absence of any diplomatic presence on the smaller island, allowed Puerto Ricans and foreign merchants to develop a trade network with the non-Hispanic Caribbean and West Africa. The author's boldest claim is that West Africa was the source of fresh slaves during the 1840 s, peaking in what he calls the "influx of 1847." Dorsey challenges the usual ascription of that increase to the importation of creoles from neighboring islands. His broad reassessment extends over three chapters and spans two continents. Above all, the author must account for continuous "silences" in his documents—of the British consul in Puerto Rico concerning imported Africans, of sellers in Curaçao and buyers in Puerto Rico regarding the "creole" identities of the slaves, and of the Dutch government about the real nature of the trade. This requires a near-conspiratorial scenario: collusion by the Dutch in Curaçao, coupled with a British consul in Puerto Rico floating "somewhere between sublime ignorance and self-incrimination." However, Curaçao masters were forced to sell their own slaves because of bad harvests and increased food prices and would almost certainly have denounced attempts to undercut them in the Puerto Rican market with illegally obtained Africans. Given the steady annual outflow of creole slaves from Curaçao before 1847 , there is no need to hypothesize a West African source for that year. What, then, accounts for the surge of 1847 ? The answer may lie less in the tenuously documented connection with a cycle of West African jihads than in the end of a long struggle in Europe. In the autumn of 1846 , Britain's market was finally opened to slave-grown sugar. The following year was one of optimism for Spanish planters. As Francisco Scarano has quantitatively shown, the British...