Jesús Sanjurjo, In the Blood of Our Brothers: Abolitionism and the End of the Slave Trade in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, 1800–1870. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2021, 192 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-210-3.
This is the author’s first book; it was selected as a finalist for the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize for excellence and originality on any theme related to global slavery. Despite this important accolade, this reader found the work frustrating. The Notes and Index take up a third of the published pages, which indicate a thoroughly researched piece of work, probably the author’s doctorate revised for publication. The abolition discussion is almost all focused on Spain’s Cuban colony not on Spain’s Empire. The historical context in which Spain handled the abolition movement is absent until we reach page 72 of the text. Finally, the slavery abolition movement was not important either internationally or domestically in Spain’s decision to end the trade in slaves. So why a book at all? Excellent, of course, for a PhD.
The first half of the book analyses the anti-slavery ideas that were shaped and developed in what was left of the Spanish Empire after 1815, driven largely but not completely from Britain during the nineteenth century. Yet it is not until we are halfway through the text that we discover that the Spanish Empire after 1815 consisted solely of Cuba, Puerto Rica and the Philippines. Spanish and European history before 1815 is missed altogether. The unwary reader would have missed the facts that Spain had been the earliest and foremost European colonising empire. All that changed after the French wars between 1795 and 1815. If the reader is not aware of the fact that Spain had had over 300 years’ experience in colonisation of the Americas, Sanjurjo’s text does not inform them until halfway through the book. A map of Spanish conquests would show that Spain had by the end of the eighteenth century colonised approximately two thirds of present North and South America, all of which were lost or sold by the first part of the nineteenth century. Why is there is no mention of this straightforward fact until we are halfway through the text? The context of the nineteenth-century abolition movement was a Spanish Empire in serious decline. My question is how can any historian discuss the anti-slavery movement in Spain in the first half of the nineteenth century without mentioning these facts? The Spanish Empire and its colonisation in decline is surely the opening paragraph as it is the major context for a discussion of nineteenth-century anti-slavery ideas.
Historians have to ask questions about the particular subject they choose to write on; then they have to choose which parts of the story they will focus upon. This is basic historical methodology. Both the questions asked and the choice of the empirical reflect both the present time of the writer and the writer’s own socio-political preferences. If the basic historical context is missing, there is no way of assessing the validity of the author’s discussions.
In this case, I am not questioning the author’s empiricism. The Notes and Index indicate fine scholarship. Sanjurjo’s search for British and Spanish records is extensive and admirable. As a work for a doctorate, the work is ideal.
Spain had colonised Latin America, with the exception of today’s Brazil, and large parts of the USA, which it sold to the British settlers in the eastern States of today’s USA. In doing so, this study reveals the development of abolitionist and anti-abolitionist discourses in the public life of Spain and the Spanish speaking-Caribbean up until the end of the transatlantic slave trade after 1862. It discusses the history of the ideological, political and diplomatic battle fought across the Atlantic for the abolition of the slave trade in Spain’s nineteenth-century minimal Atlantic empire.
What this research work does make clear is that the British were clearly the leading abolitionists during the nineteenth century. The early nineteenth-century Spanish abolitionists were a failure; the abolitionists were few in number. Should we be surprised? Spain had few colonies left after 1815, especially when their South American colonies all had obtained independence by 1833 and Spain sold off its North American holdings to British settlers in Washington. The British abolitionist influence at all levels was paramount, but ineffective as this works shows so clearly.
Senior Spanish polticians and Cuban Spanish settlers managed to withstand this political pressure. The protection of the last of Spain’s overseas dominions from independence and annexation by either the British or American was the Spanish governments’ first priority. The Spanish authorities managed to ignore the demands coming out of London and they managed to avoid annexation.
In the end, the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade came about because of the US civil war. The Spanish authorities had no alternative but to abolish the trade in slaves, in order as they assumed to preserve slavery itself. Slavery itself lingered on in Cuba until 1886 when it was finally abolished. This work does make it clear that Spain played a minor role in the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement.