Review of Schmidt-Nowara's "Empires against Emancipation" (2006)
Article Review: Spanish History, Brazilian History, Spanish Empire, Abolitionism, Slavery
Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “Empires against Emancipation: Spain, Brazil, and the Abolition of Slavery,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 31, no. 2, The Second Slavery: Mass Slavery, World-Economy, and the Comparative Microhistories, Part 1 (2008), 101-119.
What many do not realize is that the United States was not the last place to abolish slavery in the Atlantic world. While certainly the Civil War was after emancipations in Haiti and the British Empire, it was decades ahead of the Spanish and Brazilian slave systems. In part because of the tardiness of these two power’s emancipations scholars have rarely probed the depths of antislavery sentiment in the Spanish Empire. This has begun to change with a slew of publications over the past ten years. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966-2015), a professor of history at Tufts University (located in Boston area) who focused much of his scholarship on imperial Spain and antislavery in the 19th century, was a part of this historiographical shift prior to his death in 2015.
Focusing primarily on the 19th century Schmidt-Nowara argues that the similarities between Spain and Brazil’s emancipation trajectory is remarkably similar. He notes that both had conservative governments which pushed the continuance of slavery and the delay of gradual emancipation despite British pressures to end the slave trade. Ultimately both ran headlong into crisises caused in part by their efforts to maintain slavery.
A larger scale history that draws primarily from secondary sources, one of the failings of the article is its overreliance on certain scholars such as Robin Blackburn who de-emphasize American abolitionism as a force in the Atlantic world. This failing inherently limits his analysis’s connections to the United States to that of the American South. In so doing he misses antislavery activism that was growing in the 1820s in both North and South America and was interconnected.
This article provides a useful overview of connections and similarities between Brazil and the Spanish Empires. It also provides useful insight of the importance of the Haitian Revolution through the 19th century and its afterlife in the surviving slave systems of the Atlantic World.
Robert Swanson