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Ever Faithful. Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba

Stark considers the economic, legal, social, and religious factors that motivated enslaved people to enter into formal or informal marital unions with other slaves or with free people. Stark supplements his study of parish registers with a number of other sources including censuses, the Transatlantic Slave Trade database, and information about different labor regimens. While Stark is careful not to deny or minimize ‘the oppressive and inhumane nature of slavery’ (165), he seeks to use this wide variety of sources to offer insight on the families and communities that enslaved people succeeding in building for themselves. These communities changed considerably in the latter half of the eighteenth century, when the first state-led agricultural reforms in the Caribbean deliberately sought to create smaller, more productive estates in Puerto Rico. A 1778 cédula legalizing private ownership of hato lands accelerated the demise of the ranching economy and heralded the turn to sugar production that would dominate the island’s economy in the nineteenth century. The ‘creolized Afro-Puerto Rican culture’ that Stark argues developed during the eighteenth century was subsumed by the sugar boom, as an influx of enslaved Africans trafficked to the Spanish Caribbean transformed earlier demographic and social structures and eroded the ‘flexibility and openness regarding race relations’ that Stark argues characterized the hato era (177). Stark’s primary contribution is to the historiography of slavery, but his work also offers new insight on colonial Puerto Rico and its place in the economy of the circum-Caribbean. While acknowledging that direct trade between Puerto Rico and Spain was almost non-existent for much of the colonial era, Stark shows that the island played an important role in providing neighboring colonies such as Saint-Domingue and particularly Jamaica with the food and draft animals necessary to support their sugar economies. He also situates Puerto Rico as a key site in a little-studied regional commerce in enslaved people; most of the slaves trafficked to the island in the eighteenth century did not come directly from Africa but arrived via other parts of the Caribbean, particularly English colonies. Stark’s attention to this illicit commerce highlights the importance of inter-imperial linkages not always captured in official records. Finally, Stark’s brief discussion of the particular characteristics of slavery in San Juan contributes to scholarship on urban slavery. This painstakingly researched study of the relationship between economy and demography in colonial Puerto Rico will be useful not only to historians of Spanish America and the Caribbean, but to anyone interested in understanding the lived realities of slavery in the colonial Americas. While Stark’s writing can at times feel dry or clinical, his careful use of parish registers provides a model for historians seeking to use empirical evidence to shed light on the lives that enslaved people built for themselves.