Alex Borucki

Trans-imperial History in the Making of the Slave Trade to Venezuela, 1526-1811

The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion of knowledge about the transatlantic slave trade, both through research on specific sections of this traffic and through the consolidation of datasets into a single online resource: Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database (hereafter Voyages Database ). This collective project has elucidated in great detail the slave trading routes across the Atlantic and the broad African origins of captives, at least from their ports of embarkation. However, this multi-source database tells us little about the slave trading routes within the Americas, as slaves were shipped through various ports of disembarkation, sometimes by crossing imperial borders in the New World. This gap complicates our understanding of the slave trade to Spanish America, which depended on foreign slavers to acquire captives through a rigid system of contracts ( asientos and licencias ) overseen by the Crown up to 1789. These foreign merchants often shipped captives from their own American territories such as Jamaica, Curacao, and Brazil. Thus, the slave trade connected the Spanish colonies with interlopers from England, France, the Netherlands, Portugal (within the Spanish domain from 1580 to 1640), and eventually the United States. The importance of the intra-American slave trade is particularly evident in Venezuela: while the Voyages Database shows only 11,500 enslaved Africans arriving in Venezuela directly from Africa, I estimate that 101,000 captives were disembarked there, mostly from other colonies. This article illuminates the volume of this traffic, the slave trading routes, and the origins of slaves arriving in Venezuela by exploring the connections of this Spanish colony with the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French Atlantics. Imperial conflicts and commercial networks shaped the number and sources of slaves arriving in Venezuela. As supplies of captives passed from Portuguese to Dutch, and then to English hands, the colony absorbed captives from different African regions of embarkation.

Across imperial boundaries: Black social networks across the Iberian South Atlantic, 1760-1810

ABSTRACT Rethinking the African Diaspora in the Americas urges scholars to look beyond where Africans came from and where they first disembarked in order to integrate the transimperial dimension. Social networks connecting black communities throughout the Americas constituted an additional feature of the black experience that shaped the political, social, economic, and cultural features of African diasporic communities and the larger societies in which these groups found themselves. Evidence regarding the slaves and freedmen that traveled across the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in South America best illustrates the significance of transimperial networks for local black communities. This article reveals that these transimperial social ties proved essential for black communities in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. This contributes to discussions of “entangled empires” by showing how free and enslaved Africans and their descendants were immersed in transimperial social networks, which to a certain extent they shaped with their actions. This article emphasizes how military actions surrounding the fall of Portuguese Colonia in 1777 shaped the continuous and substantial black social networks across these borderlands and influenced black communities in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

Shipmate Networks and Black Identities in the Marriage Files of Montevideo, 1768–1803

Caribbean Studies, and the Laney Graduate School at Emory University. My research was also supported by Mellon fellowships from the Council of Library and Information Resources and the Social Science Research Council.. I thank David Eltis for his advice and Susan Socolow and Arturo Bentancur for sharing with me their research. My gratitude goes to George Reid Andrews, Alejandro de la Fuente, and the two anonymous readers for HAHR. I would also like to thank Mónica Sarachu, the archivist of the Archive of the Archbishopric of Montevideo.

From Colonial Performers to Actors of 'American Liberty': Black Artists in Bourbon and Revolutionary Río de la Plata

From the late eighteenth century through most of the nineteenth, Buenos Aires and Montevideo were hosts to a joint theatrical circuit characterized by the regular comings and goings of impresarios, artisans, musicians, and actors between the two cities. The military conflicts that shaped this period actually encouraged these connections, as they stimulated both exile and repatriation between one locale and the other. Africans, and particularly their Rioplatense descendants, were an integral part of popular entertainment circuits in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Some of the first Argentinean historians of theater and music, among them Vicente Gesualdo and Teodoro Klein, were aware of this connection and included in their initial scholarship links that connect the history of free and enslaved Afro-descendants to the early theater of Río de la Plata.

Legacy of the Lash: Race and Corporal Punishment in the Brazilian Navy and the Atlantic World. By Zachary Morgan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Pp. xiv, 320. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

A multiplicity of crimes brought people into the legal system. Carey’s desire to provide “a more comprehensive portrait of rural life” leads him to focus on “less sensational law violations” such as illegal alcohol, marketplace infractions, infanticide, abortion, domestic violence, and slander (16). Almost all of these crimes disproportionately implicated women. Whatever the crime, however, once in court, even subaltern defendants were afforded the unusual opportunity to speak their version of truth to power. Women caught violating public market regulations red-handed typically found that judges ignored their testimonies, but female moonshiners who recounted how poverty had forced them into the illicit trade could convince judges to reduce their sentences. Similarly, women convicted of infanticide or abortion could obtain leniency by claiming to have acted in defense of their reputations.

65.00 cloth. – CORRIGENDUM

Even with the preceding taken into account, Queirolo has made a significant intellectual achievement. By stressing the notion of untainted parties she has provided a most nuanced understanding of Latin American voters, who are, at their best, bounded risktakers. At some point, they get dissatisfied with incumbent parties and seek out new representation. And in experimenting, Latin Americans are not entirely reckless—they choose newness (hence their risk-taking) only after applying an important quality test centered on untarnished performance. Latin American voters are both risk-takers and reassurance-seekers.

Africans into Creoles: Slavery, Ethnicity, and Identity in Colonial Costa Rica by Russell Lohse (review)

This article cast light on the historiography about Africans and their descendants in Uruguay from 1930s to the beginning of the 21st Century. Although in Uruguay the literature about Afrodescendants and slavery has certain tradition, diversity, and a great deal of ups and downs in relation to quality, it is not a part of the Uruguayan historiographical corpus. Historical and historiographical general works recently produced in Uruguay have forgotten the literature on Afrodescendants. However, there is certain renaissance of the studies about Afrodescendants and slavery since the last years, which come from both the academy and non-governmental organizations. Key words:afrodescendants, slavery, Uruguay.