National Economy and Atlantic Slavery: Protectionism and Resistance to Abolitionism in Spain and the Antilles, 1854-1874

Writing Spanish history in the global age: connections and entanglements in the nineteenth century

“…As the world's foremost sugar producer, Cuba exerted significant influence over the Spanish political economy, and its policies concerning slavery and slave trade, while it supplied the most important markets of Europe and the Americas. 82 The sugar exports from Cuba to the United States rocketed in the mid nineteenth century, to the point that the US became the most important market for this product (from 17% in 1840 to 91% in 1894). Spanish demand, in contrast, remained extremely low during the same period (comprising 10% and 2% of Cuban orders respectively), despite the introduction of highly protectionist tariffs.…”

Comerciar con la sangre de nuestros hermanos: Early Abolitionist Discourses in Spain's Empire

“…The establishment of this new economic system demanded the importation of large numbers of African slaves and thus led to the consolidation of a pro‐slave trade discourse within a new Cuban elite, which drew its wealth from the production of sugar, coffee and tobacco (Moreno Fraginals, : 128–129; Alvarado, : 3–4). As Christopher Schmidt‐Nowara (: 609, 628) has argued, the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire in 1807, far from stopping the trade to Cuba and Puerto Rico, ‘consolidated dynamic slave economies and a political order that protected and encouraged these economies’. However, during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, some voices started to publicly condemn those practices and to develop a Spanish abolitionist discourse.…”