Comparing Slaveries/ Comparando esclavitudes

Draft: December 2004. Comments welcome.

Comparing, Transferring or Entangling? Slavery in Cuba, the USA and Brazil. Prolegomena

Michael Zeuske, University of Cologne

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The beginning of scientific comparative studies of slavery In his Essay politique 1, Alexander von Humboldt begins the chapter about slavery on the island Cuba with the words: “As a historian of America, I wanted to bring the facts to light and clarify the concepts by means of comparisons and statistical overviews” 2. This chapter about slavery, published in 1826, can be regarded as the most important liberal sermon against slavery in the Atlantic world in the 19th century. Exactly this chapter was left out in John S. Trasher’s translation of 1856. Humboldt heavily protested against that in public.3 However, the origins of scientific-comparative research about slavery are to be found much earlier. They have their origin in the Haitian revolution. 4 Actually, at the very moment after the outbreak of the slave rebellion in the Acul region (august of 1791) in the north of Saint-Domingue a shock was going through the worlds of American slaveries. This „shock“ would become the release of comparisons: is our situation (in Cuba, in Venezuela, in Louisiana, Virginia or Salvador de Bahia) same or similar to the situation in Saint-Domingue and what are the consequences for the future of our slavery? This or so was the systemic question of comparison at the side of the masters and between the opinion makers in the societies of slavery. It would be that at the slave’s side and at the side of many ex-slaves, the systemic question was the same, but even from the other side. The second systematic and 1

Humboldt, Alexander von, Essai Politique sur l`Ile de Cuba, avec une carte et un supplément qui renferme des considérations sur la population, la richesse territoriale et le commerce de l`Archipel des Antilles et de Colombia. 2 vols. Paris, Librairie Gide et fils 1826. 2 Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, ed. and comm. von Hanno Beck in Verbindung mit W.-D. Grün et al., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992 (Alexander von Humboldt Studienausgabe. Sieben Bände. Bd. III), pp. 154-169, hier p. 154; Humboldt, Alexander von, „The Nature of Slavery“, translated from German by Shelley L Frisch (Rutgers University), in: Humboldt, The Island of Cuba. Translated from Spanish with notes and a preliminary essay by J.S. Thrasher. Introduction by Luis Martínez-Fernández. The Nature of Slavery [by Alexander von Humboldt] Translated from German by Shelley L. Frisch. Humboldt and Arango y Parreño: A Dialogue by Frank Argote-Freyre, Princeton: Markus Weiner Publishers; Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2001, pp. 253-265, here p. 255, for a critique of the translation and the publication, see my review in New West Indian Guide: New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, vol. 78, no. 3 & 4, Leiden (2004), pp. 131-134. 3 Foner, Philip S. (ed.), Alexander von Humboldt über die Sklaverei in den USA. Eine Dokumentation mit einer Einführung und Anmerkungen/Alexander von Humboldt on Slavery in the United States, with introduction and notes. Übersetzung und Bearbeitung der deutschen Fassung von Schwarz, Ingo, Berlin: Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, 1984; Zeuske, Michael, „¿Humboldteanización del mundo occidental? La importancia del viaje de Humboldt para Europa y América Latina“, in: Humboldt im Netz. International Review for Humboldtian Studies (HiN), Potsdam, IV, 6 (2003) www.unipotsdam.de/u/romanistik/humboldt/hin/hin_6.htm. 4 Zeuske, “Revolution im Zentrum der schwarzen Karibik”, in: Zeuske, Schwarze Karibik. Sklaven, Sklavereikulturen und Emanzipationen [Black Caribbean. Slaves, Cultures of Slavery and Emancipation]; Zürich: Rotpunktverlag, 2004, pp. 157-190; Ramos Guedez, “Esclavitud y manumisión en Venezuela colonial según el testimonio de Alejandro de Humboldt”, in : Anuario de Estudios Bolivarianos. Bolivarium, Año IV, Núm. 4, Caracas (1995), pp. 171-215; Chalhoub, Sidney, “Slaves, freemen, and the politics of freedom in Brazil”, in: Slavery and Abolition 10/3 (1989), pp. 64-84; Schmidt-Nowara, “The Specter of Las Casas: José Antonio Saco and the Persistence of Spanish Colonialism in Cuba”, in: Itinerario Vol. 25 (2001), pp. 93-109; Schmidt-Nowara, “’La España Ultramarina’: Colonialism and Nation-Building in Nineteenth-century Spain”, in: European History Quarterly Vol. 34:2 (2004), pp. 191-214.

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systemic question of comparison was the question about differences and how the results of the rebellion could be taken in advantage for the development (or destruction) of the “own” slavery. Actually, the case of this second real-historic operation of comparison (the establishing and use of differences) deals already with some kind of answer to the first question. The basic operations of real comparisons are explainable in political and anthropological ways. They have much to do with transfers through information and Caribbean mobility at these times. However, the agents of real-historic comparisons and transfers were reacting immediately: Francisco de Arango y Parreño (1765-1837), congenial friend of Alexander von Humboldt, remembers: “En 20 de noviembre de 1791, llegó a Madrid la noticia de la insurrección del Guarico [at November 20, 1791 the information of the rebellion in Guarico (an old Spanish name for the town of Le Cap at Saint-Domingue) reached Madrid].” 5 At the same day Arango wrote to the king of Spain. In this letter he was doing very rough comparisons (the situation of sugar production in Saint-Domingue and in Cuba, what has to be changed). 6 And still in his famous „Discurso sobre la agricultura de la Habana y medios de fomentarla“ (1792) Arango was using, among many other things (like studies about the causes on the scene of rebellion and the highly delicate problem of the milicias of Pardos y Morenos)7, the comparison to construct a myth: „La suerte de nuestros libertos y esclavos es más cómoda y feliz que lo era la de los franceses. Su número es inferior al de los blancos, y además de esto debe contenerlos la guarnición respetable que hay siempre en la ciudad de la Habana. Mis grandes recelos son para lo sucesivo, para el tiempo en que cresca la fortuna de la Isla y tenga dentro de su recinto quinientos o seiscientos mil africanos. Desde ahora hablo para entonces, y quiero que nuestras precauciones comiencen desde el momento [Das Schicksal unserer Freigelassenen und Sklaven ist bequemer und glücklicher als es das bei den Franzosen [auf Saint-Domingue] war. Ihre Zahl ist geringer als die der weißen und außerdem sollte sie die respektable Garnison zurückhalten, die es immer in Havanna gibt. Meine großen Bemühungen [um die Sicherheit vor einer Sklavenrevolte – M.Z.] gelten für die Zukunft, für die Zeit, in der das Glück der Insel [Kuba] wachsen wird und sie in ihren Grenzen Fünfhundert- oder Sechshunderttausend

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Arango y Parreño, Francisco, Obras de D. Francisco de Arango y Parreño, 2 vols., La Habana: Publicaciones de la Dirección de Culture del Ministerio de Educación, 1952 (Arango, Obras), II, p. 55. 6 Arango y Parreño, „Representación hecha a S.M. con motivo de la sublevación de los esclavos en los dominios de la Isla de Santo Domingo“ (20. November 1791), in: Arango, Obras, I, pp. 111-112. 7 Arango, “Discurso sobre la Agricultura de la Habana y medios de fomentarla” (1792), in: Arango, Obras, I, pp. 114-162, hier p. 150.

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Afrikaner haben wird. Schon jetzt spreche ich für jene Zeit und ich möchte, dass unsere Vorkehrungen ab heute beginnen]”.8 Frank Tannenbaum would have been very happy in reading this. The pragmatist Arango was more farsighted than the scientist Humboldt. About the reactions and debates of the opposite side – the comparison done by slaves, much of them running away to Saint-Domingue or about colored fishermen, seamen, smugglers or militia-men – we know very few. 9 Humboldt arrived America only in 1799. It may be that he heard something about the rebellion before this year; but – counted from the very beginning of the rebellion he needed more than ten years (1791-1803), before he was realizing the problem of a great slave uprising in the middle of societies of slavery. And exactly in context to these studies of revolution and slavery, Humboldt describes himself as “historian of America”- In today’s sense, this is a politicization of history. In the end of 1803 and the beginning of 1804, Humboldt spent his last days in Mexico-City. Then he journeyed on to Veracruz. Finally, he and Bonpland arrived in Havana, Cuba on March 19th, 1804. 10 Parallel to that period of time, something unbelievable for most of the contemporaries Humboldt had contact with was happening. Former slaves, now soldiers and officers in an army of blacks, proclaimed a new state. They proclaimed their state in the French part of the Caribbean island La Hispaniola, in Saint-Domingue, after having defeated an expedition armament of Napoleon’s famous French army.11 They called that state “Hayti”, also “Ayti” occurred. 12

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Ibid., pp. 114-162, hier pp. 148f. Scott, Julius, “Crisscrossing Empires: Ships, Sailors and Resistance in the Lesser Antilles in the Eighteenth Century”, in: The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. by Paquette, Robert L.; Engerman, Stanley W., Gainesville: Univ. of Florida Press, 1996, pp. 128-143; Ferrer, Ada, “La société esclavagiste cubaine et la révolution haïtienne”, in : Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales, 58e année, no 2 (mars-avril 2003), pp. 333356 ; Ferrer, “Noticias de Haití en Cuba”, in : Revista de Indias (RI) Vol. LXIII, núm. 229, Madrid (2003), pp. 675-693; 10 Humboldt, Reise auf dem Río Magdalena, durch die Anden und durch Mexico. Aus den Reisetagebüchern zusammengest. u. erläutert v. Margot Faak, 2 Bde., Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1986/1990; Leitner, Ulrike, „’Anciennes folies neptuniennes!’ Über das wiedergefundene ‘Journal du Mexique à Veracruz’ aus den mexikanischen Reisetagebüchern A. v. Humboldts”, in: Humboldt im Netz (HiN). International Review for Humboldtian Studies, III, 5 (2002) (www.uni-potsdam.de/u/romanistik/humboldt). 11 Fick, Carolyn E., The making of Haiti: the Saint Domingue revolution from below, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,1990; Fick, “The French Revolution in Saint Domingue. A Triumph or a Failure?”, in: Gaspar, Barry D.; Geggus, David P., A Turbulent Time. The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1997, pp. 51-75; Fick, “Dilemmas of Emancipation: From the Saint Domingue Insurrections of 1791 to the Emerging Haitian State”, in: History Workshop Journal 46 (1998), pp. 115; Fick, “The Saint-Domingue Slave Insurrection of 1791: A Socio-Political and Cultural Analysis”, in: Shepherd, Verene A., Beckles, Hilary McD (eds.), Caribbean slavery in the Atlantic world. A student reader, Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers/Oxford: James Currey Publishers/Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 2000, pp. 961-982; Geggus, David A., “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789-1815”, in: Gaspar; Geggus, A Turbulent Time …, pp. 1-50; Geggus, “Thirty years of Haitian revolution historiography”, in: Revista Mexicana del Caribe 5, Año III, Chetumal, Quintana Roo (1998), pp. 178-197; Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001; Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002 (Blacks in the Diaspora); Dubois, Avengers of the New World. The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.; 9

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In his diaries, as far as they are published today13, Humboldt does not mention one word of that veritable, world-historical event. Neither in his Mexico-diary nor during his stay in Veracruz he says anything about the revolution in Saint-Domingue (1791-1798) and the French intervention in the former colony (1802-1803). That is surprising, because Humboldt, who really was a big communicator and wrote much, usually commented on nearly all important news and information. And one of these contemporaries, Bryan Edwards, is said to having already mentioned in London parliament in 1797: “The time in which we live will go down in world-history as a terrible epoch; because the spirit of revolt goes round, and destroys the wisdom of our fathers and the doctrines of experience”. 14 Until a short while ago, this expression could have been accepted without challenging it. For further explanations, I had referred to Humboldt’s Essai politique about Cuba and to some passages in his diaries that express the hostility of the Prussian towards slavery. 15 Eventually, I also had quoted the book of the well-known Haitian historian Rolph Michel Trouillot 16, which states that the contemporaries were mainly irritated about Haiti and, first and foremost, had been silent. Maybe I had written that Humboldt on the one hand rejected slavery, but on the other hand manifested his expressis verbis and only, bit by bit, developed his hostility towards slavery when he prepared his travel notes for publication (and, in the case of the materials that were used for the published books Relation historique and Essai politique about Cuba, that needed 10 to 20 years). A while ago, however, circumstances occurred that completely changed the terms for a comparative analysis of the American London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004; Dubois, A Colony of Citizens. Revolution & Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 12 Geggus, “The Naming of Haiti”, in: New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids Vol. 71, No. 1 & 2 (1997), pp. 43-68. 13 Humboldt, Lateinamerika am Vorabend der Unabhängigkeitsrevolution. Eine Anthologie von Impressionen und Urteilen aus den Reisetagebüchern zusammengestellt und erläutert durch Margot Faak. Mit einer einleitenden Studie von Manfred Kossok, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1982 (Beiträge zur Alexander-vonHumboldt-Forschung, Bd. 5); Humboldt, Reise auf dem Río Magdalena ..., 2 Vols., 1986/1990; Humboldt, Reise durch Venezuela. Auswahl aus den amerikanischen Reisetagebüchern, ed. and introd. by Margot Faak. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2000 (Beiträge zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung, Bd. 12). 14

Bryan Edwards, der britische Westindienhistoriker und Plantagenbesitzer, in einer Rede 1797 vor dem Unterhaus in London. Ebenso wie die kubanischen Pflanzer trieb Edwards - und andere westindische Plantagenbesitzer - das Interesse und die Furcht vor dem Sklavenaufstand zu einem regelrechten Polittourismus nach Saint Domingue (natürlich im Schutze britischer Truppen); Edwards hielt sein Erfahrungen in seinem dreibändigen Standardwerk fest: Edwards, B., History of the West Indies, 3 Bde., London 1794; in Deutsch wurde der “Reisebericht“ Edwards' unter dem Titel: Geschichte der Revolutionskriege in St.Domingue, aus dem Englischen mit einer Vorrede von J.G.Dyck, Leipzig 1798 veröffentlicht; siehe auch: Blouet, Olwyn, “Bryan Edwards and the Haitian Revolution”, in: Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution ..., pp. 44-57. 15 Den Stand der Forschungen zum Thema „Alexander von Humboldt und die Sklaverei auf Kuba“ vor dem 7. Oktober 2004 (Email Ulrike Leitner von der BBAW) zeigt das gleichnamige Kapitel in meinem Buch: Zeuske, Schwarze Karibik ..., pp. 349-360. 16 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, „An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event“, in: Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, pp. 70-107.

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slavery and its perception through Humboldt. I want to mention them here quickly to show the relativity and reflexivity of today’s post-colonial history writing. 17 That is not meant to be a nihilist position in the sense of: “Today we do not know what past we will have tomorrow”. I only want to show that new empiricism forces us to revise theoretical statements and, eventually, to admit mistakes that then could possibly mutate to productive mistakes.

Ex-slaves proclaim a new state, Humboldt begins comparisons of slavery

Until a short while ago, I myself was of the opinion that Humboldt had not written anything about slavery during his stays in Cuba18 (as well as, in general, about these stays and mass-slavery in Cuba). 19 For me, the reason is that Humboldt was not interested in Cuba anymore (other researchers had already been active there) and that, for him, the island (Cuba) was only an intermediate station for either a world journey (as he had still planned it with the French Baudin-expedition in spring 1801 in Havana20) or for his America-journey (17991804). This might not be completely wrong. However, it is important that the key for Humboldt’s interest in slavery is not to find directly on Cuba, but in the “San-Domingo revolution”. This significance of the Saint-Domingue revolution for the work of Humboldt and the comparative history of slavery only became obvious to me through the intense transatlantic debate about the 200 years of revolution in Haiti (especially with the question: Why did Humboldt, who was in America nearly parallel to the final stage of the Haitian revolution, not written anything about it?). As well, I profit, as so often, from the basic researches on the Alexander von Humboldt research centre of the Berlin-Brandenburg Werner, Michael; Zimmermann, Bénédicte, “Penser l’histoire croisée: entre empirie et reflexivité”, in: Annales HSS 58, No. 1 (Janvier-fevrier 2003), pp. 36-77. Ich zitiere diesen Artikel, weil er am besten diese notwendige Reflexivität der Geschichte/Geschichtsschreibung thematisiert; allerdings von Kolonien, Sklaverei und transnationalen Räumen, quasi “vor der Nation”, nicht die Spur einer Ahnung hat. 18 Der erste Kuba-Aufenthalt Humboldts dauerte vom 19. Dezember 1800 bis zum 5. März 180, der zweite zweiten Kuba-Aufenthalt vom 19. März bis zum 29. April 1804. 19 Ich stützte mich dabei auch auf die Aussagen von Margot Faak, dass es weder zum ersten noch zum zweiten Kuba-Aufenthalt eine “zusammenhängende Schilderung” gäbe, siehe: Humboldt, Reise auf dem Río Magdalena, I, p. 394, siehe auch: Faak, Alexander von Humboldt auf Kuba. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1996 (Berliner Manuskripte zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung, 11); Faak, Alexander von Humboldts amerikanische Reisejournale. Eine Übersicht, Berlin: Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschungsstelle, 2002 (Berliner Manuskripte zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung, 25). Ich zog daraus den falschen Schluss, dass es zum zweiten Aufenthalt überhaupt keine Tagebuchnotizen gäbe. Das widerspricht eigentlich Humboldt Arbeitsprinzipien. Aber ich meinte, Humboldt habe 1804 (wie er es in den jetzt aufgefundenen Tagbuchfragmenten zur Kubazeit 1804 auch zum Ausdruck bringt) angenommen, die Sklaverei auf Kuba werde nicht mehr lange existieren und deshalb hatte er kein großes Interesse an Kuba. Erst um 1820 habe er die Bedeutung der Zucker- und Sklavenboomwirtschaft auf Kuba richtig eingeschätzt und deshalb begonnen, neu am Kuba-Thema zu arbeiten. 20 Humboldt, Politischer Essay über die Insel Kuba. Herausgegeben und neu übersetzt von Prüfer Leske, Irene, Alicante: Editorial Club Universitario, 2002, pp. 193-218, hier p. 194. 17

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Academy of sciences that firstly, as well, had nothing to do with the Saint-Domingue revolution (and, since then, was focused on the more traditional theme “Humboldt and the independence of Spanish-America” 21). In 2000, Ulrike Leitner22, the Humboldt-bibliographer from the Alexander von Humboldt research centre, found (again) parts of the Humboldt diaries in Krakow, Poland. 23 Because she first wanted to work on the discovery and I thought that there would be nothing more important about Cuba and the slavery of the time when Humboldt had his America-journey, the copies of the again found diary parts remained in Berlin. Ulrike Leitner concentrated on Mexico. 24 Only when having take part in the conference about „Haiti 1804-2004“ (Rio de Janeiro)25 and preparing an article about “Alexander von Humboldt and Slavery” for the conference “Alexander von Humboldt. From the Americas to the Cosmos. An Interdisciplinary Conference” (New York) 26, I worked out a compilation of the Humboldtdiaries about slavery and Haiti. More incidentally, I asked Ulrike Leitner for copies of the sources from Krakow. When holding them in my hand on October 7th, 2004, I was like struck by a lightning: Nearly parallel to the proclamation of the state Haiti through Dessalines, Humboldt started to work on comparisons of slavery in the Antilles, in the Americas, and, in a sense, also on slavery within the scope of world history! 27

Enemy of the revolution and enemy of slavery: Fragments of the diary from the second Cuba- journey As an enemy of revolution and of slavery, Humboldt had come to America. First, his hostility towards politics that involve openly physical violence and state terrorism (like the Jacobines in France 1793/94) 28 prevailed. In 1799 in Venezuela, the naturalist nearly directly

Humboldt, Lateinamerika am Vorabend der Unabhängigkeitsrevolution ..., passim; Zeuske, „Vater der Unabhängigkeit? - Humboldt und die Transformation zur Moderne im spanischen Amerika“, in: Alexander von Humboldt. Aufbruch in die Moderne, ed. Ette, Ottmar; Hermanns, Ute; Scherer, Bernd M.; Suckow, Christian (Beiträge zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung, Bd. 21), Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2001, pp. 179-224. 22 Fiedler, Horst (†)/Leitner, Alexander von Humboldts Schriften - Bibliographie der selbständig erschienenen Werke, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999 (Beiträge zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung, Bd. 20). 23 Isle de Cuba. Antilles en général, in: Biblioteka Jagiellonska Kraków 1159-1161. A. v. Humboldt: Nachlaß 3. 24 Leitner, „’Anciennes folies neptuniennes!’ Über das wiedergefundene ‘Journal du Mexique à Veracruz’ aus den mexikanischen Reisetagebüchern A. v. Humboldts”, in: Humboldt im Netz (HiN). International Review for Humboldtian Studies, III, 5 (2002) (www.uni-potsdam.de/u/romanistik/humboldt). 25 Haiti 1804-2004. Da Revolução dos Escravos à Construção do estado nacional, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciéncias Sociais (IFCS) – Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Largo São Francisco de Paula, Centro, Rio de Janeiro, 22-24 Setembro de 2004. 26 October 14-16, 2004, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue (at 34 th Street), New York City. 27 Zeuske, “Alexander von Humboldt und die Anfänge der vergleichenden Geschichte der Sklaverei” (demnächst in den Konferenzmaterialien). 28 Zum „Verstummen“ des Freiheitsdiskurses und zur Feindschaft der europäischen Intellktuellen zur Jakobinerdiktatur am Beispiel Friedrich Schiller (Ausnahme: Humboldts Freun Georg Forster), siehe: Dann, 21

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became a political scientist because of the consequences of the Saint-Domingue-revolution29 that were nearly perceptible with the body (and a historian as well, because Humboldt practices a comparative historicism with strong roots in enlightenment, first of all in physiocratism30). But despite of this, during his first Cuba-journey in 1800/01, he did not write much about slaves or slavery, though having been on a longer trip to the plantations of a friend of the slavery-oligarchy. On the contrary, he participated in the elite-debates about technological improvements of slavery (the famous reverberation ovens31 and the debates about better infrastructures like streets and canales). In Havana Humboldt also knew Francisco de Arango y Parreño32, the “Adam Smith” of the plantation economies. Only after his first Cuba-journey (and that can be reproduced from his published diaries), he starts writing about slaves and slavery. Thereby, Humboldt’s hostility towards slavery comes, bit by bit, to the level of his hostility towards a violent revolution as political means. Both tend against two groups that, barely ten years later, perform the Creole independent movements in Spanish America. Firstly, against the “generation of independence” (that, at the time of Humboldt in America 1799-1804, still acted as a supporter of a kind of colonial autonomy) from the Creole oligarchies (Andrés Ibarra, Francisco José de Caldas, Fernando Peñalver, the Ribas family and, among others, also against Simón Bolívar and Francisco de Miranda). 33 And secondly, against the social group (“caste” in colonial jargon) of the “pardos”. 34 Because of their loyalty towards the “French” terrorism, because of their racism and because of their Otto, „Die Gesetzgebung des Lykurgus und Solon“, in: Schiller, Friedrich, Universalhistorische Schriften, hrsg. und komm. von Dann, Otto, Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1999 (insel taschenbuch 2548), pp. 88-131 und Kommentare pp. 187-189 sowie pp. 195-196. 29 Geggus, “The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on Blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean”, in : Naro, Nancy Priscilla (ed.), Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003, pp. 38-59. 30 Langue, Frédérique, “Humboldt und der ‘Afrikanerstaat’ Venezuela : bürgerliche Zwiste und feindselige Leidenschaften”, in: Humboldt in Amerika, ed. Zeuske, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001. (=COMPARATIV. Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und zur vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung, 11. Jg., Heft 2), pp. 16-29. 31 Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, p. 120f. Das Problem der Öfen und ihrer Befeuerung “ohne Holz” beschäftigte den Real Consulado noch die ganze erste Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. 1827 wurde ein Delegation nach Jamaika geschickt, deren Mitglieder dieses Problem auf Jamaika beobachtete und vor allem auf die bessere Administration der Plantagen verwies, siehe: Arozarena, Ramón de; Baudy, Pedro, Informe presentado a la Junta de Gobierno del Real Consulado de la siempre fiel isla de Cuba, sobre el estado de la agricultura, y elaboración y beneficio de los frutos coloniales de la de Jamayca, Habana: Imprenta Fraternal de los Días de Castro, 1828. 32 Tomich, Dale W., “The Wealth of the Empire: Francisco de Arango y Parreño, Political Economy, and the Second Slavery in Cuba“, in: CSSH, No. 1 (2003), pp. 4-28. 33 Zeuske, „¿Humboldteanización del mundo occidental? La importancia del viaje de Humboldt para Europa y América Latina“, passim; Zeuske, “Introducción”, in: Francisco de Miranda y la modernidad en América, introducción, selección, transcripción y notas de Zeuske, Michael, Madrid: Fundación Mapfre Tavera; Ediciones Doce Calles, S.L., 2004 (Prisma Histórico: Viejos documentos, Nuevas lecturas; Velhos Documentos, Novas Leituras), pp. 13-106. 34 Langue, Frédérique: Las élites de Venezuela y la revolución francesa o la formación de un ideal democrático, Caracas: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad José María Vargas 1990; Langue, “Les identités fractales. Honneur et couleur dans la société vénézuélienne du XVIIIe siècle”, in : Caravelle, n° 65 (1995), pp. 23-37.

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wish to establish a “white” republic, Humboldt disliked the Creoles. Here, the two basic hostilities of Humboldt mixed up. With the pardos it is a bit more complicated. With the evaluation of the “Afro”-American aesthetics and culture of the so-called pardos and with their popular trans-culturalism of European, American and African values, Humboldt’s own inter-culturalism, based on Greek-Roman roots, ends. This is first of all valid for his written judgements on politics or culture. In Humboldts relation as a person to the real world there were scarcely sharp limits.35 At Humboldts times empires, societies and ideas were in movement. Overall in the west started discussions about the cultural roots of a concept called „nation“.36 [die deutsche Stelle lautet: Das gilt allerdings vor allem für geschriebene politische und kulturelle Urteile. In Humboldts Verhältnis als Person zur realen Welt gab es kaum scharfe Grenzen37, zumal überall in der westlichen Welt damals begonnen wurde, die kulturellen und mentalen Grundlagen der „Nation“38 zu debattieren. Schau doch mal, lieber Finzschie, ob ich etwa den Spirit catchen konnte, M.] As well, between the pardos Humboldt might suppose the mob, which could become the organizer of open corporal violence in a possible anti-colonial rebellion. All this can be seen in Humboldt’s published diaries. So far not published was Humboldt’s final, journey-ending conclusion about slavery and revolution. Humboldt was a scientist who also changed opinions through evidence. Between 1802 and 1804, referring to Saint-Domingue, Humboldt came to a critical, however positive, judgment about the revolution of the slaves. All this can be found in the part of the Cuban diary that Ulrike Leitner found.

The Cuban diary

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Zum Interkulturalismus Humboldts siehe : Ette, Ottmar, Weltbewußtsein. Alexander von Humboldt und das unvollendete Projekt einer anderen Moderne, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2002, passim; zu den unscharfen Grenzen Humboldts, siehe: Lubrich, Oliver, „Dolores, enfermedades y metáforas poéticas del cuerpo en Alejandro de Humboldt“, in: Revista de Indias Vol. LXIV, núm 231 (2004), pp. 503-528. 36 Goodman, Paul, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998; Geulen, Christian, Wahlverwandte. Rassendiskurs und Nationalismus im späten 19. Jahrhundert, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2004. 37 Zum Interkulturalismus Humboldts siehe : Ette, Ottmar, Weltbewußtsein. Alexander von Humboldt und das unvollendete Projekt einer anderen Moderne, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2002, passim; zu den unscharfen Grenzen Humboldts, siehe: Lubrich, Oliver, „Dolores, enfermedades y metáforas poéticas del cuerpo en Alejandro de Humboldt“, in: Revista de Indias Vol. LXIV, núm 231 (2004), pp. 503-528. 38 Geulen, Christian, Wahlverwandte. Rassendiskurs und Nationalismus im späten 19. Jahrhundert, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2004.

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The diary fragment “Cuba 1804” is chaotic. There are copies of the Krakow originals39 from which a transcription was made in Berlin. They are divided into the sub-fragments from “Cuba 1+2” to “Cuba 19” (including “Cuba 7” and “Cuba 7a”) as well as “Cuba-note 1” to “Cuba-note 4”. Humboldt has always written the things down that he had just heard and that came to his mind. Afterwards, he added more comments, in this case until 1814. 40 That it is a diary fragment started/written in Cuba in April 1804, is shown most clearly by the sub-fragment “Cuba 8” (where Humboldt mentions temperature measurements in Havana from April 1804). The sub-fragments “Cuba 7” and “Cuba 9” deal with the situation in the Caribbean at the time of the last fights in Saint-Domingue and with the consequences for the Caribbean slaves and the Americans. “Cuba 11” is very short and only deals with the USA (export to England, population and population growth); “Cuba 18” deals with the geographic structures of Havana and its surroundings. The short piece “Cuba 19” deals with the flour trade with New-Spain. The content of the whole diary fragments “Cuba 1804”, mainly compiled in French (and Spanish, German), represent three things: Firstly, it is the beginning of comparative scientific slavery research and, as such, a relatively “wild writing”. Secondly, it is the unordered Essai politique about Cuba. And thirdly, it is a collection of data, information and opinions (which are continuing Humboldt’s “short essays” inside the diary of the journey, most of them with titles like “Esclavage”, and “Esclaves”, which show opinions and analyses about slavery situations in America). This collection is much wider than the things that Humboldt later published in his Essai politique about Cuba. Humboldt, partly detailed, partly only superficially, deals with the following topics: Slaves as actors who set the fields in Cuba (and elsewhere) on fire (a kind of explanation of the consequences of the slave-revolution, including the mentioning of different revolts and conspiracies), over and over again (often more than one time from different perspectives) “slaves, rebellions, rights” and “legislation, laws and comparative history of law”; Humboldt also examined the production of SaintDomingue until 1788 and the consequences of the Saint-Domingue-revolution for the prices of sugar and coffee as well as for slave trade and origin of the slaves in the Antilles in 1788. Humboldt continues with examining the long-term consequences of the Saint-Domingue revolution for Cuba and other slave societies41 under the terms:

39

Isle de Cuba. Antilles en général, in: Biblioteka Jagiellonska Kraków 1159-1161. A. v. Humboldt: Nachlaß 3. Humboldt weilte bei seinem zweiten Kuba-Aufenthalt vom 19. März bis zum 29. April 1804 in Havanna und auf Kuba. 41 Geggus, “The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on Blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean”, pp. 38-59. 40

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“Landscapes (and soil as well as soil types) of slavery”, “slavery statistics and origin of the slaves“, “revolution and terrorism [42] in the Caribbean” and “revolution, rebellions, slave trade”. Originating in the concrete situation of his stay in Havana (and the slave regions in the South-East of Havana, near Güines and Bejucal), Humboldt analyses “revolution, rebellion, resistance and slave dogs”, “revolution, rebellions and rights of the ‘Negroes’ 1804”, the “character of the ‘Negroes’ in Africa”, the “situation in the Caribbean around 1804”, and the “character of the Habaneros”. So he also does detailed work about colonial demography and the total number of slaves in Cuba in 1804, as well as caste structure and the so-called masculinity rate (ratio between slave men and slave women). Humboldt ends his analysis with the future prospect (written around 1804) that, in his opinion, slavery in the Caribbean and in the Americas will be abolished in approximately 20 years. 43 Nichts wissen konnte Humboldt über den „Antworten“ von Sklaven auf Kuba selbst auf all diese Probleme, die etwa parallel zu seinem Schreiben um 1825 stattfanden.44

The published Essai politique about Cuba and the comparative history of slavery

20 years later, slavery was not abolished. On the opposite, it flourished. In his Essai politique about Cuba, Humboldt wrote: “Without any doubt, slavery is the greatest of all evils that have tormented mankind….”.45 As well, slave smuggling reached new heights. Not only the trade to Cuba, but also human smuggling in the Caribbean, for example from Saint Thomas to Puerto Rico or East Cuba. Under the impression of his own diary notes which Humboldt used for the text of his book, one thing gets quite clear when reading the essay about Cuba again (what I recommend to every reader): It is also a hidden Essai politique about Haiti. And it is an essay of explicit comparison as well as of implicit transfers, networking and entangling. Humboldt analyses all aspects of slavery that he had as well written down in his diary, however, now in systematic form.

Humboldt versteht zu diesem Zeitpunkt unter “Terrorismus” die Anwendung von körperlicher Gewalt in der Politik, d.h., den „Terrorismus“ französischer Generale gegen die ehemaligen Sklaven; Humboldt hängt noch nicht den Ideologien der Furchtikone „Haiti“ an, wie sie nach 1804 durch Intellektuelle und Schriftsteller vor allem aus der Pflanzerelite konstruiert worden ist. 43 Die Tagebuchfragmente zu Kuba 1804 sind gegenwärtig noch nicht publiziert. Sie werden für 2005 zur Publikation vorbereitet in der Reihe „Beiträge zur Alexander-von-Humboldt-Forschung“ (Michael Zeuske; Ulrike Leitner). 44 Barcia Paz, Manuel, La rebelión de esclavos de 1825 en Guamacaro, Ciudad Habana: Universidad de la Habana 2000 (tutora: María del Carmen Barcia). 45 Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, p. 154. 42

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Slavery-comparisons are especially mentioned in the chapters about “Population” (all aspects of modern demography, but, above all, the difference between rural and urban slavery and the growth of slave populations), “trade” (sugar- and coffee-export as well as slave trade, wood-, cattle- and flour-imports) and “agriculture” (“great” Cuba, ingenios, and businessmanagement of sugar production, its structure and costs). An interesting omission of material used in the diary attracts attention: Humboldt does not publish his knowledge of events in which slaves have been actors of their own rights. But he describes Haiti itself, what means a state, as actor. And even more important, Humboldt considers Haiti, “Empire of the Ethiopians” 46, to be the possible nucleus for an “African Confederation of the Free States of the Antilles” 47. Today we would call the concept “Africa in America”, a Caribbean AfroAmerica or a “Black” Caribbean. Behind the black and coloured, slaved or free population of Cuba, there was a big Caribbean group that included more than two million people, as Humboldt mentions. In his Essai politique about Cuba, Humboldt speaks of 2.360.000 coloured persons or 83% of the Caribbean population (For Brazil in 1819, there were 1.1 million slaves in a population of 3.5 million people48). All told, however, the published essay about Cuba (and Haiti) is a rhetoric work of political science, which refers to the local elites of slave proprietors. The fact that Cuba is still a colony mainly gets ignored by the author (as well as the position of the church and religion). Humboldt tells the elite of Cuba: If you do not abolish mass slavery with the help of reforms, there will be a “revenge of the serving population” 49, a “bloody catastrophe”, like in SaintDomingue. 50 As congenial in Cuba, Humboldt, for that aim, saw Francisco de Arango y Parreno (1765-1837). In the 1820s, Arango got similar attitudes to Humboldt. That is why the friendly correspondence between Arango and Humboldt51 took place (despite the fact that

46

Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, pp. 80-81, Fussnote (für die Übersetzung in das Englische auch Trasher 1856). Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, pp. 64; Humboldt, The Island of Cuba (Thrasher), p. 124. 48 “The Population of Colonial Brazil”, in: The Cambridge History of Latin America, 11 Vols., ed. by Bethell, Leslie, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1984-1995, II (1984), pp. 37-63, hier p. 63 (Table 5). 49 Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, p. 159. Thrasher lässt diese Stelle weg (p. 148). 50 Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, p. 64. 51 In 1827 Francisco Arango y Parreño wrote to Humboldt: “Mi mui apreciable am.º y sr: encargué a mi primo que anticipase á V. mis expresivas gracias por el favor que me hace en su preciocisimo Ensayo sobre esta Isla, y la añadi al propio tiempo que le ofreciera de mi parte algunas observaciones sobre los principales hechos que se encuentran en la obra – Me la presentaron por desgracia con termino mui angustiado, y en esa precipitacion, no sé si me habré extdido [extendido? M.Z.], ó si he dejado, ni deci todo lo q e podia – De lo que estoi mui seguro es de mi buena intencion, y que he tenido otro estimulo para extender esas [?] notas y enviar esos documentos, que en mi etma [extremísima? M.Z.] amistad y sincera gratitud al filósofo viagero que admiran todas las naciones cultas ...”, Letter from Arango to the Baron de Humboldt, La Habana, July 30, 1827, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung, Nachl. A. v. Humboldt, K 7b, Mp. 68. 47

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Humboldt’s essay about Cuba got forbidden on the island nearly directly after its publication52). In Humboldt’s Essai politique about Cuba, direct comparisons can be found in the chapters “Population”, “Agriculture”, and “About Slavery” (which is the sermon against slavery). It involves comparisons of numbers (humans, “natural reproduction” and amounts of production) as they are still to be found in the socio-historic literature of the 20th century (and often still with Humboldt’s numbers). Humboldt compares the numbers of population and the quota of the specific population groups (slaves, free coloured and whites) from Cuba, Jamaica, the British Antilles (today it would be called: British Caribbean53), the whole Antilles-archipelago, the USA and Brazil. The highest quota of slaves and the lowest number of other population groups are to be found in Jamaica (85% slaves, 10% free coloured and 6% whites), all British Antilles (81%, 10% and 9%), followed by Brazil (51%, 26% and 23%) as well as Cuba (36%, 18%, 46%) and the USA (16%, 3%, 81%). Important is Humboldt’s information referring to the numbers for the whole “Antilles-archipelago” (40%, 43%, 17%): “One must not forget that, since the liberation [! MZ] of Haiti, there already are more free blacks and mulattos than slaves in the whole archipelago of the Antilles”. 54 And, in the sense of his rhetoric for reform, he even says more: “In the whole archipelago of the Antilles, the coloured people (blacks and mulattos, free persons and slaves) already constitute 2.360.000 or 83/100 of the whole population. If not, in a short time, the legislation of the Antilles and the rights of coloured people is changed positively, if one continues to think instead of to act, the political overweight will get to the people who have the power to work and the will to free themselves, and the courage to suffer continuous deprivations”. 55 In the topic “natural reproduction” of the slave populations and slave trade Humboldt first states an explicit comparison between Cuba and Jamaica. The result, for Humboldt, seems to “turn out to the advantage of the Spanish legislation and the customs of the Cuban

Antrag von Andrés de Zayas 1827 auf Verbot der Zirkulation des Essai Politique: „... daß dieses Werk, unter vielen Aspekten sehr bewundernswert, ohne Zweifel aber ungewöhnlich gefährlich ist, wegen der Meinungen seines Autors über die Sklaverei und in erster Linie wegen des Bildes, das je wahrer, umso schrecklicher ist, den gentes de color [freie Farbige - M.Z.] ihre immense Kraft auf dieser Insel und ihr exzessives Übergewicht auf allen Antillen und an den Küsten des Kontinents zeigt...“, zit. nach: „Expediente en que el exmo. Ayuntam.to, sobre que se recoja la obra del Barón de Humboldt titulado ensayo politico de la Isla de Cuba y que se nieguen las licencias a la gente de color, para escuelas“, in: Boletín del Archivo Nacional, La Habana, LVI (enerodiciembre 1957), pp. 32-33. 53 Engerman ; Higman, Barry W., „The Demographic Structure of the Caribbean Slave Societies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries“, in: Franklin W. Knight (ed.), General History of the Caribbean, Bd. III: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, London and Basingstoke: UNESCO Publishing, 1997, pp. 47-57. 54 Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, pp. 63 und 64. Thrasher, „Comparative Population of the Antilles and the United States“, in: Humboldt, The Island of Cuba (Thrasher), p. 124. 55 Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, p. 64; Humboldt, The Island of Cuba (Thrasher), p. 124. 52

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population… On this island [Cuba], the comparisons show a better situation concerning the physical preservation and the liberation of the blacks“. Tannenbaum and Elkins56 give their regards. Then, Humboldt states sentences that also the authors of “Time on the Cross” 57 might have liked to read: “It does not come to my mind to praise the treatment of blacks in the Southern parts of the United States, however, there are different grades in the tribulations of the human being. The slave who has a hut and a family is not as unhappy as the one who is locked somewhere like belonging to a herd [Here, Humboldt talks about the barracones in Cuba58- MZ]. The bigger the number of settled blacks with families and huts as their properties [59], the faster their reproduction can take place.” 60 Humboldt analyses the numbers about the increase of the slave population in the USA from 1780 to 1820. There is an increase of 26/1000. 61 Exactly here, Arango, in his marginalia of the Humboldt-essay about Cuba, gives his famous comment in unrivalled dryness: “This document is a proof of the representation [of 1811 62] and in it is very well explained that the meaning of the sentence is not the one the baron presents here. I recommend him to moderate his rigor…”).63 A third comparison by Humboldt, the most extensive one, is found in refer to the “yield” [Ertrag?] (sugar production) and the “export” (sugar export) between Cuba, Jamaica, Barbados, Granada (Grenada), St. Vincent, Trinidad, all of the “British Antilles”, the “French Antilles”, the whole “Antilles-archipelago” as well as the British, Dutch and French Guayanas and Brazil. Louisiana is only mentioned aside (in 1825). 64 Humboldt puts the whole into

56

Tannenbaum, Frank, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946 (Reprint: Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Elkins, Stanley M., Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959, zur historiographischen Einordnung siehe: Kolchin,Peter, A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003 (Kolchin erwähnt Humboldt nicht einmal!). 57 Fogel, Robert William; Engerman, Time on the cross, New York; London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995 (1. Auflage 1974). 58 Pérez de la Riva, Juan, El barracón y otros ensayos, La Habana : Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, 1975; Zeuske, Geschichte der Sklaverei auf Kuba, 1492-1966 (demnächst). 59 Zum Problem traditioneller und geschriebener Eigentumsrechte in der Sklaverei siehe : Scott ; Zeuske, „Property in Writing, Property on the Ground: Pigs, Horses, Land and Citizenship in the Aftermath of Slavery, Cuba 1880-1909“, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History. An International Quarterly, Vol. 44, No. 4 (October 2002), pp. 669-699. 60 Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, pp. 90-91; Humboldt, The Island of Cuba (Thrasher), pp. 142-143. 61 Ibid. 62 Es handelt sich um die berühmt-berüchtigte Repräsentation von 1811 (für mich ein Gründungsdokument des modernen Rassismus): Arango, “Representación de la Ciudad de la Habana a las Cortes, el 20 de julio de 1811, con motivo de las proposiciones hechas por D. José Miguel Guridi Alcocer y D. Agustín de Argüelles, sobre el tráfico y esclavitud de los negros; extendida por el Alférez Mayor de la Ciudad, D. Francisco de Arango, por encargo del Ayuntamiento, Consulado y Sociedad Patriótica de la Habana”, in: Arango, Obras, II, pp. 145-189. 63 Miguel Ángel Puig-Samper ; Consuelo Naranjo Orovio ; Armando García González, Humboldt, Ensayo Político sobre la Isla de Cuba, Madrid (Aranjuez): Ediciones Doce Calles/Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 1998 (THEATRUM NATURAE. Colección de Historia Natural, Serie: Textos Clásicos), p. 207n 53. 64 Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, pp. 100-106; Humboldt, The Island of Cuba (Thrasher), pp. 157-159.

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comparison with Saint-Domingue in 1788, 1799 and around 1825. In around 1825, the export of Haiti would have been “nearly zero”; Brazil, Cuba and Guyana, with their 2.526.000 slaves, would export three times as much sugar as Saint-Domingue at the time of its greatest productivity in 1788. 65 There are more explicit comparisons, for example of the sugar prices and their up and down, or the numbers of the different Cuban census from 1784 to 182966; Implicitly, Humboldt also deals with transfers, for example when he talks about the internal organisation of the plantations, about the technical processing of sugar, about the yields of the soil and the sugarcane, as well as when he talks about the consequences of the Saint-Domingue-revolution for the different sugar colonies and Europe (sometimes even Java or rather Reunion). Especially important are explanations about how the fear-and security-politics of the masters cultures spread out as transfers in the slavery societies. 67 Equally important is the comparison of the abolition in the “new republics” (the republics of later Latin America founded after the Creole wars of independence against Spain) with the south of the USA with its growing numbers of slaves and the effects of the “incautious and destructive law [Missouri Bill]”. 68 Nearly un-inspected is the chapter “Additions”, that Humboldt has not published before 1830 or 1831, after having returned to Berlin from his Russia-expedition. Here, one can find the wonderful comparisons of the income of Colombia (the so-called “Great”-Columbia of Simón Bolívar; Humboldt already before had recommended the Cuban elites to organise the emancipation of slavery like the manumission-legislation in Bolivar’s Columbia69) and Cuba, the appreciation of the economical boom on “the beautiful island of Puerto Rico” (however,

65

Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, p. 104; Humboldt, The Island of Cuba (Thrasher), p. 158. Kiple, Kenneth F., Blacks in Colonial Cuba, 1774-1899 (Latin American Monographs, 17), Gainesville, Fla: The University Press of Florida, 1976. 67 Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, pp. 154-169 passim. 68 Ibid., pp. 160-161. 69 Auf diese Gesetzgebung bezieht sich Humboldt nochmals ausdrücklich in seinem letzten (bekannten) Brief an Bolívar: „En el volumen del Viaje que acaba de salir he hablado de la emancipación de los negros. Es la República de Colombia la que ha dado el ejemplo, y esta medida humanitaria y prudente a un tiempo, se debe al desinterés del general Bolívar ...“, zit. nach: Minguet, Charles, “Las relaciones entre Alexander von Humboldt y Simón Bolívar”, in: Bolívar y Europa en las crónicas, el pensamiento político y la historiografía. Investigación dirigida por Alberto Filippi, prólogo de José L. Salcedo-Bastardo, 3 Bde., Bd.1 (siglo XIX). Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia de la República 1986, pp. 743-754, p. 751 (doc. 214c); siehe auch: Humboldt, Reise in die Äquinoktial-Gegenden des Neuen Kontinents, Ette, Ottmar (ed.), Vols., Frankfurt am Main/Leipzig: Insel Verlag ²1991, II, p. 1507: “Für den Zustand der Sklaven sind heilsame Veränderungen im Gange. Den Gesetzen der neuen unabhängigen Staaten zufolge wird die Sklaverei allmählich erlöschen: schon hat die Republik Kolumbien das Beispiel einer allmählichen Freilassung gegeben. Diese ebenso menschliche wie kluge Maßnahme ist GENERAL BOLIVAR zu danken ...”; Zeuske, „Kontinentale Emanzipationswege“, in: Zeuske, Sklavereien, Emanzipationen und atlantische Weltgeschichte. Essays über Mikrogeschichten, Sklaven, Globalisierungen und Rassismus, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2002 (Arbeitsberichte des Instituts für Kultur und Universalgeschichte Leipzig e.V., Bd. 6), pp. 202-213; Ramos Guédez, José Marcial, “Simón Bolívar – la abolición de la esclavitud en Venezuela 1810-1830. Problemas y frustración de una causa”, in: Revista de Historia de América, núm. 125 (Jul.-Dic. 1999), pp. 7-20. 66

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like in Cuba, with the help of mass slavery) and their comparison with Jamaica and Cuba.70 Humboldt also praises the „recognition“ of Haiti by France [Und Humboldt lobt die „Anerkennung“ Haitis durch Frankreich 1825].71 He does not mention the extremly high reparations paid by Haiti to the former metropole.

The reality works in the background: The historical origins of the comparison and the consequences of the Saint-Domingue-revolution for the “second slavery” Agents of the comparison Since the 19th century (after Humboldt), people talk about the Saint-Domingue-revolution in terms like a “grande peur” (great fear) of revolts and the revenge of the slaves. 72 However, when the contemporary Francisco de Arango y Parreno heard about the Saint-Domingue-revolution (1790-1804) in 1791, he wrote, still like a founding father of Cuban mass slavery: “when the divine providence brought to France the hostage that it tormented today [Arango means the Saint-Domingue-revolution] … The confusion and the chaos that ruled in its colonies, diminished their production and gave value to ours.” 73 This said, Arango, cool calculating, demanded free trade with slaves, the taking back of Código Negro Español74 (the slave laws of 1789, valid for the whole Spanish empire), free export and technological improvements for the sugar production in Cuba. 75

70

Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, p. 202. Menzel, Gerhard, Der schwarze Traum vom Glück. Haiti seit 1804, Frankfurt am Main u.a.: Peter Lang, 2001 (Beiträge zur Kirchen- und Kulturgeschichte, Bd. 11), pp. 70-87. 72 Die Furcht vor Revolution und Sklavenrebellion, oder gar einer Sklavenrevolution, wird oft für das Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts als eine Art „kollektiver Paranoia“ beschrieben, siehe: Callahan Jr., William J., „La propaganda, la sedición y la revolución francesa en la capitanía general de Venezuela, 1786-1796“, in: Boletín Histórico Nr. 14, Caracas (1967), pp. 177-205; Aizpurua, Ramón, “La insurrección de los negros de la serranía de Coro de 1795 : una revisión histórica”, in : Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia (BANH) núm. 283, Caracas (julio-septiembre de 1988), pp. 705-723; Munford, Clarence J.; Zeuske, Michael, “Black Slavery, Class Struggle, Fear and Revolution in St. Domingue and Cuba, 1785-1795”, in: The Journal of Negro History, Atlanta, Georgia, Vol. LXXIII, 1-4 (Spring, Winter, Summer, Fall 1988), S. 12-32; Ferrer, “La société esclavagiste cubaine et la révolution haïtienne”, pp. 333-356 ; Ferrer, “Noticias de Haití en Cuba”, pp. 675-693. 73 Arango y Parreño, Francisco, “Discurso sobre la agricultura de La Habana y medios de fomentarla” (1792), in: Pichardo, Documentos, Bd. I, pp. 162-197, hier p. 169. 74 Konetzke, Richard, Colección de Documentos para la Historia de la Formación Social de Hispanoamérica, 1493-1810, 3 vols. in 5 Bden., Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1958-1962, III, pp. 643652 (Document no. 308). 75 Arango y Parreño, “Representación hecha a su S.M. con motivo de la sublevación de esclavos en los dominios franceses de la isla de Santo Domingo” (20. November 1791), in: Arango, Obras, I, pp. 111-112. 71

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Arango and Nicolas Calvo as well as the whole group of Humboldt-friends76 started to pressure for a complete liberation of slave trade77 - a front door next to the most important slave revolution of world history! As a consequence, the Spanish authorities supported the “free trade” with slaves (and had projects about “white” immigration), however, these slaves should be bozales (black slaves from Africa) and not “French” ladinos (slaves born in SaintDomingue). 78 At that time, the planters in Havana developed a strong liking for numbers and colonial demography. At the same time, as stated above, the state’s influence of making the slave laws, referring to Saint-Domingue, got dismissed (the Código Negro Español was not put into power79). Strategically, so to speak, for the next fifty years. The planters were stronger then the crisis-struck empire. The strategy of the planters to exploit Haiti and, at the same time, with the help of selffinanced expeditions, to insure the resources of “their” island80, was successful. Apparently much more successful than the strategy of the imperial elites in the metropolis to militarily power down the colonial competitive France with the help of conquering its most important colony. 81 Anyway, the elites of Havana developed the sugar-plantation-economy by taking advantage of the markets that were served by Saint-Domingue. Of course, a la longue, a change of emphasis of these markets to North America took place. Nicolas Calvo, one of the most influential owner of great plantations, writes in his note for the Real Consulado de la Habana 1797: “It is proved that, before the revolution that had destroyed the French colony, our sugar could not compete with the foreign one on European markets”. 82 76

González-Ripoll Navarro, Cuba, la isla de los ensayos: cultura y sociedad, 1790-1815, Madrid : Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Centro de Humanidades, Instituto de Historia, Departamento de Historia de América, 1999, pp. 205-222; Naranjo Orovio, Consuelo, “Humboldt y la isla de Cuba en el siglo XIX”, in: San Pío, María Pilar; Puig-Samper, Miguel Ángel (eds.), Las flores del Paraíso, Barcelona: Lunwerg, 1999, pp. 121-138. 77 Kuethe, Allan J., „La fidelidad cubana durante la edad de las revoluciones“, en: Anuario de Estudios Americanos (AEA), Vol. 55 (1998), pp. 209-220; Grafenstein Gareis, Johanna von, “El Caribe en la política imperial de España, siglo XVIII”, en: Tzintzun. Revista de Estudios Históricos 32 (Julio-Dic. del 2000), pp. 111138. 78 Archivo Nacional de Cuba, La Habana (ANC), Real Consulado (RC), 203/8993: “Expediente relativo a las precauciones y seguridad a los negros en general y en particular a los introducidos de las colonias extranjeras”, 1795-1801; ANC, RC, 74/2836 : “Expediente sobre prorroga de termino concedido por S.M. en Real Orden de 22 de Abril de 1804 para traer negros de la costa de Africa”, fol. 1-3. 79 Zeuske, Geschichte der Sklaverei auf Kuba, 1492-1966 (demnächst). 80 Guirao de Vierna, Angel, “El proyecto cubano del conde de Mopox: aspectos generales de su organización y finanziación”, in: Higueras, Dolores (ed.), Cuba Ilustrada. Real Comisión de Guantánamo 1796-1802, 2 Vols., Barcelona: Lunwerg, 1991, I, pp. 17-41. 81 Yacou, Alain, „La stratégie espagnole d’éradication de Saint-Domingue français, 1790-1804”, in : L'Espace Caraïbe. Théâtre et Enjeu des Luttes Impériales (XVIe - XIXe Siècle), coord.. Butel, Paul ; Lavallé, Bernard (Collection de la Maison des Pays Ibériques, 70), Bordeaux: Maison des Pays Ibériques, 1996, pp. 277-293 ; Yacou, „Santiago de Cuba a la hora de la revolución de Santo Domingo (1790-1804)“, in: Del Caribe 26, Santiago de Cuba (1997), pp. 73-80. 82 ANC, RC, leg. 85, No. 3489: “Informe de Nicolás Calvo al Real Consulado” (6 de Septiembre de 1797), f. 2r.

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This was similar for Jamaica. 83 However, nearly forty years later, the “Econocide” (a kind of “economical suicide”, as Seymour Drescher84 once puts it) came to the British sugar island. However, the Cuba grande dominated the sugar markets, with one of the most efficient agricultures of the world, relatively unbroken until 1954. 85 At the same time, the sugar-andslave-culture of this great Cuba developed with an ideological, discursive help- The manipulation of the fruit icon Haiti. In 1791, Arango could cheer: „La época de nuestra felicidad ha llegado [The epoch of our happiness has come]”. 86 This actually does not really fit to fear, silence and irritation. The exact sociological-political study, the comparative colonial demography that inevitably resulted from the analysis of the Saint-Domingue-revolution, was well used by the persons as reign-knowledge; partly also against the own mother country, the Madre Patria. In this context, Manuel Moreno Fraginals does not yet talk about transferts culturels, but about “expeditions to modernity”. By that he means the journeys of people from the sugar elite into other countries and to other sugar-islands, especially to Saint-Domingue (or later to Haiti, to see if the competitives would stay low), to Jamaica, Barbados or Portugal (because of slave trade87). “Travelling through Haiti, Jamaica or Barbados was like getting a title for industrial skills, like a doctorate in Ingenios. It was something that was talked about with pride by Nicolas Calvo, Martinez Campos, Antonio Morejon, Jose Ignacio Echegoyen [and Arango as well as Ignacio Pedro Montalvo, who, in 1794, had both travelled to Spain, Portugal (experts in slave trade!), England, Barbados and Jamaica].” 88 Especially his stay in England89 persuaded Arango that the future was technological progress on a mechanical base and on the base of mass slavery/slave-trade. For his England-admiration, the following Marx’ sentence is valid: “To the minor developed country, the industrially developed country does only show Craton, Michael, “Jamaican Slavery”, in: Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean, Kingston: Ian Rande Publishers [etc.], 1997, pp. 161-184; see also: Holt, Thomas, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labour, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. 84 Drescher, Seymour, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, Pittsburgh: Pittburgh University Press, 1977; Drescher, The mighty experiment: free labor versus slavery in British emancipation, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002; Holt, Thomas, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labour, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. 85 Zeuske, Insel der Estreme. Kuba im 20. Jahrhundert, Zürich: Rotpunktverlag, 2004. 86 Arango, Obras, Bd. I, p. 134. 87 González-Ripoll Navarro, “Dos viajes, una intención: Francisco de Arango y Alejandro Olivan en Europa y las Antillas azucareras (1794 y 1829)”, p. 85-101; González-Ripoll Navarro, „Vínculos y redes de poder entre Madrid y La Habana: Francisco de Arango y Parreño (1765-1837), ideólogo y mediador”, p. 291-305. 88 Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio. Complejo económico social cubano del azúcar, 3 Vols., La Habana: Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, 1978, I, p. 75. 89 Siehe die Reiseberichte Arangos in: ANC, RC 92/3923: “Expediente sobre las noticias comunicadas por el Sindico Don Francisco de Arango y Parreño, adquiridas en el viaje por encargo de S.M. ha hecho a Inglaterra, Portugal, Barbada y Jamayca”, 30 de Septiembre de 1795; sowie: ANC, RC 93/3924: “Expediente relativo a las noticias adquiridas por el Sindico de este cuerpo en Inglaterra y Jamayca, sobre refinerias de azucar”, 28 de Octubre de 1795. 83

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the picture of its [the minor developed country] own future”. 90 This statement was wrong (and still is), however, the Creole sugar patricians would have liked to make Cuba to the Albion of Spanish-America. During the journeys to the Saint-Domingue that was shook by revolution and war, one maybe can talk about a mixture of “travelling to modernity” and early civil war-tourism. However, talking about transfers is a need. From their journeys to SaintDomingue, the Cuban planters brought the French sugar experts for the installation of their modern ingenios, virtual sugar factories in the field, with them to Cuba. Nicolas Calvo: “Such a sad experience [that “our sugar could not compete”] has moved the spirits of some illustrious citizens to search for the best kind of cultivation and fabrication, that our rivals misdealt, to sell sugar to a lower price than we do, sugar that, on the other hand, is completely white and of better quality than ours. With this aim, Casa-Montalvo and Arango had their journey. At their return, they brought with them, in addition to many other information, the information about the very useful and never adequately praised development of the reverberate ovens with Clarificadoras [see above, Humboldt, MZ]. With the help of them, the Black worked less and the lord had more and better results. And they did not only bring these information, but, because in Jamaica they met some French emigrates, very intelligent in the management of the ingenios, they persuaded their fellow citizens to let come these emigrants from this island [to pay them the shipping-MZ]. From their intellect, our nation can expect great advantages… I let come Mr.Julian Lardiere from Jamaica, a man with a good reputation in Saint-Domingue. [When coming to his plantation El Cangre,] … he upraised from our coach, and that, he said, that is the land that is the place where nature has united everything to sow sugar-cane and to fabricate sugar”. 91 In 1796, because of the not ending revolution in Saint-Domingue, it came to insecurity. In this year there was a debate in the Real Consulado between the supporters of a “white emigration” (general captain Las Casas), the increase of slave import (Arango) and the introduction of Mexican and Yucatecic Indians (Marques de Casa Peñalver), who should be used as forced labourers. 92 Arango enforced his idea. Nicolas Calvo managed to take pleasure in the best sides of the situation, despite the not ending war and revolution in Saint-Domingue: “For the French it is not easy to produce Marx, Karl, “Vorwort zur ersten Auflage”, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, in: Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels, Werke (MEW), Bd. XXIII, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1959, pp. 11-12, hier p. 12. 91 ANC, RC, leg. 85, No. 3489: “Informe de Nicolás Calvo ...”, f. 2r-3r; RC 92/3921: “Expediente ofreciendo seguir por el metodo frances el cultivo de la caña de azucar y la elaboracion de este fruto, y solicitando licencia del gobernador para traer a su costo varios artefices y agricultores franceses”, 26 de Agosto de 1795. 92 Naranjo Orovio, Consuelo, „Humboldt en Cuba: reformismo y abolición“, in: Debate y perspectivas. Cuadernos de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, Madrid, No. 1 (Diciembre de 2000): Alejandro de Humboldt y el mundo hispánico. La Modernidad y la Independencia americana, coord. por Miguel Ángel Puig-Samper, pp. 183-201, hier S. 188, Humboldt erwähnt diese Debatte: Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, p. 163f. 90

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such a high amount of sugar so quickly; because their Blacks are occupied with revolt and war, and, for a long time, they will flee all work, obedience and order. The English, on their stony islands, do not have one piece of good soil anymore that is not cultivated. As a consequence, one should not believe that they will be able to increase their production anymore”. 93 Mind you, Calvo wrote this in 1797, when the victory of the slave army under Toussaint was not completely clear yet. Calvo believed that even if the French and English troops were victorious- and of that he was absolutely sure!- there would be a long lasting production breakdown on the neighbour-island. Anyway, one should not underestimate the shock about the Saint-Dominguerevolution.94 It again becomes clear when looking at the threat that all “superior cultures” suffered in the Caribbean when it became clear that a revolutionary aristocrat, Simon Bolivar, really went to Haiti in 1816. An English captain expressed the opinion of the contemporaries, who knew of the explosive effect that Haiti possessed as reality, symbol and icon, completely right: “This alliance [between Pétion and Bolívar, MZ] opened the eyes of the country and about the true intentions of the insurgent leaders, and it has essentially changed the essence of the topic. The same people are in command, but already, it is not the same side anymore”. 95 In rough lines, this might outline the effects of the only really great and successful slave revolution of world history in the Americas. The transfers and influences of persons from other territories, classes and groups of the slave societies in the Caribbean of course were much more extensive, it came to a considerable politicization. Maybe, between 1794 and 1798, there was a really revolutionary situation in the Caribbean. Maybe, Humboldt really felt that, shortly before his arrival in America, a general revolution of slaves, free Blacks and coloured people seemed to be near. We have clues, however not enough material to perceive the point of view of the other “agents of comparison” (because al slaves compared their situation with the information about Saint-Domingue/Haiti). 96 However, there were no more successful great revolts of Blacks and coloured people. The elites of the slave societies started with the intense evaluation of the “experience Haiti” and with the construction of new reignmechanisms. Hereby, they very actively used the “fruit icon” Haiti and the results of comparative political studies about slavery. ANC, RC, leg. 85, No. 3489: “Informe de Nicolás Calvo ...”, f. 7v-8r. Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World …, passim. 95 Kapitän Stirling an den Konteradmiral Harvey, Februar 1817, zit. nach: Parra-Pérez, Caracciolo, Mariño y la independencia de Venezuela, 5 Vols., Madrid: Edicones Cultura Hispánica, 1954-1957, II, pp. 301-308, hier p. 307. 96 Geggus, „The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions“, in: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. XLIV, No. 2 (April 1987), pp. 274-299; Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789-1815”, pp. 1-50; Geggus, “The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on Blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean”, pp. 38-59. 93 94

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The consequences of the Saint-Domingue/Haiti-revolution for the “second slavery” To sum up, one can say, as David Geggus did it, that “the Black Jacobines, Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Saint-Domingue-revolution”, as it is the famous title of C.L.R. James, acted destructive as well as stimulating to the slavery in the big picture of the Atlantic. The only question is: On which local or regional slavery did it act destructive and on which stimulating? And one will have to say: In science, the shock of the slave revolution led to new forms: the historical comparison in the frame of contemporary observation of politics and contemporary politicization of history. The French “pearl of the Antilles”, Saint-Domingue (symbolised in the change of name: Haiti), was definitely destroyed- once and for all. On middle term, also the export sector of the British “pearl of the Caribbean”, Jamaica, got destroyed. The San-Domingorevolution definitely had a long-term stimulating effect, after ten hard years and a relatively short “golden age” of the Jamaican sugar production 1805-1820, on the development of the Cuban sugar production. The Spanish “pearl of the Antilles” 97, for nearly 100 years, carried the economical dynamics and the financing of the Spanish Atlantic Empire. In the Caribbean, there were, on the example of the three islands of mass slavery of the Ancien Regime, SaintDomingue, Jamaica and Cuba, three completely oppositional development decisions, development ways and, therefore, also types of emancipation as well as abolition. In Jamaica and on other islands of the British Caribbean, a reformative stop of the slave trade and- relatively late after (1808-1834/38)- of the slavery because of political and geo-strategic reasons took place. That’s way the is wrong: „The abolition of slavery in the British Empire was the first major act of emancipation in modern times“.98 This stop of the slave trade and the slavery in the Atlantic parts of British Empire had structural, political and media-historical causes: The strategic shift in the British Empire from the Atlantic hemisphere to the Indian hemisphere; the drain of the soil on the relatively little islands of British WestIndia (contradicted only by the advancements in British Guiana99) as well as the rise in cost of the working force after the abolition of the British slave trade. Media-historically, but performative as well, England at that time was “discovering” itself as a new global power of 97

Sivers, Jegor von, Cuba, Die Perle der Antillen. Reisedenkwürdigkeiten und Forschungen, Leipzig: Verlag von Carl Fr. Fleischer, 1861; Gallenga, Antonio Carlo Napoleone, The Pearl of the Antilles, London: Chapman and Hall, 1873. 98 Green, William A., British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment 1830-1865, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991 (erste Auflage: 1976), pp. 99. 99 Costa, Emilia Viotti da, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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freedom, originating in the spirit of conservatism and the radical Dissenting Protestantism. After the abolition of slave trade and slavery, it came to a short boom in the sugar production, and finally, after a bloody slave rebellion 1831-1832, to the “Econocide”. 100 The first major act of slave emancipation occurred in Saint Domingue 1791-1804. In Saint-Domingue, a revolutionary stop because of political and structural reasons took place (diminishing of the country in the North and a difficult development situation, especially in the South); emancipation and abolition were enforced with force by the slaves themselves and, however more as a shadow of a state, the (jacobine) state. In the wars, the military leaders of the free coloured people (Rigaud, Petion, Boyer and others) had to attach themselves to the Black “slave generals”. In Haiti, a new ethnos raised. In other societies, where there were less Black slaves and more coloured people, like in Venezuela, especially this experience was carefully analysed. In the following time, “Haiti” was created- As a real state (or rather states101). At the same time, Haiti was an Atlantic icon of fear. This icon of fear is constructed from the pictures of 1804. With them, racism became retrievable. And slavery became more politicised. The main result of the revolution for the former slaves in Haiti, however, was not the new state and not their constitution as well. The main results were freedom and land: destruction of the big plantations and the ownership of land for former male and female slaves (especially in the republic of Haiti under Pétion and Boyer). The slave revolution led to one of the biggest redistributions of land that ever took place in history. This redistribution was initiated by Petion (and imitated by Bolivar later), however, later only some parts of it could be influenced by the new state elites. With this new country, the now free Haitians got their own life. Now they had the possibility to show resistance towards the state and forced ways of life. Unconsciously but targeted, they correlated to “sub”-development to keep their familiar subsistence-culture. 102 In the 19th century, the disappearing small military and civil elites of Haiti disrupted themselves in conflicts between “Blacks” and “Mulattos”; to the “small Haiti”, to the country of the Black farmers, there actually was no connection (unless generals needed soldiers). This is the mentality and the “history”, given from generation to generation as a cultural remembrance. Today, Haiti is said to be the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. 100

Drescher, Seymour, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition, Pittsburgh: Pittburgh University Press, 1977; Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean ... 101 Trouillot, Silencing the Past …, pp. 70–107. 102 Fick, “Dilemmas of Emancipation: From the Saint Domingue Insurrections of 1791 to the Emerging Haitian State”, in: History Workshop Journal 46 (1998), pp. 1-15.

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Strongly influenced by the development in Saint-Domingue/Haiti, in the sense of the destruction of slavery and the general influence on the creation of the country, is the development in the other part of the old island La Hispanola, in Santo Domingo. Haitian military conquered the Spanish part; they proclaimed the abolition of slavery and the unity (of the two island-parts: 1822); only in 1844, Santo Domingo got “decolonised”- against Haiti. In Cuba, under the influence of the Napoleonic wars, it came to a liberalization of the Spanish crown towards the Creole elite of Havana; as well, it came to a quasi-breakdown of the order function of the imperial state. The colonial elite took its opportunity in sugar, the agricultural boom industry of the second globalisation. Actually voluntarily, the Creole elite of the island remained in the colonial status. A similar pattern, however between 1820 and 1850 on the one hand concerning sugar even more explosive and on the other hand flanked by a strong coffee sector, occurred in Puerto Rico. 103 For these elites, Spain was the “weakest lord” with the least power to get involved into the interests of the colonial elite. With slaves on plantations, Ingenios, produced sugar became the most important economical structure between 1820 and 1886 in the Spain Caribbean (in Puerto Rico, the sugar crisis does not start before 1850); the exception, since 1822, was Santo Domingo. However, reality and memory of plantation economy and the “superior culture” are historically so traumatic that they, over and over again, cause the predispositions to social explosions. The generation that has experienced the “superior culture” itself, mistrusts every modernisation “from above” and prefers to choose the way of economical and political isolation. Today, development sociologists also discuss the threat of a “Haitianisation” of Cuba (in the sense of a “nondevelopment” according to neo-liberal demands and an outer blockade). 104 Delayed, the Saint-Domingue-revolution also affected the development of slavery in Nueva Granada (the later Colombia) and in Venezuela (however, there already was a crisis before); So to speak, the elites preventively started the autonomy movement against Spain. Eventually to anticipate revolts of the Pardos according to the Haitian pattern. 105 Stimulating in a long run, the Saint-Domingue-revolution also affected the development of slavery in the new Southern Interior of the USA. Jamaica-type and Louisianatype of slavery, though being similar in the politically legal sphere conditions at least until 1820 in the sense of centre (Jamaica) and periphery (Louisiana), led, under the influence of

Díaz Soler, Historia de la esclavitud negra en Puerto Rico …, passim; Scarano, Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico …, passim; Picó, Fernando, Al filo del poder: subalternos y dominantes en Puerto Rico, 1739-1910, Río Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1993. 104 Zeuske, Schwarze Karibik ..., passim; Zeuske, Insel der Extreme ..., passim. 105 Zeuske, „Revolution im Zentrum der Karibik“, in: Zeuske, Schwarze Karibik ..., pp. 154-190. 103

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Saint-Domingue and its integration into different state systems, demographic pattern, forms of resistance and law systems, to completely different ways.106 Saint-Domingue finally had a stimulating effect first for the sugar production in Bahia and Pernambuco (until approximately 1840) and as well for the coffee production in the south of Brazil later. 107 For Brazil as well, “Haiti” originated as icon of fear and as a real impulse in slave rebellions and conspiracies. 108 In the shadow of these three most important modernisation paths with mass slavery, Cuba, Louisiana and Brazil, there also were booms in Martinique and Guadalupe as well as for British Guyana, the Danish Saint Thomas (slave trade109), the Swedish Saint-Barthelemy and the Dutch Surinam. In the sign of exhaustion after the “era of the democratic revolutions 1789-1848” and thanks to the breakdown of Jamaica, slavery in the Dutch area was maintained especially long. 110 Here we have, so to speak, the dark side of the age of the democratic revolutions in front of us. Around 1850 it seemed evident, especially with the success of the great “modern” agriculture including mass slavery in the USA, that “nation”, modern republicanism and slavery together seemed to be thinkable and realisable (that is why the so-called “annexionism” in Cuba took place, which describes an attempt of parts of the plantation elites to support the southern states of the United States of America). In the sense of those transfers (real breakdown as producer and competitor, that means a not completely voluntary transfer of “market share”, human- and capital-transfer, including experience transfer as well as study object in security questions and manipulable icon of fear), “Saint-Domingue” became the acceleration-object for the three most important paths (developmental paths) of the modernisation with mass slavery in the Atlantic-American area. Tadman, Michael, “The Demographic Coast of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas“, in: AHR, Vol. 105, Number 5 (Dec. 2000), pp. 1534-1575; Berlin, Ira, Generations of Captivity. A History of African-American Slaves, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. 107 Reis, João José, Rebelião escrava no Brasil. A história do levante dos malê em 1835. Edição revista e ampliada, São Paulo: Companhia Das Letras, 2003; Luna, Francisco Vidal; Klein, Herbert S., “The Growth of Coffee in the Nineteenth Century”, in: Luna; Klein, Slavery and Economy of São Paulo 1750-1850, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, pp. 53-78. 108 Reis; Gomes, Flávio dos Santos (eds.), Liberdade por um fio. História dos quilombos no Brasil, São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1996; Gomes, „Fronteras e mocambos: o protesto negro na Guiana brasileira“, in: Santos Gomes (org.), Nas Terras do Cabo Norte. Fronteiras, colonização e escravidão na Guiana Brasileira – séculos VVIII/XIX, Belém, Pará: Gráfica e Editora Universitária, 1999, pp. 225-318; Gomes,“Other Black Atlantic Borders: Escape Routes, Mocambos, and Fears od Sedition in Brazil and French Guiana (Eigthteenth to Nineteenth Centuries)”, in: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 77, no. 3 & 4 (2003), pp. 253-287; Gomes, Experiências atlânticas. Ensaios e pesquisas sobre a escravidão o pós-emancipação no Brasil, Passo Fundo : UPF, 2003 (Coleção Malungo; 7); Del Priore, Mary; Gomes (org.), Os senhores dos rios, Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 2003. 109 Dorsey, Joseph C., Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition: Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815-1859, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. 110 Oostindie, Gert (ed.), Fifty Years Later. Antislavery, Capitalism and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit, Leiden/Pittsburgh: KITLV Press/University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. 106

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As a consequence, the way was free for the development of the Black Caribbean of the 19th century. Its centres were not in the coast-planes of relatively small islands anymore, but instead in great savannahs and river valleys of great islands, coast-planes on the Mexican Gulf and wide continental areas of the Mississippi-valley. Now, also really great rivers, like the Mississippi, and several fashionable and fast growing cities, like Rio de Janeiro, Havanna, Matanzas and New Orleans, belonged to the landscapes of slavery. All that still in close relation to the big picture or, if one wants to say so, to the seascape of the Atlantic. Structurehistorically and culturally as well, the thing is relatively clear if one reads Ira Berlin, Dale W. Tomich and Peter Kolchin parallel: First, it came to the crisis of the traditional island-and coast slaveries in Northern America, like in whole America (with the exception of SaintDomingue, Jamaica and, partially, Cuba) in the second half of the 18th century. 111 Under the favourable circumstances of the massive demand of unqualified handwork in the peripheries of the second globalisation, three slave systems developed in British-America/USA, as Ira Berlin and Dale W. Tomich have shown structure-historically: The northern Not-plantation-system (New England-type) was quite different from the system of the “old slavery” that was used around the Chesapeake Bay (Virginia-type). In the south, the actual plantation-system developed in the “Rice-belt” of the lowlands of Carolina and Georgia up to Florida (Carolina/Georgia/Florida-type: “From Cape Fear in North Carolina up to the St. Johns River in West-Florida”), today all conceptualised by Ira Berlin as “Seaboard South” 112. In the lower Mississippi-valley there even was a new “booming zone” that in the following forty years developed to what Ira Berlin today calls “Southern Interior”.113 This new slave area can be divided into a very small sugar area in the southern parishes around New Orleans and a huge cotton area that, in 30 to 40 years, spread to the

Tomich, „The ‚Second Slavery‘: Bonded Labor and the Transformations of the Nineteenth-century World Economy“, in: Ramírez, Francisco O. (ed.), Rethinking the Nineteenth Century: Contradictions and Movement, New York: Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 103-117; Tomich, “The Wealth of the Empire, pp. 4-28; see also: Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery. Labor, Capital, and World Economy, Boulder [etc.]: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2004. 112 See also: Morgan, Philip D., Slave Counterpoint. Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesaspeake & Lowcountry, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 113 Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America”, in: American Historical Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (February 1980), pp. 44–78; Tomich, “The ›Second Slavery‹ …”, pp. 103–117; Tomich, “World Slavery and Caribbean Capitalism: The Cuban Sugar Industry, 1760–1868”, in: Theory and Society 20 (1991), pp. 297–319; Kolchin, American Slavery. 1619-1877, New York: Hill and Wang, 1993; Kolchin, A Sphinx on the American Land …; Tomich, “Spaces of Slavery, Times of Freedom: Rethinking Caribbean History in World Perspective”, in: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 57 (1997), pp. 67–80; pp. 140-163, siehe vor allem die Karte auf p. 160; siehe auch die Vergleichsvarianten, die Scarano (Mikro) und Kolchin (Makro) bieten: Scarano, Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico …, passim; Kolchin, A Sphinx on the American Land …, passim. 111

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states Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia (and further states114). The originating new slave system of Louisiana first was dominated by Creoles and Acadiens. However, soon it got took over by Yankees. The old centres of slavery in Northern America became double peripheries; referring to the world market and referring to the new centre in the south. New Orleans became the metropolis of a new, internal slave trade in the USA. In the territories which later were the heart of the slave-south, a model of slavery first developed that was based on Saint-Domingue. Louisiana became its centre (Louisiana-type). The most “French”, who were frightened away from Cuba in 1809, went to Louisiana. There were planters as well as petit blancs, administrators, employees, sugar masters, surgeons as well as affranchis, free Coloured, but also slaves. Between May and August 1809, approximately 9000 persons emigrated from Cuba to New Orleans (altogether, approximately 30.000 people had fled from Saint-Domingue to Cuba, and approximately 2/3 of them later went to Louisiana). But there also was a relatively strong migration to Jamaica. 115 First, the planters made sugar to the main product. Sugar, next to “king cotton”, remained an important product. They all were realistic-historian “comparators”, at the same time they represented, with their experience, entangling and transfers, with their life stories and their relations histoires croisées as well. We now relatively much about all these “comparators”. However, we know nearly nothing about the male and female slaves. 116 With the Atlantic-global demand for cotton and stimulations like sugar and coffee, large-scale-slavery became efficient and profitable. The institution of slavery, which, by the fathers of the constitution with their enlightened rhetoric, was said to become un-modern very quickly, became the basis of modernisation. Here, despite or just because of the comparisonblocks, which were embedded tightly in the specific national historiographies, the transfers became especially clear. Slavery was trans-national and cosmopolitan in its structures which were emphasised by the lords. It was trans-national, hidden and local in its slave cultures. This case especially dealt with the emigration of an economical culture from Saint-Domingue to Cuba and later also from Americans, Yankees, to Louisiana as well as with a flourishing internal slave trade along the Mississippi (and from East to Southwest; altogether, 2 million slaves were sold in

Für eine Definition des “Südens”, siehe: Ibid. Zeuske, “Las Capitanías Generales de Cuba y Puerto Rico, 1808-1812” (demnächst); Debien, Gabriel ; Wright, Philip, “Les colons de Saint-Domingue passés à la Jamaïque, 1792-1835”, in : Bulletin de la Societé d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe XXVI (1975), pp. 3-216. 116 Obwohl ihre impliziten Vergleiche bis auf die Ebene juristischen Schrifttums durchschlugen, siehe: Zeuske, García Martínez, „Notarios y esclavos en Cuba (siglo XIX)“ (demnächst in: Debate y Perspectivas“, Madrid). 114 115

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the antebellum-period117). So, from these transfers, the type of a new slavery in the south of the USA was created. In this sense, the USA as well, at least its south, was a part of the Black Caribbean; so to say the Caribbean of the USA. 118

Comparing today: entanglings, histoires croisées, transfers and comparisons What does “Comparing of slaveries today” mean119? First, it is a reflexive and critical fallback to Arango and Humboldt, who started with it. Second, a comparison today has to resolve the problem of comparing different spaces, including the mobility, the flux of informations and the experiences of persons with agency. Third, there exist three or four basis operations that are necessary for today comparisons. The elementary basis of every comparison is the formation of types (pattern) to realize similarities. In German the sense of the word „compare“ („vergleichen“) has to do with „same“ („gleich“); the formation of types or patterns implies the assumption, that under the same conditions raises the same, although the locations are different; more difficult is it with similar types under different times. Formation of types forms today a recognized sociological and historical method; if this method of deductive type-formation is refused because of a more empirical-anthropological and individualistic philosophy, a explicit comparison is not possible or only in very limited way. For example under the themes: effects of a weapon, a instrument or money in different cultures (“spaces”) or the effects of different slave-systems on the experience of a slave or a slave-woman who are sold from one to another. This understanding of implicit and inductive comparison is very near to the methods of cultural transfers and analysis of the perception although elements of comparison play their role. Comparing today is not only formal typeformation. The cronological run, the development, the information, the agency of individuals, and the structures in which types or patterns are shaped and with which they are interacting, are part of the art of comparison.120 But first of all: the perspectives have changed. These changes of perspective exist in three or four different aspects: Today, we believe in the slaves

Johnson, Walter, “Introduction: A Person with a Price”, in: Johnson, Soul by Soul. Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, Cambridge, Mass.; London, Engl.: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 1-18. 118 May, Robert E., The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1973; May (ed.), The North, the South, and the Atlantic Rim, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1995. 119 Werner; Zimmermann, “Penser l’histoire croisée: entre empirie et reflexivité”, pp. 36-77; Middell, Matthias, „Kulturtransfer und Historische Komparatistik – Thesen zu ihrem Verhältnis“, in: Kulturtransfer und Vergleich, ed. Middell, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2000 (=COMPARATIV. Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und zur vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung, 10. Jg., Heft 1), pp. 7-40. 120 Tomich, “Small Islands and Huge Comparisons. Caribbean Plantations, Historical Unevenness, and Capitalist Modernity”, in: Tomich, Trough the Prism of Slavery …, pp. 120-136. 117

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as the agents121 and not anymore, like Humboldt, the local elites as agents. The slaves were more or less strictly bound to the houses or plantations of their lords. From there they more and more influenced the culture of the originating and different American nation. This is the Afro-America-approach.122 However, at the same time they lived in connections concerning information, memory and culture of more or less Atlantic cultures, which trans-nationally were avant la letter. This is more the African-centred Diaspora-approach. 123 To this comes a third change of perspective: the one of the microstoria and the dimensions of experience and agency. 124 As well, we are in a reflexive relation to the past; exactly that is the core of postcolonialism; the reflexivity gets mainly influenced by methodical bonds at the at his time very critical concept of the “transculturation” (Fernando Ortiz125), as well as by the cultural transfers and the histoire croisée. Material can as well be found in the older “relation stories” and in travel research. In the diaspora research, it is just the other way round. Here, the starting point is more an ethnical and cultural essentialism, then comes the hybridity, and only then (if at all) the comparison, but in the major part of the cases cultural transfers126 and implicit comparisons of situations of passage as well as situations of before and after127 and their periods and interactions in a chronological or spatial order.128 Most of the time it are implicit comparisons mixed with transfers along timelines (that are part of every history). Scott, “Reclaiming Gregoria’s Mule: The Meanings of Freedom in the Arimao and Caunao Valleys, Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1880-1899”, in: Past & Present, Number 170 (February 2001), pp. 181-216; Scott, “The Provincial Archive as a Place of Memory: Confronting Oral and Written Sources on the Role of Former Slaves in the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98)”, in: New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, vol. 76 (3 & 4) (2002), pp. 191-209; Zeuske, „Hidden Markers, Open Secrets. On Naming, Race Marking and Race Making in Cuba“, in: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids vol. 76, no. 3 & 4 (2002), pp. 235266. 122 Mintz; Price, Richard, The birth of African-American culture : an anthropological perspective, Boston : Beacon Press, 1992. 123 Lovejoy, Paul E., “Identifiying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora”, in: Lovejoy (ed.), Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, London; New York: Continuum, 2000 (The Black Atlantic), pp. 1-29. 124 Zeuske, Sklavereien, Emanzipationen und atlantische Weltgeschichte. Essays über Mikrogeschichten, Sklaven, Globalisierungen und Rassismus ..., passim; Zeuske, „LUX VERITATIS, VITA MEMORIÆ, MAGISTRA VITÆ – 16 vidas y la historia de Cuba“, in: Opatrný, Josef (ed.), El Caribe Hispano. Sujeto y objeto en política internacional, Praha : Universidad Carolina de Praga ; Editorial Karolinum, 2001, pp. 173-197. 125 Coronil,Fernado, “Transculturation and the Politics of Theory. Countering the Center, Cuban Counterpoint” [Einleitung], in: Ortiz, Fernando, Cuban Counterpoint. Tobacco and Sugar, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995, pp. IX-LVI. 126 Eine klassisch methodische Arbeit in dieser Hinsicht scheint mir der Artikel von Robin Law über die “Außenbenennungen” “Lucumí“ und „Nago“ zu sein: Law, Robin, “Ethnicity and the Slave Trade: ‘Lucumi’ and ‘Nago’ as Ethnonyms in West Afrika”, in: History in Africa 24 (1997), pp. 205-219; siehe auch: Lovejoy; Law, “The Changing Dimensions of African History: Reappropriating the Diaspora”, in: McGrath, Simon; Jedrej, Charles; King, Kenneth; Thompson, Jack (eds.), Rethinking African History, Edinburgh, Centre of African Studies, 1997, pp. 181-200. 127 Chambers, Douglas B., “Tracing Igbo into the African Diaspora” in: Lovejoy (ed.), Identity in the Shadow of Slavery …, pp. 55-71. 128 Eine Auswahl: DuBois, W.E.B., The Negro, 1915 (Reprint, with an introduction by G. Shepperson, New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); DuBois, The World and Africa, New York: Viking Press, 1947; Herskovits, Melville J., The Myth of the Negro Past, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958; Mintz, Sidney; Price, Richard, The Birth of African-American Culture, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992; Kilson, Martin L.; Rotberg, Robert I. 121

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Forth finally, from the cultures of the slaves and their life histories we look at the middle ranks of structures and landscapes (for example plantations and their development) and to the macro-ranks of the big pictures of landscapes and seascapes as well as continents and ideologies. But also a such understood comparison cannot exist at all without the methods of transfers, the network-thinking and the reflexivity. The historical constructions of comparative perspectives are relatively clear. Most of the time, it are colonial perspectives, which have often seen the slaves (only) as victims, and concentrated on structures and “superior cultures” or who defended slavery. The starting point for the discursive and especially for the scientific analysis comparative customisation is the Saint-Domingue-revolution. 129 This discursive and scientific comparison is preceded by the implicit, real-historic comparison by protagonists from the plantation elites (for example Francisco de Arango y Parreño in relation to Jamaica and Portugal130 or Justo G. Cantero about the advantages and disadvantages of sugar production with slaves in Cuba and

(comps.), The African diaspora: interpretative essays, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1976; Kilson; Rotberg (eds.), The African Diaspora, Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn; Harley, Sharon; and Benton Rushing, Andrea, Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987; Lewis, E., “To Turn as on a Pivot: Writing African Americans into a History of Overlapping Diasporas”, in: AHR Vol. 100 (1995), pp. 765-787; Lovejoy; Law, “The Changing Dimensions of African History: Reappropriating the Diaspora”, pp. 181-200; Thornton, Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1880, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 (Studies in Comparative World History); African Diaspora. African Origins and New World Identities, Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, Ali A. Mazrui (eds.), Bloomington and Indiana: Indiania University Press, 1999; Crossing Boundaries. Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora, ed. by Clark Hine, Darlene; McLeod, Jacqueline, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999; Desch-Obi, Thomas J. Engolo: Combat Traditions and African Diaspora, Los Angeles: University of California, 2000; Lovejoy (ed.), Identity in the Shadow of Slavery, London; New York: Continuum, 2000; Mann, Kristin, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture”, in: Mann; Bay, Edna G. (eds.), Rethinking the African Diaspora. The Making of A Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil, London [u.a.]: Cass, 2001 (=Special Issue. Slavery and Abolition 22,1), pp. 3-21; Heywood, Linda (ed.), Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002; Lovejoy; Trotman, David V., Trans-Atlantic dimensions of ethnicity in the African diaspora, London : Continuum, 2002 (The Black Atlantic); Benton, Lauren, “Law in Diaspora: The Legal Regime of the Atlantic World”, in: Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures. Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 (Studies in Comparative World History), pp. 31-79; Chivallon, Christine, “Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: The Experience of African Diaspora”, in: Diaspora. A Journal of Transnational Studies 3, Vol. 11 (Winter 2002), pp. 359-382; Falola, Toyin; Childs, Matt (eds.), The Yoruba diaspora in the Atlantic world, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004, Kokot, Waltraut; Dorsch, Hauke, “Kommentierte Bibliographie zur Diasporaforschung” in: Periplus. Jahrbuch für außereuropäische Geschichte 14. Jg. (2004), pp. 163-169. 129 Natürlich kennt die Aufklärungshistorie Vergleiche; aber die sind eher theoretisch, durch starre (“ewige”) Konzepte gekennzeichnet und sehr statisch, siehe: Raynal, Abbé, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, Revised, augmented, and published in ten volumes, by the Abbé Raynal. Newly translated from the French, By J. O. Justamond, F.R.S with a new set of maps adapted to the work and a copious index, in eight volumes, London: Printed for A. Strahan; and T. Cadell, MDCCCXXXVIII (1788); Raynal, Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Établissemens & du Commerce des Européens dans les Deux Indes, 15 Bde., par Guillaume-Thomas [François] Raynal, Lausanne : Pierre Heubach & Comp., 1784 (4. Auflage). Auch die ältere englische Reiseliteratur oder die jesuitische Geschichtsschreibung oder die politische Ökonomie Frankreichs oder Schottlands kennt Vergleiche. 130 González-Ripoll Navarro, “Dos viajes, una intención: Francisco de Arango y Alejandro Olivan en Europa y las Antillas azucareras (1794 y 1829)”, pp. 85-101.

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Louisiana131) as well as by the male and female slaves. Real-historic comparisons by protagonists, who were involved in the problems of their time as contemporaries, and have relations to several other persons and groups, always implicitly involve histoires croisées as well (and vice versa, the relation can only be determined empirically). In the specific time and in the traditional historical representations, these implicit comparisons, entanglings and histories croisees have mostly been represented under the formats “relations” and “journeys”. One of the most important aspects in slave societies, but especially in post-slavery-societies (from which point of view, comparative stories of slaveries were written quite often), is the problem of the race.132 Most persons, also the travelling comparators (male or female) of the lath 18th and of the 19th century, already (or still, when talking about historians) accept a myth of the “races”, which mystifies the European and the “white” hegemony (or supremacy). Under these conditions of racial knowledge they were constructing their criteria for comparisons. A true sense of post-colonialism lies in the search for the new basis for comparisons in the history of slave societies and post-emancipation-societies in a criticism of that more and more tight race-construction. 133 Humboldt compared Cuba with all important slave societies of his time around 18251830 (around 1825, the New South of the USA is quasi not yet existent for him). Methodically, he especially uses numbers, demography and statistics. However, his scientific comparison more remained an exception from the rule, also because the more scientific operation “comparing”, around 1825/30, completely contradicted the two originating methods of historiography (historicism- Leopold von Ranke- and term-dialectics as well as idea-history of philosophy- Hegel134). Contemporaries and travellers first compared especially Saint131

Cantero, Justo G., Los Ingenios. Colección de vistas de los principales ingenios de azúcar de la isla de Cuba. Edición de lujo. El texto redactado por Justo G. Cantero, gentil.hombre de la camara de S.M. y alferez real de Trinidad. Las laminas dibujadas del natural y litografiadas por Eduardo Laplante. Dedicado a la Real Junta de Fomento, La Habana : Impreso en la litografía de Luis Marquier, 1857, pp. 4r/v. 132 Hannaford, Ivan, Race. The History of an Idea in the West, Foreword by Bernard Crick, Washington, D.C.: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 (Humboldt, pp. 262-264); Berlin, “Making Slavery, Making Race”, in: Berlin, Many Thousands Gone. The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Cambridge, Mass.; London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 1-14. 133 Hodes, Martha. “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” The American Historical Review 108 (February 2003), pp. 84-118. Several political scientists have grappled with the structural correlates of divisions by ascribed color. See, Degler, Carl N., “Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Barzil and the United States, New York: Macmillan, 1971 and, most recently, Marx, Anthony W., Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, The United States, and Brazil, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1998; and Klinkner, Philip A. with Smith, Rogers M., The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. 134 Zeuske, „'Geschichtsschreiber von Amerika': Alexander von Humboldt, Deutschland, Kuba und die Humboldteanisierung Lateinamerikas“, in: Humboldt in Amerika, ed. Zeuske, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001 (COMPARATIV. Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und zur vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung, 11. Jg., Heft 2), pp. 30-83; Zeuske, „Humboldt, Historismus, Humboldteanisierung“, in:

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Domingue with Cuba, then Cuba with Jamaica and, since the 1850s, Cuba with the South of the USA135 or vice versa (also often because exactly that was a, by geography given, travel route, which was already mentioned by Humboldt in his letter to Willdenow136). Or they compared Brazil with other continental Spanish colonies (despite also that was very rare, because Brazil, also and just because of his overwhelming size, was seen as an exception). 137 Ulrike Schmieder, who has observed travelling women and their attitude towards slavery, race and gender, does not mention one person who had visited all mentioned slave societies, the south of the USA, Cuba and the north-east or the south-east of Brazil (Salvador, Pernambuco or Rio or rather São Paulo). 138 Real-historically and constructivisticly, especially the Cubans (Jose Antonio Saco139) have started comparative perspectives. As an explanation for slavery, Saco used the same historical deep-dimensions (Romans and Greeks) that were also popular in the “superior cultures”, to explain, in the age of enlightenment and the abolition movement, why they still had slavery. 140 Saco especially looked at Brazil, because it was impossible for him to write directly against the slave trade and the slavery in Cuba. He referred to similarities in structure

Humboldt im Netz (HiN), II, 3 (I. Teil), (2001; Internet-Zeitschrift: www.unipotsdam.de/u/romanistik/humboldt/hin/hin3.htm); Zeuske, „Humboldt, Historismus, Humboldteanisierung“, in: Humboldt im Netz (HiN), III, 4 (II. Teil) (2002; Internet-Zeitschrift: www.unipotsdam.de/u/romanistik/humboldt/hin/hin4.htm). 135 Pérez Jr. (ed.), Louis A., Slaves, Sugar, & Colonial Society. Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801-1899, Wilmington: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1992; Pérez Jr., “Defining Differences”, in: Pérez Jr., On Becoming Cuban. Identity, Nationality, and Culture, Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999, pp. 24-38. 136 Humboldt, „An Karl Ludwig Willdenow“ (Havanna, 21. Februar 1801) (Dokument 41), in: Humboldt, Briefe aus Amerika 1799-1804, Ulrike Moheit (ed.), Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1993 (Beiträge zur Alexander-vonHumboldt-Forschung; 16), pp. 122-131, hier p. 124. 137 Eine „Nebeneinanderhalten“ dreier Sklavereien (Brasilien, Mexiko und Carolina) unter der Frage „Why African Slavery?“ findet sich bei: Menard, Russell; Schwartz, Stuart B., „Why African Slavery? Labor Force Transitions in Brazil, Mexico and the Carolina Lowcountry“, in: Binder, Wolfgang (ed.), Slavery in the Americas, Erlangen: Königshausen & Neumann, 1993, pp. 89-114. 138 Schmieder, „Sklaverei von Afrikanern in Brasilien“, in: Sklaverei zwischen Afrika und Amerika, ed. Zeuske, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag 2003 (COMPARATIV. Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und zur vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung, 13. Jg., Heft 2), pp. 26-43; Schmieder, „War die iberoamerikanische Sklaverei mild?“, in: Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte Jg. 4, Heft 1, Franfurt am Main [u.a.] (Frühjahr 2003), pp. 115-132; Schmieder, Geschlecht und Ethnizität in Lateinamerika im Spiegel von Reiseberichten: Mexiko, Brasilien und Kuba 1780-1880, Stuttgart: Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz Akademischer Verlag Stuttgart, 2003 (Historamericana, ed. König, Hans-Joachim und Rinke, Stefan; 15). 139 Saco, José Antonio, „Análisis por don José Antonio Saco de una obra sobre Brasil, intitulada, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 by Rev. R. Walsh author of journey from Constantinople, etc.” [1832], in: Saco, Colección de papeles científicos, históricos, políticos, y de otros ramos sobre la Isla de Cuba, ya publicados, ya inéditos, por ..., 3 Vols., La Habana: Dirección General de Cultura; Ministerio de Educuación, 1961, II, pp. 7172; siehe auch: Torres-Cuevas, Eduardo, „Ensayo introductorio. José Antonio Saco. La aventura intelectual de una época”, in: Saco, Obras, ensayo introductorio, compilación y notas: Torres-Cuevas, Eduardo, La Habana: IMAGEN CONTEMPORÁNEA, 2001 (Biblioteca de Clásicos Cubanos), Vol. I, pp. 1-99, hier pp. 35-37. 140 In diesem Sinne schrieb Saco später auch seine “Geschichte der Sklaverei”: Saco, José Antonio, Historia de la esclavitud desde los tiempos más remotos hasta nuestros días, 3 Bde., Bde. I und II: Paris: Kugelmann, 1875; Bd. III: Barcelona: Impr. Jaime Jepús, 1877/78; Saco, Acerca de la Esclavitud y su Historia, La Habana, Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 1982.

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and politics as well as in the behaviour of the elites. The huge empire was seen by him as a kind of “protective power” for the slave holders of his world in the middle of the 19th century. This peculiar search for imperial support was of course even clearer in relation to the USA. This often was directed against Great Britain. 141 Representatives of British interests, like Richard Madden, put very early a critical perspective of slavery against these defences of slavery. Madden was analysing also and very critically one of the main arguments of the defenders of slavery at Cuba, the myth of the “mildness” of Ibero-American slavery.142 Since 1830, the Brazilian executive, in a specific manner, followed the Spanish-Cuban political and legislative demands (prohibition of slave trade (1845 in Cuba and 1850 in Brazil), Ley Moret and Lei Rio Branco [“vientre libre” and “ventre livre”, 1870 and 1871], and abolition of slavery in 1886 and 1888).143 In a systemic sense exchanges, transfers and comparisons by protagonist took place, often mediated by Great Britain.144 Scientific comparisons of a conceptual style in the USA were especially discussed in the work of Frank Tannenbaum and Stanley Elkins (who, among others, based their ideas on Humboldt, Ortiz and Freyre)145; mostly either in reaction to Ulrich B. Phillips (internal)146 or Fernando Ortiz and Gilberto Freyre (external). 147 The first works came from W.E.B. DuBois, 141

Paquette, Robert L., Sugar Is Made With Blood. The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988; Paquette, “Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the Making of Territorial Louisiana”, in: Barry; Geggus, A Turbulent Time ..., pp. 204-225. 142 Richard Madden setzt sich als erstes intensiv mit dem Argument der „Sanftheit“ der kubanischen Sklaverei auseinander; er kommt zu dem Schluß, „dass die Sklaverei auf Kuba die zerstörerischste ist für das menschliche Leben, schädlich für die Gesellschaft, degradierend für den Sklaven, erniedrigend für den Herren und fatal für die Gesundheit und die Wohlfahrt [felicidad], [mehr] als in irgend einem anderen Sklavereiland“, siehe: Madden, Richard, The Island of Cuba. Its Resources, Progress, etc., in Relation Especially to the Influence of its Prosperity on the Interests of the British West India Colonies, London: C. Gilpin, 1849, Spanisch: Madden, La Isla de Cuba. Sus Recursos, Progresos y Perspectivas, trad. por Sarah Méndez Capote, La Habana: Consejo Nacional de Cuba, 1964 (Colección Viajeros), hier : Madden, „Condición de los esclavos en Cuba“, in: Madden, La Isla de Cuba ..., pp. 131-166; hier p. 142. Dabei ist zu bedenken, dass Madden (auch) die Interessen der britischen West-Indies vertritt. 143 Eltis, David; Walvin, James, The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Origins and Effects in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, Madison: The Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1981; Engerman, “Emancipations in Comparative Perspective. A Long and Wide View”, in: Oostindie, Gert (ed.), Fifty Years Later. Antislavery, Capitalism and Modernity in the Dutch Orbit, Leiden/Pittsburgh: KITLV Press/University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, pp. 223-241. 144 Bethell, Leslie, The abolition of the Brazilian slave trade. Brazil and the slave question (1807-1869), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970; Drescher, „Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective“, in: Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR) Vol. 68:3 (1988), pp. 429-460. 145 Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen …; Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life …, zur Debatte siehe: Fuente, Alejandro de la, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited”, in: Law and History Review 22:2 (2004) (www.press.ullinois.edu/journals/lhr/DLF22_2.pdf, besucht am 28. Juni 2004). 146 Phillips, Ulrich B., A History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt to 1860, New York: Columbia University Press, 1908; Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South, Boston: Little, Brown, 1963. 147 Ortiz, Fernando, Los negros brujos (apuntes para un estudio de etnología criminal). Carta prólogo del Dr. C. Lombroso, Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fe, 1906; Ortiz, Hampa afro-cubana: Los negros esclavos. Estudio sociológico y de derecho público, La Habana: Revista Bimestre Cubana, 1916 [Los negros esclavos, La Habana: Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, 1976]; Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azúcar (advertencia de sus contrastes agrarios, económicos, históricos y sociales, su etnografía y su transculturación), Introducción de

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Hubert Aimes Aimes148 Philip S. Foner and anthropologists like Herskovits and Mintz. Great sociological and idea-historical syntheses with comparative moments followed to the Big Picture of slavery (Davis, Patterson with a world-historic approach149). Then there came the social-historic middle-stage-comparisons of Herbert S. Klein between Virginia and Cuba150 and his “great” panorama of slaveries in Latin America and the Caribbean. 151 A pleading for the classical-isolating comparison, which at the same time is narrow on the one hand but on the other hand widely understood inside this narrowness, is done by Peter Kolchin, 152, surely based on his earlier experiences in comparing Russia and the United States.153 In the works of Stanley L. Engerman one can find classical isolating and external macro-comparisons.154 The most explicit and clear comparisons of slavery systems I found, were practiced by Alain Yacou (Spanish and French slaveries in the Antilles), Dale W. Tomich (Martinique and Cuba) and Barry Higman (North-America and the Caribbean). 155 David P. Geggus in many of his works about the Haitian Revolution is operation a kind of transfer history and entangled

Bronislaw Malinowski, La Habana: Jesús Montero, 1940 (Biblioteca de Historia, Filosofía y Sociología, v. 8); Ortiz, “El fenómeno social de la transculturación y su importancia en Cuba”, in: Revista Bimestre Cubana, La Habana Vol. XLVI (Julio-Dic. 1940), pp. 273-278; Freyre, Gilberto, Casa-Grande & Senzala, o.O.[Rio de Janeiro:] , Schmidt-Editor, 1933; Freyre, The masters and the slaves : a study in the development of Brazilian civilization; translated from the Portuguese of the fourth and definitive Brazilian edition by Samuel Putnam, New York : Knopf, 1946. 148 Aimes, Hubert H.S., “African Institutions in America”, in: Journal of American Folklore 18 (January-March 1905), pp. 15-32. 149 Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1776-1823, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975; Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death. A Comparative Study, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982; Patterson, Orlando, Freedom, 2 Vols, Vol. I: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, New York: Basic Books/HarperCollinsPublishers, 1991; Davis, „Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives“, in: American Historical Review, vol. 105, No. 2 (April 2000), pp. 452-484. 150 Klein, Herbert S., Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. 151 Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 152 Weil Kolchin sich mit den Feinheiten von Vergleichen, Transfers und reflexiven Entanglings gar nicht erst aufhält, siehe: Kolchin, A Sphinx on the American Land ..., pp. 2-6, 74-115. 153 Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom, Cambridge & London, Harvard University Press, 1887; Kolchin, “Some Thoughts on Emancipation in Comparative Perspective: Russia and the United States South”, in: Slavery & Abolition, S. 351-367. 154 Engerman, “Slavery, serfdom and other forms of coerced labour: similarities and differences”, in: Bush, Michael L. (ed.), Serfdom & Slavery. Studies in Legal Bondage, Essex: Addison Wesley Longman, 1996, pp. 18-41, siehe auch: Kolchin, “Some controversial questions concerning nineteenth-century emancipation from slavery and serfdom”, in: Bush (ed.), Serfdom & Slavery …, pp. 42-67. 155 Yacou, “Reflexions comparées sur l’esclavage dans les Antilles françaises et espagnoles, à la veille de la Révolution française”, in : Groupe Interdisciplinaire de recherche et de Documentation sur l’Amérique Latine, L’Amérique espagnole a l’époque des lumières, Tradition – Innovation – Représentations (Colloque francoespagnol du CRNS, 18-20 septembre 1986), Paris : Éditions du CNRS, 1987, S. 287-305; Tomich, “ Small Islands and Huge Comparisons. Caribbean Plantations, Historical Unevenness, and Capitalist Modernity”, S. 120-136; Higman, „Plantagensklaverei in Nord-Amerika und der Karibik“, in: Zeitschrift für Weltgeschichte, Jg. 3, Heft 2 (2002), S. 9-23.

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history with elements of implicit comparisons (between Saint-Domingue/Haiti and other societies of slavery).156 Macro-comparisons in Europe were made by Magnus Moerner. 157 These macrocomparisons were done on a global level, with the interesting aspect that the old MarxWilliams-thesis about the “original accumulation” is not used anymore for the “old Europe”, but instead for America (where it actually should be used). 158 Especially theory-led histories like to work with macro-comparisons. So we have an interesting debate about the rhetorical „free“ work in the centres of capitalist development in the nineteenth century, in which for example the legislation of work for a long time had the character of a quasi-slavery (and the production of resources was done by real slavery and contract-work).159 Comparative done studies, which consequently see slaves as actors, include histoires croisées and look from a micro-stage of lived lives of actors to the macro-structures (Big Picture), but as well to the concrete landscapes of slavery, are still quite rare. 160 Also rare, but already a little bit more spread are panoramas of slaveries (first of all American types of slavery), which analyse the different parts of the system (slavery) under different aspects (division of labour, methods of control by masters and states, living conditions, structures, like plantations, or processes, like abolition and emancipation with their specific laws).161 Geggus, “Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789-1815”, in: Gaspar; Geggus, A Turbulent Time …, pp. 1-50; Geggus, “Thirty years of Haitian revolution historiography”, in: Revista Mexicana del Caribe 5, Año III, Chetumal, Quintana Roo (1998), pp. 178-197; Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001; Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002 (Blacks in the Diaspora); Geggus, “The Influence of the Haitian Revolution on Blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean”, in : Naro, Nancy Priscilla (ed.), Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003, pp. 38-59. 157 Mörner, “Recent Research on Negro Slavery and Abolition in Latin America”, in: LARR 13:2 (1978), pp. 265-290; Mörner, “’Comprar o Criar’. Fuentes alternativas de su ministro de esclavos en las sociedades plantacionistas del Nuevo Mundo”, in: Revista de Historia de America 91 (Enero-Junio de 1981), pp. 37-81; Mörner, “Labor Systems and Patterns of Social Stratification in Colonial America: North and South”, in: Nord und Süd in Amerika. Gegensätze. Gemeinsamkeiten. Europäischer Hintergrund, Reinhard, Wolfgang; Waldmann, Peter (eds.), 2 Vols., Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 1992, I, pp. 347-363; Mörner, „African Slavery in Spanish and Portuguese America: Some Remarks on Historiography and the Present State of Research“, in: Binder (ed.), Slavery in the Americas ..., pp. 57-87. 158 Klein, “Slavery, the International Labour Market and the Emancipation of Slaves in the Nineteenth Century”, in: Slavery & Abolition, Vol. 15:2 (August 1994), pp. 197-220; Blackburn, Robin, The Making of New World Slavery. From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800, London/New York, Verso, 1997. 159 Mann, Michael, “Die Mär von der freien Lohnarbeit. Menschenhandel und erzwungene Arbeit in der Neuzeit. Ein einleitender Essay”, in: Menschenhandel und unfreie Arbeit, ed. Mann, Michael, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2003 (=COMPARATIV, Jg. 13, H. 4), pp. 7-22. 160 Scott; Zeuske, „Property in Writing, Property on the Ground: Pigs, Horses, Land and Citizenship in the Aftermath of Slavery, Cuba 1880-1909“, pp. 669-699; Scott; Zeuske, “Le ‘droit d’avoir des droits’: l’oral et l’écrit dans les revendications legales des anciens esclaves à Cuba, 1872-1909”, in : Annales HSS, No. 3 (maijuin 2004), pp. 521-545 ; Zeuske, Schwarze Karibik …, passim. 161 Schwartz, “Black Latin America: Legacies of Slavery, Race, and African Culture”, in: Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR) Vol. 82:3 (August 2002), pp. 429-433; Marquese, Rafael de Bivar, Feitores do corpo, missionários da mente. Senhores, letrados e o controle dos escravos nas Américas, 1660-1860, São Paulo: Companhia Das Letras, 2004, vor allem “Parte III: A teoria da administração de escravos nos quadros dos 156

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In the contemporary diaspora-research, Cuba (and in a specific sense Brazil as well) does only play a marginal role. 162 A really critical post-colonial history should not only analyse the trans-cultural fogginess of the slave regions or slave landscapes in America. First and especially, it should work off the hidden fogginess of the trans-Atlantic area for the slave cultures, about the slave trade and the reflux of former slaves163, with the actors slaves, former slaves, slave traders, sailors, seamen, ship-doctors, travellers, soldiers, Atlantic-Creoles164 (and the plants, animals and pathogens165). And this fogginess as a base has a tight network of exchange-relationships and bidirectional movements, not always only the arrows, which were shown in many traditional representations of the slavery and slave trade of Africa and America. Then, also the fogginess of the Atlantic area should be worked off in the sense of a trans-cultural area of hidden African-American culture of the slaves and of the working people and of the Creolisation from below166 – and not only as Anglo-American “Black Atlantic” (despite the basic approach being good and right and showing how far one can get with trans-cultural transfers). Historiographical imperialisms of that kind are wide-spread and nearly no researcher, who knows “his” slavery best, is completely free from that (so, all of us sit in a glass-house). 167

Estados nacionais”, pp. 259-376; Tomich, Through the prism of slavery – labor, capital and the world economy, Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. 162 Es gibt, wie immer, Ausnahmen : Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture”, in: Mann; Bay (eds.), Rethinking the African Diaspora …, pp. 3-21 und passim. 163 Verger, Pierre, Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos od Santos du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, Paris: Mouton, 1968 ; Sarracino, Rodolfo, Los que volvieron a Africa, La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1988. 164 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone …, pp. 17-28. 165 Crosby, Alfred W., Germs, Seeds and Animals. Studies in Ecological History, Armonk; London: M.E. Sharpe, 1994; Ortmayr, Norbert, “Kulturpflanzen: Transfers und Ausbreitungsprozesse im 18. Jahrhundert“, in: Grandner, Margarete; Komlosy, Andrea (eds.), Vom Weltgeist beseelt. Globalgeschichte 1700-1815, Wien, Promedia, 2004 (Edition Weltregionen), pp. 73-99. 166 Linebaugh, Peter; Rediker, Marcus, The many-headed Hydra: sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic, Boston: Beacon Press; London: Verso, 2000; Bartens, Angela, Der kreolische Raum : Geschichte und Gegenwart, Helsinki : Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1996 (Annales Academiae scientiarum Fennicae. Series B ; 281); Brooks, George, Landlords and Strangers : Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630, Boulder : Westwood, 1993 ; Lienhard, Martin, Le discours des esclaves de l’Afrique à l’Amérique latine (Kongo, Angola, Brésil, Caraïbes). Traduit du portugais par Beatriz Lienhard-Fernández et l’auteur. Préface d’Emmanuel B. Dongala, Paris: L’Harmattan 2001 (Collection Recherches et Documents – Amériques latines) ; Warner-Lewis, Maureen, “Posited Kikoongo Origins of some Portuguese and Spanish Words from the Slave Era”, in: América Negra 13 (1997), pp. 83-95 ; Lovejoy, “Identifiying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora”, pp. 1-29. 167 Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso 1993. Eine sehr schöne Kritik des historiographischen Imperialismus findet sich in: Craton, Michael, “Jamaican Slavery”, in: Craton, Empire, Enslavement and Freedom in the Caribbean ..., , pp. 161-184.

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Cuba-United States

In my opinion, Tannenbaum was wrong in his comparison between the USA and Cuba. At least he was wrong with the sources that he has used, and with the bases, he believed to be constituent, especially because the slaves culture themselves and the male and female slaves, as actors are not in the field of vision at all. However, Tannenbaum pointed out a series of elements that today are part of comparative research again, like the role of law, specific institutions, the duration of a transit from “slave to citizen” and others.168 In addition, Herbert Klein, in his comparison Virginia-Cuba169, in a specific sense, compared pears with apples. Especially because of the great differences between tobacco and sugar and because Virginia had its high point in the 17th and 18th century, and Cuba, in contrast, had its high point in the 19th century and other sources of slave trade. The same case we can find in the early work of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.170 Cuba between 1800 and 1840 cannot be compared with the USA; also later, a direct comparison is impossible. First, Cuba as part of the Spanish empire until 1840 is to important, and later Cuba is to little. More or less in 1850, the relations of size and power are clear: the south of the US and Brazil are the giants, Cuba is the flexible dwarf. Cotton (or tobacco) and sugar were too different worlds. The two cultures of slavery were and are not to analyse in isolated comparisons as clearly separate entities. Here better is a implicit comparison with transfers and nets in the foreground. In part-aspects, comparisons are possible (“great Cuba” and sugar-Louisiana), as Rebecca J. Scott has shown (for example about different “landscapes of slavery”). 171 Rebecca Scott first dared to compare the implicit comparison between Cuba, Brazil and Louisiana referring to the slavery in sugar or rather referring to the direct postemancipation (together with Seymour Drescher). 172 On her empirical works it gets clear that, especially because of the scale, actually only useful comparisons between the “mundos donde The best conceptualisation of these contradictions can be found in: Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited”, in: Law and History Review 22:2 (2004) (www.press.ullinois.edu/journals/lhr/DLF22_2.pdf, besucht am 28. Juni 2004); Fuente, “La esclavitud, la ley, y la reclamación de derechos en Cuba: repensando el debate de Tannenbaum”, in : Fuente (coord.), Su “único derecho”: los esclavos y la ley, Madrid: Fundación Mapfre| Tavera, 2004 (=Debate y perspectivas. Cuadernos de Historia y Ciencias Sociales, No. 4 (Diciembre 2004)), pp. 37-68. 169 Klein, Herbert S., Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. 170 Midlo Hall, Gwendolyn, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies. A Comparison of Saint Domingue and Cuba, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge and London ²1996 (erste Auflage 1971; Johns Hopkins Press). 171 Scott, „Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil, and Louisiana after Emancipation“, in: AHR, Vol. 99, Number 1 (1994), pp. 70-102. 172 Ibid.; Drescher, „Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective“, in: HAHR Vol. 68:3 (1988), pp. 429-460; see also a rather traditional form of isolated comparison: Turley, David, „Slave emancipations in modern history”, in : Serfdom & Slavery …, pp. 181-196. 168

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crece la caña” between Louisiana and Cuba are possible. In these similar worlds, which are connected to each other, also the trans-cultural and interweaved life-story of many actors, the fight against slavery and colonialism as well as the post-emancipation fit well in. The continental cotton-slavery of the USA with its variants (Mississippi, Missouri, Alabama) 173 had a complete different culture. Especially the scale- and size- problem in relation to slave numbers as well as continental areas (which got wider and wider with the waves of the Industrial revolution, especially with trains and steam-shipping) on the one hand and the size as well as the numbers of slavery-basic structures (ingenios, plantations) on the other hand did not make a good comparison impossible, but very complicated. In addition, the elites/owners (often slave smugglers and later rich merchants and imperial elites) in Cuba, because of the trans-Atlantic slave smuggling, were much richer and more potent then the elites of the US-south. Also in relation to the Brazilians, the Cubans had a lead in the technology of approximately 50-60 years. They made the rural sugar culture, and with it a number of dynamic city-economies (especially Havanna, Matanzas and Cienfuegos), to a nonrecurring slavery-region (the “Cuba grande”) in the Western world. Nonrecurring especially in its combination of cultural, social, political and technological dynamic. This Cuba Grande, relatively seen, was the most efficient slavery of modern history; however, it only was it relatively. In absolute numbers, the Cuba Grande could not reach the US-slavery (or the one of South-East-Brazil), lets say, until 1850. However, especially, the Cuba Grande and the island Cuba with its five or six slave cultures and the cultures of free Coloured and free Blacks cannot be compared with the USA (even if the racism, in theory, firstly was formulated harder and clearer in Cuba174 then in the USAHowever, that was more a politicization of social categories and history-constructions which never had its breakthrough). The cultures of the slaves themselves (USA: mostly Creoles; Cuba: A big number of different Afro-Cuban slave subcultures with own “holy memories”, like santería, palo monte, ekpe/abakúa, vudú and their historical forerunners) were not comparable, with the exception of the former delta-sugar-area and its dynamic centre, New Orleans. 175

Kolchin, “Many Souths”, in: Kolchin, A Sphinx …, pp. 39-73, siehe auch die Karte bei Marquese, Feitores do corpo …, pp. 336. 174 Arango, “Representación de la Ciudad de la Habana a las Cortes, el 20 de julio de 1811 ...”, pp. 145-189. 175 Rehder, John B., Delta Sugar: Louisiana's Vanishing Plantation Landscape, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999; Walker, Daniel E., NO MORE, NO MORE: Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans, University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 173

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There are transfers and entanglings between the Caribbean, the imperial power Spain and the USA: The sale of a part of the Spanish Caribbean, Louisiana, in 1804 to the USA176 (or the Floridas later) and the origination of the early sugar slavery as well as a number of influences, which have structured the early slavery in the “new” south of the USA, directly became clear from the Saint-Domingue-transfers (or by the “detour” Cuba (1792-1809) or rather by Jamaica177 or Florida178). In his defence of slavery in 1811 (against the constitutional Cortes in Spain), Arango paid clear reference to the constitutions of the newfound United States. At the same time, he invented the modern functional racism. Arango chose selective comparisons where they seemed to be useful for his point of view. Despite from that, he more believed the USA, in relation to sugar-production, export and market, to be a Cuban colony (additionally, the USA especially delivered unprocessed natural resources to Cuba, like wood and cattle). 179 That means that the comparison done by the contemporaries as well as the comparison in the frame of science (“later” in the sense of Hegel: “The owl only raises at dusk”, what means: science always comes later then real life, because it needs this lead in experience) are likely to be time-intense surely in relation to at least one criterion (structures, perceptions, state, empire, control, legislation), however, not too difficult to do. From a specific point onwards, they will only be of limited use. For post-colonial efforts of the future, not only the histoire croisée of slaveries, but also the comparison from the point of view, from the perspective of the slaves themselves, and their today still hidden worlds, will be important. These were per se, especially through slave trade, trans-Caribbean, trans-Atlantic and trans-American migrations and diasporas, linked to each other. 180 This means that, from the beginning on, they are more a topic for cultural transfer-research or research about histoire croisée, diasporas and entangled histories. However, they also built, under the influence of the former existing cultures of the specific colonial-, imperial- and “superior”-cultures (especially their territorial structures, religion, law- and punishment-systems), and the specific slavery societies (where did the predominant, as “whites” categorised immigrants, mainly come from), relatively separate, in the beginnings very hidden and local, Afro-American cultures in the landscapes of slavery. Here, the comparative analysis can start either on the micro-stage “of lived lives”, or on the stage of Paquette, “Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the Making of Territorial Louisiana”, in: Barry; Geggus, A Turbulent Time ..., pp. 204-225. 177 Debien ; Wright, Philip, “Les colons de Saint-Domingue passés à la Jamaïque, 1792-1835”, in : Bulletin de la Societé d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe XXVI (1975), pp. 3-216. 178 Landers, Jane G., Black Society in Spanish Florida, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999; Landers (ed.), Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000. 179 Arango, “Representación de la Ciudad de la Habana a las Cortes, el 20 de julio de 1811 ...”, pp. 145-189. 180 Landers, Jane, “Cimarrón Ethnicity and Cultural Adaptation in the Spanish Domains of the CircumCaribbean, 1503-1763”, in: Lovejoy (ed.), Identity in the Shadow of Slavery …, pp. 30-54. 176

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discourse and representation (mémoire, biographical representations, “slave voices” 181) or on the macro stage (like Yoruba diaspora in the Americas). A useful key concept could be the term “transculturation” by Fernando Ortiz. After all, the concept of “histoire croisée” or the one of “entangled history” fits much better for the historical relation of the worlds of slaves, the slaveries and slave societies than a crude twopage comparison. 182 Nevertheless: Also, here the possibilities of classical isolating comparisons are not at all exhausted. On the contrary, the objects for one or more of such comparisons are obvious: one could compare Havana (or Matanzas) with New Orleans as well as San Juan de los Remedios or Baracoa with San Agustín or Pensacola. These comparisons could have the advantage – because of the changes of colonial metropolis – to include transcultural levels of comparison and transfers. One or more comparisons of sugar slaveries on a bit lower levels between the sugar regions Louisiana, Cuba (and Puerto Rico) and, as already mentioned, Salvador de Bahia (or Pernambuco) would also be useful. 183

Cuba- Brazil

As far as I can see, there are never similarly wide transfers or entanglings between Cuba and Brazil, Brazil and Cuba184 than between Cuba and the USA. In the slave trade and between the slave smugglers networks, transfers and exchange did exist as well as comparisons, but we know very few about them.185 In the real-history of the debate about the slavery in Cuba, there is an experience-transfer between Brazil and Cuba in the works of Arango and the slavery-historian Jose Antonio Saco. In der Realgeschichte der Debatte um Sklavenhandel und Sklaverei auf Kuba gibt es Erfahrungstransfers zwischen Brasilien und Kuba im Werk von Arango wie im Werk von José Antonio Saco, des wichtigsten Woodward, C. Vann, “History from slave sources”, in: Charles T. Davis, Charles T.; Gates Jr., Henry Louis Jr., The Slaves's Narrative, Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 48-59; Zeuske, “The Cimarrón in the Archives: A Re-Reading of Miguel Barnet's Biography of Esteban Montejo”, in: New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, vol. 71, no. 3 & 4 (1997), pp. 265-279. 182 Werner; Zimmermann, “Penser l’histoire croisée: entre empirie et reflexivité”, pp. 36-77. 183 Tadman, “The Demographic Coast of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas“, pp. 1534-1575. 184 There are only a few exception beside of the already mentioned: Lamounier, Lucia, “Early Experiments with Free Labour & Patterns of Slave Emancipation in Brazil & Cuba”, in: Turner, Mary (ed.), From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves. The Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the Americas, Kingston: Ian Randle; Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey, 1995, pp. 185-200; Röhrig Assunção, Matthias; Zeuske, „’Race’, Ethnicity and Social Structure in 19 th Century Brazil and Cuba“, in: Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv. Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaften und Geschichte. Neue Folge, 24 (1998), Heft 3-4, pp. 375-443. 185 Jones, Adam, “Theophile Conneau at Galinhas and New Sestos, 1836-1841: A comparison of the Sources”, in: History in Africa 8 (1981), pp. 89-106; Pleticha, Hans (ed.), Sklaven für Havanna. Der Lebensbericht des Sklavenhändlers Theodore Canot 1826-1839, Stuttgart/Wien: Edition Erdmann/Thienemann, 1988 (Alte abenteuerliche Reiseberichte). 181

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Sklavereihistorikers in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Arango schlug schon in seinem berühmten „Discurso sobre la agricultura“ von 1792 vor, hispano-kubanische Handelsniederlassungen in Brasilien statt am Rio Gabon186 (und auf Fernando Póo) zu gründen. Comparisons are, especially because of the scale, the size- nearly I want to say, the mass problem of slave numbers, impossible in a useful way. In addition, Brazil, in a verticaltemporal view (older traditions of mass slavery in the plantation-sector) as well as in a horizontal-spatial view (mining-slavery in El Cobre/Cuba187 and in Minas Gerais/Brazil188 and more diffuse slaveries in other areas - for example in Maranhão189 - and gigantic borderand crossing-areas in Indian cultures played a incomparable different role190), shows completely different dimensions, quantities and ranges than Cuba. This does not mean that comparisons on the macro-stage would be useless at all, especially because there are hardly any historic South-South-comparisons and because as scientific South-South-comparisons, they are the absolute exception. A macro-analysis would have to start with a cartographic comparison in the same scales, that Cuba and Brazil- in contrast to USA-Cuba- hardly ever appear together, in the same scale, on a map (despite of the fact that they were belonging for long time to the area of catholic culture). Laird W. Bergad hebt in einem seiner letzten Artikel die “striking similarities in American slave systems” in Bezug auf die wirtschaftlichen Aspekte hervor. 191 Ähnliches gilt für die systemischen Aspekte der Sklavenkontrolle.192 For tight entanglings and transfers, on the other hand, the south of Brazil in the 19th and 20th century is too far away from Cuba. Coffee is not sugar. Cotton or cocoa near Natal are Recife were shaping quite different cultures than sugar near Matanzas or Cienfuegos; it would be very interesting under a closer look what types of cultures shaped these structures with slaves of the same (or similar) ethnic origin from Africa.

Arango y Parreño, “Discurso sobre la agricultura de La Habana y medios de fomentarla” (1792), in: Pichardo, Documentos, I, S. 162-197, hier S. 179. 187 Díaz, María Elena, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre. Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2001. 188 Bergad, Laird W., “After the Mining Boom. Demographic and Economic Aspects of Slavery in Mariana, Minas Gerais, 1750-1818”, in: LARR Vol. 31, Nr. 1 (1996), pp. 67-97; Bergad, The Demographic and Economic History of Slavery in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720-1880, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 189 Röhrig Assunção, Pflanzer, Sklaven und Kleinbauern in der brasilianischen Provinz Maranhão 1800-1850, Frankfurt am Main : Vervuert, 1993. 190 Gomes (org.), Nas Terras do Cabo Norte ...; Gomes,“Other Black Atlantic Borders ...”, pp. 253-287; Gomes, Experiências atlânticas ...; Del Priore; Gomes (org.), Os senhores dos rios ... 191 Bergad, “American Slave Markets During the 1850s: Slave Price Rises in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil in Comparative Perspective”, in: Eltis, David; Lewis, Frank; Sokoloff, Kenneth (eds.), Slavery in the development of the Americas, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2004, S. 219-235. 192 Marquese, Feitores do corpo, missionários da mente …, passim. 186

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Between 1800 and 1844, there was, in a specific sense from a Cuban perspective, an internal and external competition between sugar and coffee. When two hurricanes193 heavily damaged the Cuban coffee-plantations in 1844/45, the Cuban coffee production, with the help of the railway194 in the centre of the island, was defeated by sugar. Of course, the outer competition of the coffee production of Brazil, Venezuela and New Granada (and many others) contributed to that. São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro in the Southeast of Brazil developed to the centres of the world-greatest coffee-economies and to Afro-American societies par excellence.195 Comparable in the sense of similarity-comparisons is the “great” Cuba, in this framework, only with the sugar regions of Salvador de Bahia and/or Pernambuco until approximately 1850. 196 With the same precautions may be done isolating comparisons between the „small“ Cuba (the Cubas „without sugar”, the Cuba of tobacco or cattle) and the „small“ Brazils of free farmers or squatters197, of resistance and runaway slaves198 or the slave families.199 Comparisons are also thinkable between the landscapes of slavery or between micro-regions in Cuba and Brazil (like Vassouras200, Rio Claro201, Salvador de Bahia202 or Matanzas203).

193

Pérez Jr., Winds of Change. Hurricanes & the Transformations of Nineteeth-Century Cuba, Chapel Hill and London: The Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2001. 194 Zanetti Lecuona, Oscar; García Álvarez, Alejandro, Sugar and Railroads. A Cuban History; 1837-1959, Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 195 Luna, Francisco Vidal; Klein, “The Growth of Coffee in the Nineteenth Century”, in: Luna; Klein, Slavery and Economy of São Paulo 1750-1850, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003, pp. 53-78. 196 Carvalho, Marcus de, Liberdade: rotinas e rupturas do escravismo. Recife – 1822-1850, Recife: Editora Universitaria, 1998. 197 Schwartz, „Peasants and Slavery: Feeding Brazil in the Late Colonial Period“, in: Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992, pp. 65-101; Mattos de Castro, Hebe Maria, “Beyond Masters and Slaves: Subsistence Agriculture as a Survival Strategy in Brazil During the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century”, in: Reseña Histórica Hispano Americana 68:3 (1988), pp. 461-89; Mattos de Castro, “El color inexistente: Relaciones raciales y trabajo rural en Río de Janeiro tras la abolición de la esclavitud”, in: Historia Social 22 (1995), pp. 83-100. 198 Schwartz, „Rethinking Palmares: Slave Resistance in Colonial Brazil“, in: Ibid., pp. 103-136; La Rosa Corzo, Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba. Resistance and Repression. Translated by Mary Todd, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 199 Schwartz, “Opening the Family Circle: Godparentage in Brazilian Slavery”, in: Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels …, pp. 137-160; Slenes, Robert W., Na senzala, uma flor: esperanças e recordações na formação da familia escrava, Brasil Sudeste, século XIX, Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1999; Barcia Zequeira, La otra familia. Parientes, redes y descendencia de los esclavos en Cuba, La Habana: Casa de las Américas/Colombia: Ministerio de Cultura, 2003 (Ensayo Histórico-Social). 200 Stein, Stanley J., Vassouras. A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850-1900. The Roles of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985 (erste Auflage: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). 201 Dean, Warren, Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820-1920, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976. 202 Mattoso, Kátia M. de Queirós, Família e sociedade na Bahia do século XIX, São Paulo: Editora Corrupio, 1988; Mattoso, Bahia, século XIX: uma província no Imperio, Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1992. 203 Bergad, Laird W., Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century. The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

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Through the spatial separation, the isolating comparison without great entanglings and histoires croisées is theoretically possible (however, because of the source-situation, especially in the 19th century, this is difficult to keep up empirically). As well, the “great” Cuba and Bahia/Pernambuco, that means the Brazilian North-East, are in an idea-, ideology-, religious- and symbolically-historic network because of the policy of their metropolis, the influence of Jesuits until 1765 or the “icon of fear Haiti”, but also through the conceptions of modernization or the abolitionism. The most elegant of possible isolating comparisons would be these between cities like Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Cuba and Salvador de Bahia. The two imperial metropolis of Atlantic Rio and Havana in 1820 and 1830 present close similarities204, like also did Santiago de Cuba or Trinidad and Salvador de Bahia or Recife. Around 1820 Rio and Havana resembled each other like two Atlantic sisters. However, differences in quantity grew very rapidly: first because of the independence of Brazil and because of his imperial status; Havana as an imperial centre could only survive as part of another territory (Spain). Only in Rio de Janeiro around 1850 existed about 80 000 (78 855) slaves, into a total of population of 205 906 Menschen.205 Havana at the same time (1846) presents a total population of 84 930 free persons (56 558 whites, 28 422 libres de color) but only 21 988 slaves.206 However, we can find here also chaps in the similar-comparison. Havana in the forties and fifties of the nineteenth-century was part (and centre) of a network of railroads and cabotage-steamers which communicated the city with the most important landscapes and locations of the Cuba grande as well as with the most important port-cities like Cárdenas, Matanzas, Cienfuegos and Batabanó.207 From the main railroad-lines ramified little private railroads to the plantations. At the same time coffee from the Vale do Paraíba in Brazil, world-greatest coffee region was still transported by caravans of mules. The Cuba grande in the nineteenth century was a landscape shaped by the most modern technologies, shaped by urban as well as rural elements and direct interfaces to the world economy. The most important thing in such a comparison is the search for new theoretical approaches based on a shift of perspective away from the structures and lords and to the male and female slaves with their experiences, knowledge, memories and social negotiating as well

204

Humboldt, Cuba-Werk, passim; Karasch, Mary C., A vida dos escravos no Rio de Janeiro (1808-1850). Tradução Pedro Maia Soares, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000. 205 Karasch, A vida dos escravos no Rio de Janeiro (1808-1850) …, pp. 106-112, hier p. 107. 206 Cuba. Comisión de Estadísticas. Cuadro estadístico de la la siempre fiel Isla de Cuba, correspondiente al año 1846, La Habana: Imprenta del Gobierno y Capitanía General, p. 53. 207 Zanetti Lecuona, Oscar; García Álvarez, Alejandro, Caminos para el azúcar, La Habana: Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, 1987.

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as to the free Coloured, as Matthias Roehrig Assunção and Priscilla Naro practise it.208 Jane G. Landers for the early times of the circum-Caribbean slaves emphasizes their Cimarrón ethnicity209, what may be also valid for Brazil. Then, the next step could be the first isolated contrasting of the specific slaverylandscapes, their slave-economies (as contra-economies and complementary economies as well), the material culture210, the resistance and/or its Afro-American forms of organisation, also its slave-trade-, slave- and production- numbers211, its geographic-physic situations and its infrastructures as well as its sources in African cultures.212 It would be very useful, as Matthias Roehrig Assunção did it for Brazil (Rio and Salvador de Bahia), to do a comparison of the vertical development of local slave cultures to the contemporary popular-cultures. 213 Despite the masses of slaves in Brazil, Cuba could, also against Brazil, defend its special leading position in the sugar economy with mass slavery. Referring to the direct comparison Salvador de Bahia or Pernambuco-Cuba, the “Cuba Grande” was superior in real time (these comparisons are also about similar landscapes- however, with a different situation in the big picture of the Atlantic slaveries-, numbers and sizes: approximately 350.000 to 400.000 slaves). The competitors of the high-technology-agriculture in sugar in the “Cuba Grande” with their modern infrastructure (trains, steamers, harbours) even enforced, as “invisible hand”, in a specific sense, the great migration from north-east to south-east in Brazil (similar to the USA, from east to south-west). In the 19th century, in a specific sense, Brazil was, despite many turbulences, an empire resting in itself with some colonies: Angola,

Röhrig Assunção, Matthias, “From Slave to Popular Culture: The Formation of Afro-Brazilian Art Forms in Nineteenth-Century Bahia and Rio de Janeiro”: in: Iberoamericana. América Latina – España – Portugal. Ensayos sobre letras, historia y sociedad. Notas. Reseñas iberoamericanas, Año III (2003), No. 12, Nueva época (Diciembre de 2003), pp. 159-176; Naro, Nancy Priscilla (ed.), Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003. 209 Landers, “Cimarrón Ethnicity and Cultural Adaptation in the Spanish Domains of the Circum-Caribbean, 1503-1763”, pp. 30-54. 210 Berlin; Morgan, Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993 (Carter G. Woodson Institute Series in Black Studies); Reis; Gomes (eds.), Liberdade por um fio ...; McDonald, Roderick A., The economy and material culture of slaves: Goods and chattels on the sugar plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1993; Barickman, Bert J., A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Recôncavo, 1780-1860, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998; Howard, Philip A., Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998; Sartorius, David, „Conucos y subsistencia: el caso del ingenios Santa Rosalía“, in: Martínez Heredia; Scott; García Martínez, Espacios, silencios y los sentidos de la libertad ..., S. 108-127. 211 Klein, “El comercio atlántico de esclavos en el siglo XIX y el suministro de mano de obra a Cuba y Brasil”, in: Piqueras (comp.), Azúcar y esclavitud en el final del trabajo forzado. Homenaje a M. Moreno Fraginals, México etc.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002, S. 37-49. 212 Zeuske, Schwarze Karibik ..., passim. 213 Moore, Robin D., “The commercial rumba: Afrocuban arts as international popular culture”, Latin American Music Review, 16:2, Austin (1995), S. 165-198; Röhrig Assunção, “From Slave to Popular Culture: The Formation of Afro-Brazilian Art Forms in Nineteenth-Century Bahia and Rio de Janeiro”, pp. 159-176. 208

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Mozambique, places in Dahomey214 and some other ports at the slave coast. The Brazilian empire had features with whom no other slavery society of the world in the 19th century could compete. Referring to this imperial structure and the real-historic comparisons of the global position, a comparison between the south of the USA (and the Confederation 1861-1865) and Brazil would be quite useful.

Instead of a conclusion: visualisations and comparisons

Quite often, art reveals essence. Because of the fact, that the life histories of the painters normally are better known that these of the slaves they painted (or the life histories of many anonymous travellers as „comparators“), the construction of the criteria for comparison becomes clearer. The pictures about Brazil, especially the closest series of “slave pictures” of world history (Johann Moritz Rugendas), show that the artist, despite all severity of slavery or the richness of the masters, puts the humans to the centre, the main actors of slavery. Rugendas was in Brazil, in Mexico and in the former Continental Spanish America, however, not in Cuba and not in the USA. 215 The gigantic amount of male and female slaves, ex-slaves (male and female) as well as their strong marginalisation until today are responsible for the fact that many elements of popular cultures which Rugendas painted (and the sport, which can also be understood as performative art) have survived in some parts of Brazil until today. 216

Soumonni, Elisée, “Some Reflections on the Brazilian Legacy in Dahomey”, in: Mann, Kristin; Bay, Edna G. (eds.), Rethinking the African Diaspora. The Making of A Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil, London [u.a.]: Cass, 2001 (=Special Issue. Slavery and Abolition 22,1), pp. 61-71; Falola, Toyin; Childs (eds.), The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic world, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 215 Rugendas, Johann Moritz, Malerische Reise in Brasilien von Moritz Rugendas, Stuttgart : Daco-Verlag Bläse, 1986 (Faks.-Ausg. d. Orig.-Ausg.: Rugendas, Voyage pittoresque dans le Brésil, Paris: Engelmann & Cie., 1835); Richert, Gertrud, Johann Moritz Rugendas. Ein deutscher Maler des XIX. Jahrhunderts, Berlin: Rembrandt-Verlag, 1959; Carneiro, Newton, Rugendas no Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: Kosmos, 1979; O Brasil de Rugendas, Belo Horizonte : Editora Itatiaia, 1998 (Coleção Imagens do Brasil, Vol. 1); Slenes, “As provações de um Abraão africano: a nascente nação brasileira na Viagem alegórica de Johann Moritz Rugendas“, in: Revista de História da Arte e Arqueologia 2 (1995/96), Centro de Pesquisa em História da Arte e Arqueologia, IFCHUNICAMP, pp. 271-294 (englische Version: Ibid., pp. 519-535); Slenes, „African Abrahams, Lucretias and Men of Sorrows: Allegory and Allusion in the Brazilian Anti-slavery Lithographs (1827-1835) of Johann Moritz Rugendas“, in: Wiedemann; Gardner (eds.), Representing the Body of the Slave, London; Portland: Frank Cass, 2002 (=Special Issue: Slavery & Abolition. A Journal of Slave and Post Slave Studies, Vol 23:2 (August 2002)), pp. 147-167. 216 Röhrig Assunção, “Capoeira. Zur Geschichte einer afro-brasilianischen Kunstform zwischen Anpassung und Widerstand“, in: Rothermund, Dietmar (ed.), Aneignung und Selbstbehauptung. Antworten auf die europäische Expansion, München: Oldenbourg, 1999, pp. 317-344. 214

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In Cuba, Miahle, Cantero/Laplante and Landaluze217 have created a closed corpus to the landscapes of slavery from the perspective of the lords (or the society of slavery). In their works, the structures as well as the historical memory of slavery-architecture and slaverylandscape are in the centre. This dominance of the “superior culture” in the official art and culture as well as the tight survival of at least five different Afro-Cuban cultures (nonrecurring in the Americas) in the popular culture and in the syncretistic religions (and the strong influence of US-American culture) led to the breakdown of the Cuban fighting-sportculture of the Mani (circle-fight-dance with its origins probably in Sierra Leone and Cameroon218) one the one hand, and on the other hand to a strong growth of folk-piety, which secures Cuba a leading position for example in the Santeria. 219 In the United States (also in the south), there is no comparable close corpus, neither of slave pictures nor of pictures about the “landscapes of slavery” (despite the fact that many plantation-pictures do exist). The visualisation of slavery in the United States is more influenced by the hard debate about slavery-defence and emancipation in the form of several thousand newspaper-cartoons. 220 Despite the fact that the styles of painting, formats and techniques nearly explosively spread in the 19th century in the western hemisphere (a whole transfer-complex221), also in painting there is nearly no occasion for similarity-comparisons.

217

Mialhe, Frédéric, Album Pintoresco de la isla de Cuba, Berlin: B. Max y Co., 1853 ; Cantero, Justo G., Los Ingenios. Colección de vistas de los principales ingenios de azúcar de la isla de Cuba. Edición de lujo. El texto redactado por Justo G. Cantero, gentil.hombre de la camara de S.M. y alferez real de Trinidad. Las laminas dibujadas del natural y litografiadas por Eduardo Laplante. Dedicado a la Real Junta de Fomento, La Habana : Impreso en la litografía de Luis Marquier, 1857; Cantero, Los ingenios de Cuba, selección y textos de Marrero, Leví, Coral Gables, Fla. : La Moderna Poesía, 1984 ; Cueto, Emilio, Mialhe’s colonial Cuba: the prints that shaped the worlds view of Cuba, Miami, Fla.: Historical Association of Southern Florida, 1994 (Catalog of an exhibition held at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, Oct. 6, 1994 – January 30, 1995); Venegas Fornias, Carlos, “El libro de los Ingenios”, in : Malpica, Antonio (ed.), Agua, trabajo y azúcar, Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1996, pp. 87-99 ; Megevand, Sylvie, “Pierre- Toussaint-Frédéric Mialhe, un lithographe gascon à Cuba (1838-1854)”, in : Cahiers du Monde Hispanique et Luso-Bresilien. Caravelle 76-77, Toulouse (décembre 2001), pp. 443-453 ; Castellanos, Lázara, Víctor Patricio Landaluze, La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1991; Colección de artículos: Tipos y costumbres de la isla de Cuba por los mejores autores de este género/obra ilustrada por D. Víctor Patricio de Landaluze ; fototipia Taveira ; con un prólogo de Antonio Bachiller y Morales, La Habana : Editorial Miguel de Villa, 1882. 218 Oder nur in der Diaspora bei den sogenannten “Gangá” aus “Sierra Leone und Liberia”, siehe : Ortiz, Los bailes y el teatro de los negros, La Habana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1993, pp. 308 ; siehe auch : Röhrig Assunção, “’¡Vamos a vagar, camarada!’ El ‘Juego de Angola’ o la capoeira baiana en la primera mitad del siglo XX”, in: Olga Portuondo Zúñiga, Michael Max P. Zeuske Ludwig (eds.), Ciudadanos en la Nación, 2 Bde., Santiago de Cuba: Oficina del Conservador de la Ciudad, 2002/2003, II, pp. 123-129; Atlas etnográfico de Cuba. Cultura popular tradicional, La Habana : Centro de Investigación de la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello [CDRom ; s.a.]. 219 Zeuske, „Afrokuba und die schwarze Karibik“, in: Zeuske, Schwarze Karibik, pp. 247-336. 220 Wood, Marcus, Blind Memory, New York: Routledge, 2000; Vlach, John Michael, The Planter's Prospect: Privilege and Power in Plantation Paintings, University of North Carolina, 2002 (ich danke Frau Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf für die Hinweise). 221 Bann, Stephen, Printmakers, painters and photographers in nineteenth-century France, New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2001.

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