The Politics of Slavery and Antislavery in the Late Spanish Empire

FAIN: HB-50590-15

Emily Berquist Soule
CSU, Long Beach (Long Beach, CA 90840-0004)

This manuscript examines the dynamics of slavery and antislavery in the late Spanish Empire. It traces early antislavery and abolitionist sentiment prior to the independence of the Spanish American mainland, and it also examines the pro-slavery policies of the Spanish crown at the imperial level, including attempts to create slave trading companies and a slave trade depot in the Gulf of Guinea. Neither of these topics have been adequately addressed in the scholarship. My proposed work aims to confront this lacuna through tracing how the competing forces of economic interest in the slave trade and moral concerns for slave welfare created a uniquely tense program for the politics of slavery. By unpacking it, my work will add a previously unexplored dimension to our understanding of early antislavery in the Atlantic world, and the politics of governance in the late Spanish Empire.