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Slave Revolts in Puerto Rico: Conspiracies and Uprisings, 1795–1873

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-021

1527-1900

Elizabeth W. Kiddy,

Caribbean history, culture, and politics

Slave Revolts in Puerto Rico was first published in 1985 as Esclavos Rebeldes; as the preface to the English edition points out, the book caused a sensation in Puerto Rico when it first appeared. Baralt confronted head-on the facile assumption that slaves in Puerto Rico were more docile and less likely to revolt. Using historical records from a number of municipal and national archives, Baralt amply demonstrated that between 1795 and 1848 there were 22 documented conspiracies (imagined or not), attempted uprisings, and revolts on the island. At the time, the study was an important and welcome addition to a nascent field of research on slave revolts in the Americas. Today, although the study of slavery in Puerto Rico has lagged behind the excellent work done in other areas of the Americas, much has changed. Because the author and the editors did not take these changes into account, the study is dated; it lacks the critical theoretical approaches that animate the current literature on the many responses to slavery.The main argument of the book is that there were slave revolts in Puerto Rico, and the author demonstrates in intimate detail that indeed the island was not immune to revolt. The study is divided into 11 short chapters that cover slave revolts and conspiracies more or less chronologically, and a 12th that examines murders committed by slaves. The material is presented in such detail that sometimes the reader can almost hear the whispering of the slaves as they plotted among themselves. This strength becomes one of the weaknesses of the study, because the work is so detailed that the material becomes repetitive and lacks cohesion. A new and extended introduction could have elucidated some of the themes that tie the material together, including links between the intensification of sugar production, the concomitant influx of African slaves, the rise in the number of slave revolts, and the fear and harsh response of the authorities. The link of all of these circumstances to the Haitian Revolution, while elaborated in the beginning of the book, could also have served as an axis around which to build a more critical and cohesive argument. The conclusion introduces some of these themes, more as a call for future research, but much of that research has now been done for other areas of the Americas. Examining the slave revolts in Puerto Rico through the lens of some of these new approaches would have helped to bring the well-documented revolts into clearer focus.There are other problems as well. The work includes a cover illustration as well as reproductions of woodcuts, engravings, drawings, and photos that begin each chapter. The images seem to span representations of slave revolts and black laborers from the sixteenth through the early twentieth century, but it is impossible to tell because there is absolutely no reference of time or place given for any of them. Images can and do serve as documentary evidence, but not when taken out of context. When used in this way, not only do images fail to carry the argument of the text forward, but they also send an uncomfortable message that all slave revolts and black laborers, across time and space, were the same. In addition to the problem with the images, the translation is too literal in places, making the text choppy and difficult to read.Since 1985, there has been a veritable boom of scholarship on slave revolts and conspiracies across the Americas, studies that examine in detail the origins, realization, and results of these real and imagined revolts. More recently, scholars have examined revolts and other types of responses to slavery, often unpacking the traditional accommodation/resistance model and examining slave responses as a direct result of Africans’ understandings of power relationships. Other scholars have done excellent and detailed work looking across the Atlantic to African societies in order to better understand the multiple motivations for the actions and reactions of enslaved men and women. All of these approaches seem to simmer under the surface of the material presented in the Slave Revolts in Puerto Rico. Baralt admits in the preface that his more recent work has focused on twentieth-century Puerto Rico and expresses his hope that the English edition of this earlier work will generate new research on slave revolts in Puerto Rico. Indeed, the topic deserves a fresh look that combines some of the raw material presented in this text with the more critical contemporary approaches to the study of slave revolts in the Americas.