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Disease, Resistance, and Lies: The Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba by Dale Graden

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-3596054

1558-1454

Richard Huzzey,

History of Medicine and Tropical Health

In 1849, just a year before Brazilian politicians acted to suppress the illegal slave trade to their country, two of them died following an outbreak of yellow fever introduced into the state of Bahia by infected mariners. Readers of this intriguing and innovative book by Dale Graden will not shed any tears for Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos and the Viscount of Maché: Both men fervently defended the slave trade and opposed efforts to stop it. However, Graden traces the midcentury suppression of Brazilian and Cuban slave trades to the threats—including infectious diseases—brought by slave ships rather than to the politics and policies of men such as the two stricken senators. The governor of Bahia at the time, Francisco Gonςalves Martin, denied any such links and suggested that the carrier ship had sailed from New Orleans, not Cuba; Graden posits that this denial was typical of the lies told to defend the slave trade, in which Martin had a personal stake (71–78).Beyond the attractions of a comparative study of two of the most significant and late-lingering slave societies in the Americas, Graden’s approach highlights how histories of disease and resistance should be “intertwined” (61). Alternating between his two Latin American case studies in the first half of the book, Graden skillfully traces fears of diseases such as cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox alongside a “second vector of infection” (58) in the examples of slave resistance in other parts of the Atlantic world. The book makes a clear and valuable historiographical intervention in asserting epidemiological and subaltern pressures alongside domestic political changes and British pressure in the two countries.Graden’s principal primary sources are drawn from the FO Foreign Office 84 files of the British Slave Trade Department, held by the UK National Archives and now available online. These naturally illuminate the well-documented campaign judgments and speculations of Foreign Office diplomatists, Royal Navy officers, and their informants during the long campaign of anti–slave trade suppression in the fifty years following the Napoleonic Wars. At times, Graden might do more to explain the grounds for his suspicion or faith in these sources: on page 79, Consul James Hudson is cited as a reliable judge of public disillusion with the slave trade in Brazil following so many epidemics linked to the landing of newly arrived Africans; however, on page 195 the judgment of Consul James Kennedy about the lack of threats from slave resistance in the 1850s and 1860s is rejected (alongside recent research by historians Manuel Barcia and Gabina La Rossa Corbo).Whatever the perils of British sources as the principal evidence in this study, Graden is adept at drawing important, unacknowledged themes from them. For example, he reveals the horror expressed by Cuban authorities at the presence of free black British sailors on HMS Romney, a surplus hulk in the harbor of Havana, after 1837 (59). The decommissioned ship was provided to quarantine and confine Africans liberated from slave ships by the Royal Navy, but the dangerous example of armed, free men of color introduced a new peril into the Spanish colony: the example of the successful revolution in Haiti or successive insurrections in the British West Indies meant that black outsiders seemed likely to bring murderous conspiracies with them. We may query how far British naval suppression inspired African resistance, as Graden suggests (97), but Spanish complaints to the Foreign Office certainly demonstrate how the Romney and its black crew heightened local anxieties.With similar skill, one of the most impressive chapters of the book uses records of the mixed commission courts and other official correspondence to trace the role of African translators and interpreters in the anti–slave trade campaigns. Graden persuasively argues (177) that the mixed commission courts were only possible thanks to African interpreters (a conclusion that will complement publications in press by John Rankin, demonstrating that the Royal Navy’s cruisers only sailed thanks to West African sailors’ labor during the recurring period when the Britons aboard were laid low by illness). He also suggests that the ability to speak Portuguese or Spanish was such an important determinant of slaves’ legal or illegal status that some slaveholders taught a little language to disguise the recent introduction of African arrivals (162).Macroeconomic explanations for the growth of antislavery sentiment have enjoyed little support from recent scholars; attention to slavery as a dynamic, inventive form of capitalism and the conceptualization of a nineteenth-century “second slavery” in the postcolonial Americas both suggest that profit continued to encourage the inhuman traffic. In looking for noneconomic, yet material, factors, Graden’s attention to disease, alongside resistance, is particularly novel in focusing future research on changing perceptions of the slave trade in wider society. His attention to the wisdom and skepticism of the “common folk” (72) in Cuba and Brazil suggests that we will need further, specialized studies of popular opinion and political anxieties to explain how the slave trade transformed from a public interest to a national threat from rebellious and/or infectious Africans.Moreover, by framing his study around the ending of the slave trades, Graden aligns his work with those paying attention to the varieties, not just the similarities, of transatlantic rejections of slavery. Just as Christopher Leslie Brown and Brycchan Carey have encouraged historians of the Anglophone Caribbean and North America to explore antislavery ideas before popular abolitionism, so Graden follows a host of scholars in separating the importation of enslaved Africans from the emancipation of those toiling in the New World. Though Graden suspects Spanish authorities of stifling public debate about disease and African insurrections, he quotes memorials or petitions from Cubans fearing future rebellion; they urged slave-trade abolition as part of an ameliorative strategy to avoid emancipation or revolution.It is impressive that British diplomats collected copies of such memorials to report back to London, though future work with Spanish sources will need to explore their local contexts more fully. While Graden, in assessing the demise of the Brazilian slave trade, supplements his British official sources with Portuguese-language accounts, he relies more on secondary sources for the Cuban chapters. There, he offers a valuable and astute synthesis of work by the likes of Matt Childs, Manuel Barcia, and Michele Reid-Vasquez, adding value by interpreting their research in light of his expertise on Brazil. The publisher’s decision to omit a bibliography will be regretted by students and instructors otherwise tempted to place such a well-informed and wide-ranging book at the center of college classes on the slave trade.This volume is a significant contribution to international (and national) studies of the transatlantic slave trade. Graden’s broader arguments will prompt further studies, even if he is wisely cautious in suggesting how he rates the causal factors at play. While Brazilian politicians such as Vasconcelos and the Viscount died from diseases introduced by slave traders, Graden admits that the impact of disease in 1849 on Brazilian abolition in 1850 is difficult to measure (78). In the final sentence of the book, he suggests “a decisive role” for Africans (216), but shies away from tracing how reception of resistance and disease directed the decisive shifts in government policy. Even if he does not stake out strong claims for agency in the “demise” of the slave trade, his book demonstrates the fruits of placing traditional political histories of abolition in dialogue with somatic and subaltern turns in studies of Atlantic slavery.