Spanish Empire & Antislavery

I have just read (and re-read!) María Elena Diaz’s important new book From Colonial Cuba to Madrid (Cambridge, 2025). This is a powerful book that thinks through big and important questions with a unique source base. At one level it is a fantastic account of a group freedom suit stemming from the copper mines in eastern Cuba. But more than thinking about these litigants, it thinks with them. It thinks about their ideas of empire and belonging. It does so by using the category of the town or village as a system of mobilizing rights. And it interrogates the claims to nativity and birthright the litigants made over the arc of their case. By doing that, Diaz helps rethink some of the most pervasive categories and transitions in the literature of the early nineteenth century, most especially with some very smart engagement with Tamar Herzog’s classic, Defining Nations.

And, as always, I returned to a beloved classic. This time by the late Chris Schmidt-Nowara, whom we lost much too soon.