Empire and Antislavery

Résumé du livre

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara builds his narrative around three pivotal moments. The first is the decade of the 1830s when Spanish revolutionaries consolidated a new imperial order that reconciled liberal institutions in the metropolis with slavery and nonrepresentative rule in the Antilles, provoking important criticisms of slavery, racial conflict, and Spanish rule from members of colonial society. The second focal point is the Liberal Union (1854-1868), during which dramatic transformations in both the Spanish and the imperial public spheres occurred, setting the stage for antislavery mobilization and new transatlantic political alliances. Finally, Schmidt-Nowara analyzes the Abolitionist Society's challenge to colonial slavery made in the aftermath of the Spanish and Cuban revolutions of 1868.