Description

“Deftly uses the available parish registers to document the stages of the coming of African women and men to Puerto Rico in the eighteenth century and reveals patterns of family formation and bonds of solidarity a few of the African slaves and with the rest of society.”― Fernando Pico, creator of Puerto Rico Remembered “An exceptionally well researched, highly original, cogently argued and engagingly written work.”―Franklin W. Knight, coeditor of Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context “A welcome contribution to the history of eighteenth-century Puerto Rico and a very powerful model for anyone the use of sacramental records to study slave life in colonial Latin The united states.”―David Wheat, Michigan State University Scholarship on slavery in the Caribbean often emphasizes sugar and tobacco production, but this unique work illustrates the importance of the region’s hato economy―a combination of livestock ranching, foodstuff cultivation, and timber harvesting―on the living patterns among slave communities. David Stark makes use of extensive Catholic parish records to provide a comprehensive examination of slavery in Puerto Rico and across the Spanish Caribbean. He reconstructs slave families to examine incidences of marriage, in addition to birth and death rates. The result are never-before-analyzed details on how many enslaved Africans came to Puerto Rico, where they came from, and how their populations grew through natural increase. Stark convincingly argues that when animal husbandry drove much of the island’s economy, slavery was once less harsh than in better-known plantation regimes geared toward crop cultivation. Slaves in the hato economy experienced more favorable conditions for family formation, quite relaxed work regimes, higher fertility rates, and lower mortality rates.
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