This book is a festschrift for Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, who died in 2015. Nowara’s innovation was to place the history of nineteenth-century slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico within the broader context of the Spanish Empire. Consistent with the spirit of his work, Atlantic Transformations invites another change of historical scale to revisit the topics of slavery and empire, moving from Nowara’s imperial approach to an even broader analytical framework based on the concept of the second slavery.
Originally proposed by Tomich, second slavery is an analytical category intended to trace the expansion of black slavery in the nineteenth-century U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil within the historical context of growing global industrial economies and post-colonial states. After the Age of Revolution, the social and material organization of black slavery went through qualitative and quantitative transformations, thus becoming key to processes of both the accumulation of capital and the organization of...