Publications using SSDA data
African Baptisms in Havana, Cuba, 1590-1600.
Jim Schindling, David Wheat, Jane Landers
This volume contains information on over one thousand Africans and people of African origin as depicted in Havana’s earliest extant baptismal register, a bound volume titled Libro de Barajas: Bautismos (Miscellaneous Book: Baptisms). Presently held in the Sagrada Catedral de San Cristóbal de La Habana in Havana, Cuba – and viewable online in digital format via the Slave Societies Digital Archive – the Libro de Barajas contains 1,223 baptismal entries that were recorded in Havana's main church (iglesia mayor) between January 1590 and January 1600, a period of rapid growth. Granted the title of 'city' in 1592, Havana was already one of the major ports associated with the Spanish Atlantic convoy system known as the Carrera de Indias and was typically the final port of call for Iberian vessels sailing from the Caribbean toward Europe.
Read more here...Africans and 'nations' in the slave trade through parish registers: preliminary notes for comparative perspectives on Brazil and Cuba in the seventeenth century.
Flavio Gomes
In this paper, we compare classification patterns for African “nations” in some parts of Brazil and Cuba. Taking into consideration some montage areas of the slave economy in the seventeenth century, we evaluate how African “nations” could appear in demographic contexts and their relationships with the slave trade and connections with Africa. Following some perspectives of Atlantic history, the main idea is take a comparative approach to the formation of Africans’ identities, classifications and social structures in the Americas.
Read more here...Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640.
David Wheat
This work resituates the Spanish Caribbean as an extension of the Luso-African Atlantic world from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, when the union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns facilitated a surge in the transatlantic slave trade. After the catastrophic decline of Amerindian populations on the islands, two major African provenance zones, first Upper Guinea and then Angola, contributed forced migrant populations with distinct experiences to the Caribbean. They played a dynamic role in the social formation of early Spanish colonial society in the fortified port cities of Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Santo Domingo, and Panama City and their semirural hinterlands.
Read more here...Baptismal Records in the Study of the Illegal Havana Slave Trade, 1821-1843
Barsom, Andrew George
This thesis describes a dataset drawn from the baptismal registers of four Havana-area churches. Baptism entries date from between 1821 and 1843 and include the baptisms of 7,181 Africans. The goal of creating this thesis is to understand more precisely the demographics of the illegal slave trade, which carried hundreds of thousands of Africans to Cuba over the course of the nineteenth century. It includes data on the age, sex, ethnicity, origin, and legal status of these Africans. Results are then compared to other sources of data on Africans trafficked to Havana during this period and the implications are discussed.
Read more here...De Cimarrones: Raza y Disidencia En Autobiografía De Juan Francisco Manzano
Elvira Morell Aballí
Colonial officials in Cuba implemented precautionary measures to stifle the flee attempts of slaves and regulate their capture. Owners despaired over the frequent escapes of their slaves. The runaway slave emerges as a literary figure from an abolitionist nuance or as a resource to perpetuate slavery as an institution. "Unauthorized" voices such as that of the slave who narrates his reality stand out in Autobiografía by the enslave poet Juan Francisco Manzano. Wrapped in a veil of tears and punishment, the autobiographical subject surreptitiously emerges in the text as a maroon; the geographies of Havana and Matanzas diverge culturally and racially, fueling a feeling of freedom. An image of Manzano as "good slave" contrast in the text with underlying elements that describe him as a rebellious entity—in a "family" tradition of seditions.
Read more here...Enslaved Women and Creoles in Guadalajara’s Slave Market, 1615–1735
Delgadillo Núñez, Jorge E.
Based on an extensive documentary database, this study charts the evolution of the slave market in seventeenth-century Guadalajara. The case of colonial Guadalajara offers a ascinating contrast to the better-known markets of Mexico City, Puebla, and Veracruz. Contrary to what happened in those cities, the local slave trade to Guadalajara peaked after 1640. Slavery thus remained significant for the economy of the region until at least the beginning of the eighteenth century. The study shows how the slave market of Guadalajara transitioned from more enslaved Africans being sold at the beginning of the century to mostly American-born slaves sold at the end of the period; from mostly enslaved negros sold to a majority of enslaved mulatos; and from more enslaved men being sold at the beginning of the century to more enslaved women sold at the end. These processes happened in the midst of gradually decreasing slave prices across the whole period. By shifting away the focus from Central Mexico to a lesser-known place, this article nuances our understanding of the transatlantic slave trade to Mexico and offers a reinterpretation of the history of colonial Guadalajara’s slave market.
Read more here...From Dust to Digital: Ten Years of the Endangered Archives Programme.
Jane Landers, Pablo F. Gómez, José Polo Acuña, and Courtney J. Campbell
Much of world’s documentary heritage rests in vulnerable, little-known and often inaccessible archives. Many of these archives preserve information that may cast new light on historical phenomena and lead to their reinterpretation. But such rich collections are often at risk of being lost before the history they capture is recorded. This volume celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Endangered Archives Programme at the British Library, established to document and publish online formerly inaccessible and neglected archives from across the globe. From Dust to Digital showcases the historical significance of the collections identified, catalogued and digitised through the Programme, bringing together articles on 19 of the 244 projects supported since its inception. These contributions demonstrate the range of materials documented — including rock inscriptions, manuscripts, archival records, newspapers, photographs and sound archives — and the wide geographical scope of the Programme. Many of the documents are published here for the first time, illustrating the potential these collections have to further our understanding of history.
Read more here...Getting to Know the Kumbukumbu Exhibition at the National Museum, Brazil 1818-2018
Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Michele de Barcelos Agostinho, and Rachel Corrêa Lima
The Slave Societies Digital Archive Press published an online English translation of Kumbukumbu, the updated exhibit catalogue of the African artifacts tragically destroyed in the 2018 fire at the National Museum of Brazil. Exhibit curator Mariza Soares discussed the exhibit in a webinar for SSDA and Vanderbilt’s Center for Latin American Center and the National Museum of Brazil also hosted a webinar to launch the new Kumbukumbu catalogue.
Read more here...Slavery and Abolition in the Atlantic World: New Sources and New Findings.
Jane Landers
This book highlights newly-discovered and underutilized sources for the study of slavery and abolition. It features the contributions of scholars who work with Portuguese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Swedish materials from Europe, Africa and Latin America. Their work draws on legal suits, merchant correspondence, Catholic sacramental records, and rare newspapers dating from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Essays cover the volume of the early South Atlantic slave trade; African and African-descended religious and cultural communities in Rio de Janeiro and the Spanish circum-Caribbean; Eurafrican trade alliances on the Gold Coast; and public participation in abolition in nineteenth-century Brazil. These essays change and enrich our understandings of slavery and its end in the Atlantic World. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery and Abolition.
Read more here...Slavery in Ecclesiastical Archives: Preserving the Records.
Mariza Soares, Jane Landers, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew McMichael
Ever since Frank Tannenbaum argued about the nature of the relationship between the Catholic Church and slavery in the New World, religion has been an important subject for scholars working on the history of slavery in the Americas.1 Ecclesiastical records provide an important documentary source, and church archives in Brazil, Cuba, and the Spanish circum-Caribbean provide the longest serial data available for the history of Africans in the Americas, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing through almost the end of the nineteenth century. Many also offer insights into African history. Catholic parish registers record data on African baptisms, marriages, and burials. In addition to providing critical demographic statistics on the African populations in the Americas, these records provide detailed information on ethnicity. Entries may record, when known, parents’ names and occasionally allude to birthplaces in Africa.
Read more here...The Digital Overhaul of the Archive of Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies (ESSSS).
Angela Sutton
The archive of the Ecclesiastical and Secular Sources for Slave Societies (ESSSS) digitally preserves endangered ecclesiastical and secular documents related to Africans and Afro-descended peoples in the Americas. It began in 2003 with an NEH grant to explore the potential for gathering digital copies of church records in Cuba and Brazil, and expanded from there. With over 600,000 documents concerning the lives of 4-6 million Africans and their descendants, it is now the largest repository of its kind. The consequences of this rapid yet steady expansion have been an increasingly irrelevant digital platform that is unsustainable and difficult to maneuver. While the archive grows and the information in the ESSSS documents continues to be preserved, fewer researchers are now able to access it. The ESSSS team is currently in the process of updating the archive’s platform in order to increase functionality, sustainability, and accessibility. The new archive will be interoperable with the latest digital preservation and dissemination projects, allowing for novel uses of the data. At the heart of this overhaul are several conversations about how to use technology in ways that best centralize underrepresented historic actors, and promote interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars in and of Latin America and the Caribbean. This article discusses the many collaborative decisions between scholars and librarians that went into the digital overhaul of the archive with the hopes of contributing to and exploring the ongoing challenges around combating obsolescence of older digital projects of particular significance to the interconnected histories of Africa and the Americas.
Read more here...The Early Slave Trade from Angola to Spanish America and Brazio, 1575-1595
David Wheat and Kara D. Schultz
In this essay we use new and overlooked sources to provide a chronology for the early slave trade from Angola to Spanish America, beginning with two voyages that sailed from Luanda Island soon after the arrival of the first governor of Portuguese Angola. Similar voyages to the Caribbean and Río de la Plata were common after 1595, but during the preceding decade, the traffic of enslaved Africans from Angola to Spanish America was largely an extension of an older, more intensive trade from Angola to Brazil.
Read more here...The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic.
Pablo F. Gómez
Drawing on an array of governmental and ecclesiastical sources—notably Inquisition records—Gómez highlights more than one hundred black ritual practitioners regarded as masters of healing practices and as social and spiritual leaders. He shows how they developed evidence-based healing principles based on sensorial experience rather than on dogma. He elucidates how they nourished ideas about the universality of human bodies, which contributed to the rise of empirical testing of disease origins and cures. Both colonial authorities and Caribbean people of all conditions viewed this experiential knowledge as powerful and competitive. In some ways, it served to respond to the ills of slavery. Even more crucial, however, it demonstrates how the black Atlantic helped creatively to fashion the early modern world.
Read more here...The Forgotten Use and Circulation of Ivory on the West-Central African Coast and Europe (1490-1630)
Mariza de Carvalho Soares
Ivory is usually classified into several types according to size, color (more white, yellowish, or color change over time), grain density, and preservation conditions (dryness). African ivory was the most prized because it yellowed less and was less dense, making carving and polishing easier. Much admired in Europe during the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance it was a little-used raw material. Ivory, the part of the tooth used in sculptures, is the inner layer called dentin, which requires the removal of the cementum (outer part) to be used, which implies a significant loss of raw material. From the fifteenth century onwards, ivory from the African Atlantic coast began to arrive in Europe. The first shipments came from Arguin, the first Atlantic trading center whose characteristics approximated ivory to that traded in the Mediterranean through Egypt. Soon after, ivory from Guinea began to arrive in Portugal, mainly from Sierra Leone. In addition to the raw ivory, richly carved pieces (oliphants, salt shakers and spoons) made African ivory famous in the sixteenth century.
Read more here...