Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (review)
Following Sir Francis Drake's expedition in 1586, a sizeable and permanent garrison was established in Havana. Moreover, in ways very similar to the expansion of the labor force that Evelyn Powell Jennings describes in her work for the years after 1763, both the Crown as well as residents imported African slaves to fortify the town. In fact, die Crown became the largest slave owner in the city, with 150 slaves in 1604; still it had to rent 106 additional laborers from local slaveholders to finish the construction of El Morro. By the early seventeenth century, Havana's population growth was the fastest in the Americas. Most of the free population came from Andalucia, Castile, and the Canary Islands, with some Portuguese merchants migrating as well. By 1610, there were some 7,000-10,000 residents, with slaves representing nearly half the total. The hinterland expanded, as servicing the fleets facilitated land allocation. At the same time, Havana's shipyard became the most important in the New World, and one of the largest in all the Atlantic, thanks in part to the high quality of Cuban hardwoods. The last two chapters offer the type of detailed elaboration of family, religious, and political networks that is the staple of modern social history and, in this case, indispensable to understanding the fundamental contours of preplantation Cuban society. A wealth of detail is provided to elucidate the experiences not merely of the white elites, but also of less prominent whites, mulattoes, free blacks, and slaves. De la Fuente points to the "erosion of traditional boundaries in a port city" (pp. 186-187), insisting that "there was much in the Spanish Atlantic that was not Spanish— including human, material and spiritual elements" (p. 227).