Abstract

ROJAS, Rafael. Liberal Slavery: Liberalism and Abolitionism in the Spanish Caribbean. Secuencia [online]. 2013, n.86, pp.29-52. ISSN 2395-8464.

This essay proposes a reconstruction of certain fundamental debates on the abolition of slavery in the Spanish Caribbean, during the first half of the 19th century. It begins with the Haitian Revolution and the polemic over slavery in the Cortes de Cádiz and ends with the abolitionist campaign of the autonomists and Republicans in Puerto Rico and Cuba in I860. The essay posits that just as in the Latin American continental world, die dispute over the natural rights of man in the mid-19th century translated into the terms of the State-Church conflict, in the colonial Caribbean, this same dispute involved the problem of slave trafficking and slavery.

Keywords : Trafficking; slavery; Hispanic liberalism; Haitian Revolution; the Constitution of Cadiz; abolitionism; autonomy and Republicanism.