Marvels of medicine: literature and scientific enquiry in early colonial Spanish America

Abstract

for enslaved Africans in New Spain through the long seventeenth century. Moving south, Rachel O’Toole’s chapter details how crucial enslaved and free people of color were to the functioning of the Pacific slave trade between Panama and Peru, including while working as enslaved mariners. Alex Borucki then details the intricacies of inter-imperial trade, between the Portuguese and Spanish in the Río de la Plata, thereby revealing the influence of the coastal trade from Brazil. One of the phenomena sketched in the chapter by David Eltis and Jorge Felipe González, in their analysis of trade to Cuba, was the concomitant increase in the free black population in Cuba even as the enslaved population grew so rapidly in the nineteenth century. Building upon González’s work on Cuban slaving activities and networks, Elena Schneider focuses on various routes to enslavement in Cuba in the eighteenth century and our understandings of ‘creole’ in the context of inter-colonial trade. The concluding chapter by Emily Berquist Soule presents a counterpoint that traces out the long, but generally muted, and ultimately unsuccessful Catholic intellectual Spanish antislavery and abolitionist impulse. Each of these chapters carries documentary gems that elaborate upon the lived experiences of Africans and their descendants in the colonies such as Smith’s account of Antonio Martinez, the enslaved man from Mozambique, forced across the Indian and Pacific Oceans to disembark at the port of Acapulco and finally sold in Antequera. The painstaking work by these authors tells stories of the Slave Trade and encounters of enslavement that have too often remained muffled in the colonial historiography. They argue convincingly for a continuing reassessment of the participation of Spain in the slave trade, of the impact of the trade on the Spanish empire, and the power of those more than 2.7 million Africans and their innumerable descendants, enslaved and free, in shaping the Spanish colonial world itself.