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Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011. xiii + 204 pp. (Paper US$ 28.95)
Was slavery in the Iberian world different? Or does it only seem different because its historiography is badly integrated into the general literature on slavery and the slave trade? This book shows that Iberian slavery did indeed differ from other slave systems. First of all, it did not constitute a colonial antithesis to the growing individual liberty and the increasingly free labor market in Europe since slavery in Spain and Portugal had not disappeared during the Middle Ages. That continuity also explains another unique feature: no other slave system was so well embedded in official legal and religious practice. In other slave systems, which were new, the judiciary as well as the Church had to invent new rules and regulations regarding slaves.
This study is clearly written with undergraduate students in mind. Adroitly, it summarizes the state of the art regarding the history of slavery and the slave trade in the British colonial world and then points to the differences, as Iberian...