Atlantic Transformations: Empire, Politics, and Slavery during the Nineteenth Century takes its title from the 2016 conference at The Fernand Braudel Centre, Binghamton, “Atlantic Transformations: Politics, Economy, and the Second Slavery.” Edited by Dale Tomich, the collection of essays aims to “broaden the scope of the second slavery perspective,” “address new questions,” and “examine new terrain” about Atlantic transformations in the nineteenth century (xi). The collection therefore ventures beyond regional and temporal specificities of ‘the second slavery’ paradigm—stricto sensu post-1807 and the slave-trading regions producing coffee, sugar and cotton—with chapters on Gran Colombia (Marcela Echeverri) and colonial Panama (Javier Laviña). Spatially, the Atlantic in Atlantic Transformations is mostly the circum-Caribbean Spanish Empire, in which Cuba is the main site of historical inquiry (Albert Garcia-Balañà, José Antonio Piqueras, and Luis Miguel García Mora). Conceptually, the essays explore circuits of knowledge as power, as catalysts for change, “interchange and exchange” (177), and as vectors for controlling or preventing change between the local and the global. Collectively, therefore, the chapters demonstrate and test the conceptual robustness and historical scope of the second-slavery framework as a vehicle for historiographical debate about colonialism and imperialism, slavery and freedom, nation building and national identities within the Atlantic world and as part of “broader world processes” (195).

On a global level, the essays are framed as a world-system perspective by Josep M. Fradera's opening chapter on cycles of French and British “revolutionary crisis” (4–6). It is within this trans-Atlantic unit of analysis and against a wider European imperialist arena that the following chapters operate, historically and dialogically, through their respective (regional) examinations of the illegal slave trade (Piqueras for Cuba, Rafael Marquese and Tomich for Brazil), slavery, gradualism, and abolitionism (Echeverri for Gran Columbia, Laviña for Panama, García Mora for Cuba), annexation (Garcia-Balañà and Anne Eller for Santo Domingo), and autonomism (García Mora). In the process, some conventional paradigmatic historiographical thinking is unpicked. Drawing on themes of imperial destruction and reconstruction, Fradera argues that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European monarchic empires in the Americas and Asia reemerged as new imperial European nations across the long nineteenth century—through colonialism in Africa, and, in the case of Spain, through unequal juridicial “political and cultural integration” of territories in the Caribbean (14). Echeverri argues for situating Gran Columbia within the second slavery analytical framework on the basis that “the same forces that fostered the second slavery were behind political and economic transformations in the Spanish Main” (35). Although slavery was a marginal institution demographically in “Old Columbia,” it was “entrenched both ideologically and economically following independence [and] was a key institution through which state power was articulated” (24). Discussing the late nineteenth century, Garcia-Balañà expertly examines the ways in which patriotic and nationalistic Spanish ideals were articulated and contested through militarism, mobility, and migration of creoles and Catalans, on the one hand, and free Afro-Cubans, on the other, in a context of Spanish recolonization—namely, the Guerra de África (1859–60), the Cuban Wars of Independence (1868–1878), and Dominican annexation of 1861. Piqueras tracks the course of formal and informal diplomacy behind the Anglo-Spanish Treaty of 1817, which committed Spain to the legal abolition of the slave trade by 1820. Conversely, this diplomatic history forms the foundations in which the second slavery is set socioeconomically and “in breach of the abolition of the trade after 1821” transforming Cuba into the “epicenter” of world sugar production (90, 101).

From the perspective of the Dominican Republic, Eller's chapter overlaps historically and regionally with the two preceding ones. She interrogates the intersecting interests of Dominican annexationists and circum-Spanish Caribbean political elites in general with those of the Crown in the “Assembling [of] the Spanish Colonial State” in Santo Domingo during this brief but turbulent historical interlude. Although absent since 1822, slavery continued to insert itself in the socioeconomic reordering of the Dominican (colonial) lifestyle and labor regime as a racialized point of reference in determining occupational hierarchies, immigration, and social mores. The subsequent chapter by Luis Miguel García Mora also falls outside the formal timeframe of slavery while expanding on the second slavery period (178). Following the public personas of two “autonomist representatives” (154) and editors of Madrid-based newspapers, García Mora reframes the conventional periodization of Cuban abolitionism, marking 1880–1886 as a stage of “second abolition”—a stage “defined by the fight against the patronato” that was ideologically and politically bound up in anticolonialism and autonomism, on the one hand, and socioeconomically to free trade, on the other (149). Like García Mora, Javier Laviña “complements” the second-slavery concept, marking a failed phase of “first slavery” in colonial Panama (178). Within a framework of “Atlantization” (175–76), Laviña draws together themes of conquest, marronage, and piracy within a non-plantation colonial project and through the lens of slave resistance.

In the final chapter, Marquese and Tomich assume the mantle of the second-slavery and world-system approach in full and move deftly through a century of global history, mapping the “mass production of key commodities of the material culture of modernity” (193)—namely between the major sites of sugar and coffee production across Asia, the Caribbean, and Brazil, via European imperial revolutionary crisis, Napoleonic Wars, British antislavery activism, US urbanization, and British industrialization. If there is a cataclysmic event in this dense web of historicity, it is the Haitian Revolution. With the framework for expanding global markets for both sugar and coffee established, Marquese and Tomich analyze the historically specific growth of coffee in the Paraiba Valley (in the then province of Rio de Janeiro) during the illegal phase of the slave trade to Brazil, doing so through themes of “land, labor and capital [and] the political relations between planters, enslaved workers, and the nation state” (195).

Primarily, Atlantic Transformations offers new ways of thinking about elites as a broad and heterogeneous group by disaggregating their formal political power and informal socioeconomic capital within a world system. The second-slavery and world-system mode of working historically, then, is anything but reductive. It is not a process of reversal of positions and perspectives from the metropolis and imperial centers to the colonial periphery or margins, akin to dependency theory (194). The process is instead one of relearning what those perspectives mean from local points (often multiple) of interaction and iteration. The historical subjects (and groups) the reader encounters along the way are both multifaceted and mobile, almost always adaptive but sometimes malleable. Ideas are nuanced, processes are polyvalent, and systems of knowledge and power are as complex as they are flexible. Rarely is anything static, even if thematically slavery remains constant.