What if we could tell a cascading, multi-imperial Atlantic history through a singular event? In The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World, Elena Schneider does just that, arguing successfully that the brief British capture of that city (1762–3) in the Seven Years’ War altered the trajectory of Cuba, the Spanish and British Empires, the Caribbean and the Atlantic World. This is a book not just about a siege, but about ‘an intensification of years-long hostilities between two rival colonial systems − predicated on war, trade, and racial slavery – that had grown deeply and dangerously enmeshed’ (pp. 42–3). Schneider contends that, rather than being the launch pad for the Cuban sugar boom, the British occupation brought into focus previous slave-trading connections and the demographic and strategic importance of Afro-Cubans before the siege. Thus, the paradigm shift was not away from previous labour or trading systems but rather towards the hardening of binary attitudes about race and legal status for people of colour in the post-war period.

Schneider's narrative unfolds in three parts. Part 1 surveys mutually beneficial but often contentious Anglo-Spanish relations in Havana before the invasion. Britain and its trading companies profited from supplying Cuba with enslaved Africans under asiento contracts in the first half of the eighteenth century. Contraband trade connected to this commerce also enriched both British and Spanish merchants. Consequently, British officials accumulated an intense familiarity with Havana's strategic contours and continually refined plans for invading the city, especially during the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–48). Echoing the work of Richard Pares in War and Trade in the West Indies (Oxford University Press, 1936), Schneider views trade and war as two sides of the same coin in the Caribbean context: both facilitated inter-imperial interaction. While Havana elites enriched the city through this risky contact, people of colour diversified Havana's economy and made up more than half of its population. Schneider rebuffs historiography depicting Havana as a backward military outpost and a primarily White space pre-occupation. Instead, it was a vibrant commercial centre rooted in Afro-Caribbean labour.

Part 2 tells the story of the British siege and 11-month occupation of Havana. The invasion was one of the largest military engagements in the western hemisphere in the eighteenth century. Schneider emphasises the outsized role of several thousand people of African descent, who represented the majority of the Spanish defence. Many enslaved Africans fought for the promise of manumission. Free people of colour hoped their valour as militiamen would secure new rights and privileges after the siege. Schneider argues that they fought longer and more doggedly than Havana's Creole elites, who eventually accepted surrender to avoid further property damage. Although British victory left people of colour caught between two legal jurisdictions, it opened up a commercial bonanza for habanero merchants. Schneider disagrees with previous scholarship pinpointing the occupation as the beginning of a widespread slave trade to Cuba. Rather, the period enabled British and Spanish subjects to employ previous slave-trading connections to expand a range of commercial exchanges in a new space of layered sovereignty. Both sides profited from plunder and complicity while people of colour, who had defended the city valiantly, feared re-enslavement under a new regime.

In Part 3, Schneider appraises the long-term aftermath of the occupation. In the wake of a humiliating defeat, the Spanish crown needed to reward loyal subjects, punish traitors, strengthen ties to pivotal elites, fix defences and remake the Cuban economy. While historians have often viewed the temporary loss of Havana as the accelerator of broad Bourbon Reforms, Schneider emphasises the specific importance of the slave trade and populations of African descent in this imperial transformation. Whereas many Creole elites had been complicit profiteers during the British occupation, the monarchy viewed their influence as central to keeping Cuba in Spanish hands. Imperial officials mostly excused their duplicitous conduct. In the first months of the Spanish reoccupation, the monarchy praised people of colour as valiant defenders worthy of respect, financial rewards and, in some cases, manumission. Yet the empire's long-term trajectory backtracked on these promises of recognition. In the decades after the defeat, Havana elites and Bourbon Reformers doubled down on the slave trade. They saw it as a panacea to revive Cuba's economy and to retrench its defences at a time when Spain's imperial peers were curtailing their reliance on enslaved labour. Colonial officials marginalised free people of colour by chipping away at their legal privileges and decommissioning or denigrating Black militia companies. By the end of the eighteenth century, ‘as a result of modernization, free trade, and “Enlightened” reform, Cuba went from a more cosmopolitan, diversified economy of exchange to a more stratified, slave-labour-powered monoculture … across this time, slavery and racial categories in Cuba became less fluid’ (p. 294).

The Occupation of Havana is a path-breaking study in the history of commerce, slavery and imperial reform in the Caribbean (as well as a page-turning war story). This book convinced me that the seizure of Havana might be one of three or four points of inflection around which to organise a course on Atlantic history. It reorients the timelines and contingencies of a monumental event. Schneider offers an impressive counter-narrative to historiographies of Cuba that have memorialised the period for its militarism and raceless nationalism without examining uncomfortable truths about its consequences for people of African descent. She also reminds the reader of the more complicated and decidedly darker history of enlightened reform in the eighteenth century. The book is deeply researched and wonderfully written. In a few places, elongated retellings of events, such as of the trials of Havana conspirators during the Spanish reoccupation, cause the narrative to drag. However, these are mere quibbles with an important book that will become essential reading for historians of early modern Caribbean, Latin American and Atlantic history.