Monsters By Trade: Slave Traffickers In Modern Spanish Culture Slave Traffickers In Modern Spanish Literature And Culture University Press Scholarship Online

Transatlantic studies have begun to explore the lasting influence of Spain on its former colonies and the surviving ties between the American nations and Spain. In Monsters by Trade, Lisa Surwillo takes a different approach, explaining how modern Spain was literally made by its Cuban colony. Long after the transatlantic slave trade had been abolished, Spain continued to smuggle thousands of Africans annually to Cuba to work the sugar plantations. Nearly a third of the royal income came from Cuban sugar, and these profits underwrote Spain's modernization even as they damaged its international standing. Surwillo analyzes a sampling of nineteenth-century Spanish literary works that reflected metropolitan fears of the hold that slave traders (and the slave economy more generally) had over the political, cultural, and financial networks of power. She also examines how the nineteenth-century empire and the role of the slave trader are commemorated in contemporary tourism and literature in various regions in Northern Spain. This is the first book to demonstrate the centrality of not just Cuba, but the illicit transatlantic slave trade to the cultural life of modern Spain.--Amazon.com Through A Literary Analysis Of Works From Key Historical Moments Across Two Hundred Years, 'monsters By Trade' Traces Shifting Anxieties Over The Transformation Of Spain Into A Slave-trader Nation, Formed Financially And Ideologically By Its Morally Corrupt Slave Economy In Cuba And Condemned By All Other Atlantic Powers. The Book Thus Expands Our Present Consideration Of Modern Empire. Introduction : Blanco White And Monsters Of Coloniality -- Negro Tomás And The Trader -- The Colony In The Capital : El Amigo Manso And Lo Prohibido -- Baroja's Atlantic, Beyond Slavery -- Postimperial Detours And Retours : The Ruta Del Indiano -- Family Ties And Narrative Confessions In Catalonia -- Conclusion : The Negrero Resurfaces. Lisa Surwillo. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. This book analyzes literary works from the nineteenth-century that engaged with Spain's active participation in the outlawed transatlantic slave trade