DOC Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams in History

Description

In the late nineteenth century; in an age of ascendant racism and imperial expansion; there emerged in Cuba a movement that unified black; mulatto; and white men in an attack on Europe's oldest empire; with the goal of creating a nation explicitly defined as antiracist. This book tells the story of the thirty-year unfolding and undoing of that movement. Ada Ferrer examines the participation of black and mulatto Cubans in nationalist insurgency from 1868; when a slaveholder began the revolution by freeing his slaves; until the intervention of racially segregated American forces in 1898. In so doing; she uncovers the struggles over the boundaries of citizenship and nationality that their participation brought to the fore; and she shows that even as black participation helped sustain the movement ideologically and militarily; it simultaneously prompted accusations of race war and fed the forces of counterinsurgency.Carefully examining the tensions between racism and antiracism contained within Cuban nationalism; Ferrer paints a dynamic portrait of a movement built upon the coexistence of an ideology of racial fraternity and the persistence of presumptions of hierarchy.