Torn Between Empires

📖 The Scoop

This in-depth, comparative study focuses on the economy, society, and political culture of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Viewing developments as they relate to the countries' common heritage of insularity, colonialism, and slavery, Luis Martinez-Fernandez points out profound, underlying balance-of-power transformations during a time of ostensibly small change in the region's political status. The chronological scope of the book is marked initially by a symbolic date: the arrival in Havana of British consul and radical abolitionist David Turnbull in 1840, an event after which Britain's influence in the Hispanic Caribbean began to decline. The concluding date, 1878, marks two pivotal events - the end of the first Cuban war of independence from Spain and the end of the fifth and final term of Dominican Republic president Buenaventura Baez. In his coverage of the intervening decades Martinez-Fernandez ranges widely, discussing, for example, expansionism and filibustering; the Cuban "Africanization Scare"; the regional impact of the American Civil War; Haiti's repeated invasions of the Dominican Republic; the mechanization of the sugar industry; the polarization of Dominican politics; and the annexationist/reformist debate in Cuba. Throughout, Martinez-Fernandez shows how such issues sparked - and sometimes were sparked by - tensions between the islands' Creole elites, merchants, free blacks, and slaves; the North Atlantic powers of Spain, France, and Great Britain; and their colonial bureaucracies. Most important, the author demonstrates how the outcome of many developments in the region were contingent on the influence of twopowerful elements. The first was the Creoles' acute race consciousness, a propensity often exploited by imperial interests vying for their allegiance. The second element was the United States' growing economic interests in the region. As the largest consumer of Hispanic Caribbean goods, the United States asserted its influence in the region with earlier and greater vigor than is recognized in most studies by North Americanists, says Martinez-Fernandez. Torn between Empires draws heavily on archival sources in North America, Europe, and the Caribbean. Detailed, and attentive to differences between the countries on which it focuses, this study offers a new regional and comparative perspective on the Hispanic Caribbean on the eve of drastic geopolitical change.

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