Teresa Prados-Torreira | All Books | sku-640942031

Teresa Prados-Torreira's The Power of Their Will: Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Edition 1) is a hardcover listed under All Books as sku-640942031. CHOICE named it an Outstanding Academic Title in 2022 and recommended it to scholars of the Caribbean and African diaspora. The book examines white Cuban women who owned enslaved people.

As abolitionism grew and the Atlantic slave trade declined in the early nineteenth century, Spain expanded plantation slavery in Cuba. More than 778,000 Africans were brought there between 1501 and 1866. Drawing on government documents, fiction, newspapers, travelers' accounts, women's wills and archival research, Prados-Torreira describes how women with little political power enforced discipline in households and helped portray slavery as humane.

Thousands of Creole slaveholding women depended on enslaved people's labor for comfort; some poorer women depended on income from hiring them out. Narrative chapters cover daily life in Havana, Santiago and other towns; sugar mills and coffee plantations; slave rebellions and the Ten Years' War; and personal relationships that sometimes shifted the balance of power.