|
Product Description
The first extensive study of the African American community under colonial Spanish rule, Black Society in Spanish Florida provides a vital counterweight to the better-known dynamics of the Anglo slave South. Jane Landers draws on a wealth of untapped primary sources, opening a new vista on the black experience in America and enriching our understanding of the powerful links between race relations and cultural custom.
Blacks under Spanish rule in Florida lived not in cotton rows or tobacco patches but in a more complex and international world that linked the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and a powerful and diverse Indian hinterland. Here the Spanish Crown afforded sanctuary to runaway slaves, making the territory a prime destination for blacks fleeing Anglo plantations, while Castilian law (grounded in Roman law) provided many avenues out of slavery, which it deemed an unnatural condition. European-African unions were common and accepted in Florida, with families of African descent developing important community connections through marriage, concubinage, and godparent choices.
Assisted by the corporate nature of Spanish society, Spain's medieval tradition of integration and assimilation, and the almost constant threat to Spanish sovereignty in Florida, multiple generations of Africans leveraged linguistic, military, diplomatic, and artisanal skills into citizenship and property rights. In this remote Spanish outpost, where they could become homesteaders, property owners, and entrepreneurs, blacks enjoyed more legal and social protection than they would again until almost two hundred years of Anglo history had passed.
Blacks under Spanish rule in Florida lived not in cotton rows or tobacco patches but in a more complex and international world that linked the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and a powerful and diverse Indian hinterland. Here the Spanish Crown afforded sanctuary to runaway slaves, making the territory a prime destination for blacks fleeing Anglo plantations, while Castilian law (grounded in Roman law) provided many avenues out of slavery, which it deemed an unnatural condition. European-African unions were common and accepted in Florida, with families of African descent developing important community connections through marriage, concubinage, and godparent choices.
Assisted by the corporate nature of Spanish society, Spain's medieval tradition of integration and assimilation, and the almost constant threat to Spanish sovereignty in Florida, multiple generations of Africans leveraged linguistic, military, diplomatic, and artisanal skills into citizenship and property rights. In this remote Spanish outpost, where they could become homesteaders, property owners, and entrepreneurs, blacks enjoyed more legal and social protection than they would again until almost two hundred years of Anglo history had passed.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861
- Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society
- Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775 (Early American Studies)
- The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early. . ... and the University of North Carolina Press)
- American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis
- Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
- Florida: A Short History (Columbus Quincentenary)
- Before the Pioneers: Indians, Settlers, Slaves, and the Founding of Miami (Florida in Focus)
- The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
- The Early American Republic, 1789-1829
*If this is not the "Black Society in Spanish Florida (Blacks in the New World)" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 14, 2024 15:49 +08.