Isle of Exceptions: Slavery, Law, and Counter-Revolutionary Governance in Cuba, 1825-1856

Abstract

Following the Haitian Revolution, the island of Cuba emerged as the most productive sugar colony in the world. With the wars of independence on the American mainland threatening to spread to Cuba, and with the island’s growing population of enslaved Africans raising concerns that isolated acts of slave resistance might develop into more coordinated rebellions of larger scale, metropolitan officials sought to shield the colony from the transformations of the Age of Revolution by consolidating Spanish sovereignty over the island. As part of a broad effort to develop a mode of counter-revolutionary governance, metropolitan officials ordered the establishment in Havana of a permanent military tribunal known as the Military Commission, aiming to bolster the legal powers of the colony’s captain general to contend with threats to Cuban slavery and Spanish empire. Through a study of Cuba’s Military Commission during the three decades it was in operation from 1825 to 1856, this dissertation demonstrates how colonial officials learned to channel fears of racial violence into an exceptional mode of repressive justice that afforded them the latitude and discretion to pursue the consolidation of sovereign authority within the executive branch of the colonial state. Though metropolitan officials envisioned the tribunal as a bulwark against political dissent, colonial officials regularly used the tribunal to contend with the actual and perceived threats posed by the island’s population of free and enslaved people of color. The Military Commission’s efforts to extend the legal powers of the captaincy general throughout Cuban slave society over three decades thus offers a rich case study for historicizing the roles that juridical exclusion and states of exception played in the development of legal and political regimes capable of abrogating the very norms, laws, and practices they claimed to sustain. By focusing on the way legal practices that evolved in the repression of free and enslaved people of color were institutionalized, becoming fundamental components of the normative administration of justice, this dissertation argues that the legal dimensions of slavery did not disappear with slavery’s demise, but contributed to the emergence of administrative structures and the reconfiguration of inter-institutional relations of power that characterized the development of modern states and empires during the nineteenth century.