Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Slave Families and the Hato Economy in Puerto Rico

Slave Families and the Hato Economy in Puerto Rico

Stark, David M.

Hardcover

Caribbean HistoryGeneral Latin American HistoryGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies

ISBN10: 0813060435
ISBN13: 9780813060439
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: Mar 3 2015
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.09
Height: 0.78 Width: 6.68 Depth: 8.62
Language: English
Deftly uses the available parish registers to document the stages of the coming of African men and women to Puerto Rico in the eighteenth century and reveals patterns of family formation and bonds of solidarity among the African slaves and with the rest of society.--
Fernando Pico, author of Puerto Rico Remembered

An exceptionally well researched, highly original, cogently argued and engagingly written work.--Franklin W. Knight, coeditor of Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context

A welcome contribution to the history of eighteenth-century Puerto Rico and an important model for anyone using sacramental records to study slave life in colonial Latin America.--David Wheat, Michigan State University

Scholarship on slavery in the Caribbean frequently emphasizes sugar and tobacco production, but this unique work illustrates the importance of the region's hato economy--a combination of livestock ranching, foodstuff cultivation, and timber harvesting--on the living patterns among slave communities.

David Stark makes use of extensive Catholic parish records to provide a comprehensive examination of slavery in Puerto Rico and across the Spanish Caribbean. He reconstructs slave families to examine incidences of marriage, as well as birth and death rates. The result are never-before-analyzed details on how many enslaved Africans came to Puerto Rico, where they came from, and how their populations grew through natural increase.

Stark convincingly argues that when animal husbandry drove much of the island's economy, slavery was less harsh than in better-known plantation regimes geared toward crop cultivation. Slaves in the hato economy experienced more favorable conditions for family formation, relatively relaxed work regimes, higher fertility rates, and lower mortality rates.

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