Empire And Antislavery

In this excellent study based on extensive archival research and a thorough reading of secondary material, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara meticulously analyzes the tortuous route of Spanish abolition.

A must for students and scholars.

It is a thoroughly researched study that moves beyond the 'us-against-them' model that has characterized much of the earlier scholarship, forcing scholars to recognize a more complex Spain, whose various economic and social actors clashed to produce contradictory and seemingly bizarre colonial policies.

His is a long and well thought out enquiry into the legitimacy of the revolutionary regime and the dissolution of tensions in colonial societies, which began in 1830.

Studies the experience of peasant communities in the [El Salvador] Republic in the light of changing internal and external forces and focuses on such features as land use, agrarian exports, rural class stratification, political conflict and ethnicity. . . . The book makes a valuable contribution to the economic and social history of one of the least known countries in Latin America. If it does not rewrite nineteenth and twentieth century economic history in the region, the book does reveal the importance of local and micro studies to macro debates.