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surrounding specific historical periods. For instance, Dye argues that Cuban sugargrowers’ loss of autonomy in the late nineteenth century was due less to the financialadvantages held by the sugar mills and more to the competitive advantages the millsgained by more closely controlling delivery. More strikingly, he claims that the impositionand evolution of colono contracts served in some ways to protect growers’ interests, asthey were to benefit from the mills’ productivity gains in the long run. Gomez-Galvarriato, using a careful analysis of prices and wages at one textile mill in Veracruz,questions whether the Mexican Revolution was necessary to any gains in real wagesachieved by the labour movement. The data he compiles suggest that industrial workers’purchasing power collapsed at a later date in the Porfiriato than is often argued, andthat most of their gains were achieved in the Revolution’s early years. Summerhillchallenges those interpretations of foreign capital’s role in the construction of Brazil’srailroads which argue that it deepened dependency and exacerbated inequality; hesuggests that if Brazil had had to finance the system on its own, its growth andinstitutional development would have been further hindered. He posits that althoughBrazil was unprepared to benefit from backwards linkages, the railroad’s stimulationof transport-using industries enhanced economic growth. Diaz Fuentes demonstratesthat the influence of the ‘money doctors’ on the establishment of the gold standardand central banks has been exaggerated, at least in the cases of Argentina, Brazil, andMexico. On the other hand, Alston, Libecap and Mueller’s innovative comparativeanalysis of violent land conflicts on the American and Brazilian frontiers supportstheories that stress the importance of secure property rights in promoting investmentand encouraging growth. Other chapters focus on subnational phenomena. Hanleyargues that the poor performance of the Sao Paulo Bolsa over the long-run was lessimportant to the region’s development than the long-term health of the firms foundedduring its brief period of intense activity at the beginning of the century. Triner’s studyof the banking system and the links between local and national money markets providessupport for the centrality of the financial sector in consolidating the Sao Paulo’sdominance. Other papers offer innovative approaches to challenges posed by a lack ofdata. Newland employs demographic data on employment, immigration, and urb-anization to examine levels of economic development in the littoral and interior regionsof nineteenth-century Argentina. Marquez provides an exhaustive analysis of effectiverates of tariff protection and the roles of nontariff barriers, principally the depreciationof silver, in late Porfirian Mexico. This sort of archival research and data constructionfound throughout the volume will play an important role in facilitating future com-parative and historical work. If these two collections are representative of what thisseries will produce in the coming years, this joint effort promises to be a rewardingone.

University of Arizona D R

doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0386, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

C S-N, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico,1833–1874 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. vii +39. $50.00hardback).

Historian Christopher Schmidt-Nowara’s book Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba,and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 attends to the politics of antislavery and proslaverymobilization in Spain and the Cuban and Puerto Rican colonies, arguing “that one

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cannot separate colony from metropolis in understanding the origins and interests ofabolitionists movements” (p. 3). The Abolitionist Society, according to Schmidt-Nowara,was a “hybrid political association that amalgamated colonial and metropolitan actorsand their interests and political strategies”. (p. 13) While much has been written on therelationship between British capitalist development and antislavery movements—mostnotably Eric Williams’s classic 1944 study, Capitalism and Slavery, David Brion Davis’sThe Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975), and Seymour Drescher’s 1987work, Capitalism and Antislavery—there has been far less scholarly attention to therelationship between Spanish economic development and abolitionist movements. AsSchmidt-Nowara points out, Puerto Rico and Cuba were central to Spain’s refashioningits “second empire” after the loss of its mainland possessions in the wake of the SpanishAmerican revolutions.

In the book’s introduction appropriately titled, “Spain in the Antilles and the Antillesin Spain”, the historian addresses both works and extends Drescher’s analysis ofantislavery as a political and cultural phenomenon arguing for an understanding ofantislavery movements in terms of social and intergenerational reproduction as well aseconomic production. Schmidt-Nowara’s contribution to this scholarship rests in hisdeparture from the work of Drescher by focusing “on the transatlantic nature ofantislavery ideology and mobilization” (p. 12). By the mid-nineteenth century, thehistorian argues, Spanish notions of modernity entailed establishing a democraticallyelected government, an economy based upon free trade, and a racially homogeneousempire supported by wage-labour. Using records from a dozen archives in Spain, PuertoRico and Cuba, Schmidt-Nowara demonstrates that although there were similaritiesbetween elite colonial societies of Cuba and Puerto Rico, there were important differ-ences. In the first chapter the author points out that although the Spanish Cortes of1837 sought greater liberty for Spanish subjects, the reformers believed that theheterogeneous populations of Cuba and Puerto Rico necessitated special laws to governcolonial societies. Cuban Creoles, on the other hand, saw no reason to “ ‘enslave’ allCubans because of the large slave population” (p. 25). For reformers in Spain andCuba the key to abolition entailed the ‘whitening’ of the population. Both Spanish andCuban elites feared a Haitian-style slave insurrection, prevention of which would beaccomplished only through the erasure of racial boundaries. Chapter 2 addressesantislavery mobilization in Puerto Rico. Unlike Cuba, with a relatively small slavepopulation, white settlers demographically dominated Puerto Rico. Consequently, sincethe colony was less dependent on slave labour, Creole reformers in Puerto Rico arguedthat the colony was ready to abolish slavery. However, as with Cuba, Puerto Ricanreactions to abolition must be understood on local, as well as colonial and transatlanticscales. In Cuba, western sugar planters were more dependent on slave labour, whileeastern regions, with fewer large plantations, were less dependent on a slave labourforce. Similarly, in Ponce, the largest and most important sugar region of Puerto Rico,Creole planters sought more slaves, while San Juan intellectuals argued for the abolitionof slavery. Schmidt-Nowara finds that Spain, Puerto Rico and Cuba each feared aHaitian-type “race war,” and for Creole reformers in both colonies, racial stability wasequated with white hegemony (p. 49). In Chapters 3 through 5, Schmidt-Nowaraprovides an analysis of the articulation among free trade, protectionism, free wagelabour and the transformation of the family and public sphere in Spain and the colonies.Framing the debate in Spain as a struggle between Protectionists, centred in the Catalanregion, and Free Trade Economists of Madrid, he articulates the complexity of therelationship between metropolitan and Antillean political and economic positions inthe following observation:

Spain’s most ardent champions of free trade were abolitionists—a position that alienatedthem from the colonial sectors that stood to benefit most from free trade: the slaveowning

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planter class. While colonial slaveowners advocated free trade, metropolitan producersand defenders of colonial slavery categorically opposed free trade because protectedSpanish and Antillean markets were essential to their prosperity (p. 57).

According to Economist logic, the state had no role in the production process, its onlyobligation to protect individual freedom, equality of opportunity and “workers’ rightsto struggle with capital in the marketplace”. (p. 80). In contradistinction, Protectionistsopposed the individualism of Free Trade Economists and its ideology of politicaleconomy, understood as a concession to English hegemony. Schmidt-Nowara in-terrogates David Brion Davis’s assertion that “the ideology of free wage labor espousedby Anglo-American abolitionists helped legitimate new forms of labour discipline andpolitical domination in industrializing economies” (p. 100). In Spain and the SpanishAntilles, the author argues, capitalism produced a counterhegemonic abolitionist move-ment.

Although Schmidt-Nowara’s decision to focus on elite mobilization around the issueof slavery silences the very slaves themselves, Empire and Antislavery constitutes acomprehensive study that benefits from the insights of feminist scholarship on gender,race and imperialism. The author finds that Spanish liberals advocated education formiddle class women to attain moral control of women and the family. Reformers alsoespoused the notion that women should be allowed entry into public life in order tocivilize the harsh public sphere. Consequently, women became important advocates ofreform within the Abolitionist Society. The ideology of ‘unofficial reformism’ wasextended to the colonies, particularly Cuba where the intellectuals advocated strength-ening the slave family through a process of “moralization through matrimony andfamily,” a free womb law granting freedom to children of slaves, and racial amalgamationthrough “the absorption of the African by the European” (pp. 105–6). Throughoutthe book, Schmidt-Nowara makes a convincing argument that the strategies of theAbolitionist Society were both hegemonic and counterhegemonic. Its call for immediateabolition subverted conservative power in Spain and the Antilles while remaking theSpanish empire on the basis of “free labor, free markets, representative government,and racial unity” (p. 150). Schmidt-Nowara’s book represents an intelligent contributionto the scholarship of race, slavery and empire.

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doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0387, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

S C, City of Plagues: Disease, Poverty and Deviance in San Francisco(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Pp. x +300. £24.00 hardback.

America is a vast place, and it contains many cities with a rich diversity of social,economic, geographical and cultural characteristics. Perhaps for this reason, Americanhistorians of disease and public health have tended to confine their attention to singlecity studies; examples include Judith Waltzer Leavitt’s account of politics and publichealth reform in Milwaukee (revised edition, 1996), and Evelynn Hammond’s analysis(1999) of attempts at diphtheria prevention in New York City. The general effect is

2002 Academic Press