The Blanco Whites: War, Captivity, and Spanish Antislavery, 1808–14

In 1814,’s most famous exile and political commentator, Joseph Blanco White, published an antislavery tract: Bosquexo del comercio de esclavos. The British Foreign Office subsidized the publication, just as it had subsidized Blanco White’s periodical El Español between 1810 and 1814. During this era, British foreign policy was directed toward the complete suppression of the African slave trade, having suppressed the traffic to its own colonies in 1807. was one of the main targets of this goal because, one of its last stable colonies, had since the late eighteenth century undergone a plantation revolution, becoming the greatest recipient of African slaves in the history of Spanish rule in the Americas. Given this overall geopolitical context, one could see Blanco White’s antislavery tract as an expression of British ideology and interest.  And indeed, the pamphlet demonstrates a strong familiarity and sympathy with British abolitionists, such as William Wilberforce, and their ideas. This paper will argue, however, that the origins of Blanco White’s antislavery ideas can be more usefully located in the Hispanic world.  On the one hand, Blanco specifically entered into the debates about the slave trade to opened during the Cortes of Cádiz.  Much of his pamphlet is an attempt to refute the strong pro-slave-trade arguments made in during these years.  On the other, the experience of Blanco White and of his family, especially his brother Fernando, during the French occupation and the War of Independence provided a major source of inspiration for his antislavery ideas.  I will argue that the Spanish experience of invasion, warfare, captivity, imprisonment, and exile between 1808 and 1814 allowed Blanco White to draw parallels between the plight of enslaved Africans and of Spaniards suffering under French domination.