Translating or Re-writing British Abolitionism for a Spanish Audience?

Jose Maria Blanco White is considered one of the first and rare Spanish modern anti-slavery voices writing in the early nineteenth century, a time when abolitionist forces were gaining traction throughout the Atlantic world. Although abolition of the slave trade was briefly debated in Spain’s liberal Cortes of Cadiz in 1811, Havana’s sugar planters defeated antislavery proposals introduced by a handful of Mexican and Spanish delegates. Blanco White had gone into exile in London in 1810. Four years later,  he belatedly published a pamphlet against the slave trade directed to the Spanish people. Entitled Bosquejo del comercio de esclavos y reflexiones sobre el trafico ...,, it was informed, as Blanco White acknowledged, by British (evangelical and liberal) abolitionist discourse of the time. Specifically, his pamphlet was modeled after William Wilberforce’s pamphlet on the abolition of the slave trade (1807) and Thomas Clarkson’s “master” text of 1785 on the same subject. Specifically, the paper examines the extent to which Blanco White re-wrote Wilberforce and Clarkson’s texts and antislavery arguments as a result of his hidden polemic with Cuban planters. Furthermore, my paper also interrogates to what extent British antislavery arguments (and prose)—with their particular Christian evangelical and liberal undertones— were altered in addressing Blanco White’s intended audience: the Spanish people. I also query to what extent other kind of antislavery arguments and discourses timidly circulating in other Spanish venues (mostly non-public ones such as the courts and other letrado circuits) found an echo in Blanco White’s text. These included, but were not reduced to, arguments based on Iberian medieval juridical principles and Christian discourses (with which Blanco White as a former priest would have been familiar with). What tensions and negotiations among differing antislavery traditions then circulating in the Atlantic world can be found in Blanco White’s?