In June 1825 the Cuban countryside witnessed a large African-led slave rebellion—a revolt that began a cycle of slave uprisings lasting until the mid-1840s. The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825 examines this movement and its participants for the first time, highlighting the significance of African warriors in New World plantation society.

Manuel Barcia is a senior lecturer in Latin American studies at the University of Leeds. He is also an Honorary Fellow at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull, and the author of Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808-1848.

Praise for The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825

“This book demarcates a distinct place for the 1825 rebellion on the map of Atlantic revolts produced by African-born slaves in the Era of Revolutions, showing in great detail that African ways, ethnic differences, and occupational stratification among bondmen and women were not an insuperable obstacle to concerted, collective resistance against slavery.”—João José Reis, author of Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia

“At long last we finally have a book-length study of the 1825 slave revolt in Matanzas, Cuba. No other scholar has explored the African background of Cuban slaves in the same detail and sensitivity as Manuel Barcia as he brings to life the struggle of enslaved Africans for freedom in one of the most important slave societies of the Atlantic world. Skillfully analyzing both the Atlantic forces of enslavement, migration, and plantation production that shaped nineteenth- century Cuba with a keen attention to local detail and specific circumstances, Barcia forces us to reconsider how slave revolts tell a very modern story of how struggles for freedom become intertwined with questions of identity.”—Matt Childs, author of The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery

“This is a masterfully researched and beautifully written account of an important but mostly forgotten slave revolt. It is at once a compelling local and broad Atlantic history. To be sure, a confluence of events unique to the San Carlos de Matanzas gave rise to mass violence in 1825. But the revolt cannot be understood, Barcia shows, without a deep understanding of the cultural assumptions that the rebels brought with them from Africa. The book is a welcome addition to Caribbean and Atlantic historiography and will serve as a model for studies of slave revolts elsewhere.”—Walter Hawthorne, author of From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1830

“Barcia insists on the African dimensions of the 1825 revolt in terms of leadership, a Pan-African ethnic solidarity, and the employment of West African war strategies. Indeed, he argues provocatively that this event represented an “extension” of West African warfare into Cuba (...) Barcia is to be commended for bringing Africans back into Cuban slave revolt historiography as well as for contributing with a new study to the scholarship of the African Diaspora in the Spanish Antilles.”

Jeffrey Kerr-Ritchie, International Journal of Cuban Studies 5:1 (2012)

“[Barcia’s] work makes an important contribution to a vast and mature body of literature on slave resistance in the Western Hemisphere.”

“In several respects this important, well-researched study raises critical questions for scholars of slave resistance, political mobilization, and the African diaspora, and it should inspire students of nineteenth-century rebellion in Cuba and the Americas more generally to take up further, related research”.

Melina Pappademos, American Historical Review 118:2 (2013)

“A well-written and documented contribution to the history of slavery in the Americas.”

Riva Berleant-Schiller, Choice 50:5 (2013)

• Book Cover Image