1. For a discussion of these figures—particularly the 1.6 million slaves who settled in the Spanish colonies—see among others Ianni 1976, 15; Mellafe 1973; and Fogel and Engerman 1974. [BACK]

2. For a detailed account of the different political episodes throughout the wars of independence, and of inconsistencies between law and reality, see Blanchard (1992, particularly 37-62). [BACK]

3. Fenoaltea states (1984, 653) that "given a sufficient number, slaves will be employed even in activities where they have no advantage over free men, and work side by side with them under similar conditions. One expects these to be activities in which the master's dependence on the worker's carefulness and good will makes rewards more profitable than pain incentives; and they appear to include most traditional crafts and trades, commerce and transport, administrative services and at least the nonskilled branches of factory production. These are the activities in which we find slaves living and working independently as if they were free, subject only to a quitrent to their owner." My analysis shows that the balance between pain incentives and rewards depended on very particular situations, rather than the number of slaves, and that bargaining was a part of daily coexistence. [BACK]

4. Genovese (1974, 450-455) summarizes the new research on slave families: "Largely following the pioneering work of E. Franklin Frazier, the [Moynihan Report] summarized the conventional wisdom according to which slavery had emasculated black men, created matriarchy, and prevented the emergence of a strong sense of family." And yet "almost every study of runaway slaves uncovers the importance of the family motive: thousands of slaves ran away to find children, parents, wives, or husbands from whom they had been separated by sale. From time to time a slave did prefer to stay with a good master or mistress rather than follow a spouse who was being sold away. In these cases and in many others in which slaves displayed indifference, the marriage had probably already been weakened, and sale provided the most convenient and painless form of divorce." My own findings corroborate these assertions for Lima.

For the southern hemisphere Chandler (1981, 112-113) offers evidence of the existence of slave families and their importance. In colonial Colombia "at least 60 percent of all adult slaves had been or were married, most living in nuclear family units, and another 6 percent were single parents who could be considered married, though they were apparently not living with the father of their children"; thus about 65 percent of all adult slaves were married or had a "family" experience. Craton found that 54 percent of English slaves in the Bahamas were living in nuclear family units, and Higman placed 70 percent of English Jamaican slaves in single family households, most of them nuclear units. Conrad found only 10.4 percent of Brazilian slaves married with little family life among them, and Bowser, using an earlier and much narrower sample of largely notarial records, concluded that less than 10 percent of Peruvian slaves were married, even fewer were living in family units, and that Spaniards in Peru actively sought to prevent slave marriages. Chandler concludes that "all these surprising findings challenge many previously held conceptions, not the least of which is that harsh English slavery usually prohibited family life and that benign Latin America slavery usually encouraged it." [BACK]