Book Review

The two books reviewed here share one fundamental characteristic. For both authors, their work represents a "back-to-basics" reminder to other scholars of the Caribbean region. Luis Martínez-Fernández's perspective, for example, is clearly laid out in the first page of his introduction where he argues that the origins of the historical profession are in storytelling and that "good stories carry forward the wisdom of ages." Narrative history, then, is the heart of Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean. Bonham C. Richardson's book is an admonition regarding the centrality of the environment and particularism in Caribbean history. Yet Economy and Environment in the Caribbean is not just about the need to understand how history and environment have been linked in the past; it is also an attempt to inject historical grounding into current environmental public policy and planning agendas.	1
Martínez-Fernández's book is a family biography of George Canning Backhouse's household. The British Foreign Office assigned Backhouse to the British and Spanish Mixed Commission for the Suppression of the Slave Trade in Cuba from 1853 to 1855. Using the family letters from George and his wife, Grace, Martínez-Fernández, who discovered the letters in Duke University's library, has crafted a wonderfully engaging narrative of daily life for elite foreigners in mid-nineteenth-century Havana. To complement the letters, Martínez-Fernández also conducted extensive research in British, Cuban, and Spanish archives.	2
Using Backhouse's Cuban appointment, Martínez-Fernández presents the different elements of the diplomatic, economic, and social interactions among Cuba, Spain, Britain, and the United States regarding the continued presence and growth of slavery in nineteenth-century Cuba. The limits and ultimate failure of British abolitionist policies in Cuba are clearly shown by the ineffectiveness of the joint British and Spanish commission in which Backhouse served as a judge. The economic and social power of sugar barons and of those associated with the slave trade in Cuba—from slave traders to Spanish civil, religious, and military officials—frustrated the efforts of the dutiful British government official. Backhouse, for example, only reviewed three slave trade cases—he lost all three of them—in the two years he served on the commission.	3
Fighting Slavery in the Caribbean provides an extremely detailed account of important aspects of quotidian life in mid-nineteenth-century Havana. Although many nineteenth-century travel accounts and other studies have provided solid insights into urban life among habaneros, Martínez-Fernández must be commended for using sources that have traditionally been used to describe plantation life and slavery to present an evocative picture of the urban context. This is an important contribution not only to Cuba's historiography but to the Caribbean's nineteenth-century social urban history. In a chapter, for instance, describing the limitations imposed on foreign elite women in Havana, Martínez-Fernández describes many of the social customs that limited the mobility of the British and North American female visitors to what he calls the "male" city of Havana. It is interesting that the reader gets a much more active and nonrestrictive perspective of the lives of white elite foreign women based on the rest of Martínez-Fernández's narrative. Mrs. Grace Backhouse, for example, is shown hosting parties and intellectual gatherings for other elite women. She also travels to the city's downtown and commercial district on numerous occasions.	. . .