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Dissertation Information for Jose Guadalupe Ortega

NAME:
- Jose Guadalupe Ortega

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2007)

ADVISORS:
- Kevin Terraciano
- James Lockhart

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- William R. Summerhill
- L. Robin Derby
- Russell Thornton

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: The Cuban sugar complex in the age of revolution, 1789--1844

Abstract: This dissertation is a social and economic study of Cuba, concentrating on the island's capital city, Havana, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within a generation, the massive importation of African slaves and a sharp increase in Spanish immigration transformed Cuba from a colonial backwater and military outpost to a dynamic multiethnic urban and plantation society. The work closely examines the racial, gender, and economic interactions of the lower, middle, and upper rungs of the sugar mill complex.

Research involved close reading of several hundred litigation and commercial documents from the Cuban National Archives. A career pattern methodology is employed. Tracing individuals, families, and firms makes possible a detailed description of social and economic interactions. This approach is especially useful when reconstructing the lives of ordinary people such as slaves and free people of color. The work also utilizes numerous nineteenth-century manuals, industry journals and magazines, industrial patents, and traveler accounts to determine the nature of technical and practical knowledge borrowed, exchanged, and employed by Cuban planters and their British West Indian counterparts. The research is done within Latin American history, but it also relates to Atlantic World studies.

The production and commerce of sugar placed Cuban society on the edges of modernity, aided considerably by the island's substantive reliance on African-based labor. The sudden expansion of the sugar economy in the 1790s rearticulated social and economic relations between masters and slaves, merchants and planters, and husbands and wives, the study emphasizes that the daily complexities of major labor, production, and commercial sectors demanded flexibility from all social groups. Noteworthy discussions include master-slave relations on the plantation, African gendered social networks, spousal and familial relations within the matrix of sugar production and commerce, the rise of Cuban slave merchants in the Atlantic slave trade, and the financing of the sugar mill complex. The dissertation contributes to our knowledge of Latin America, the histories of gender and of the African Diaspora, and the growing areas of inquiry and scholarship on the transfer of knowledge and ideas in the fields of history and economics.

MPACT Scores for Jose Guadalupe Ortega

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-08-07 13:40:11

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Students under Jose Guadalupe Ortega

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None