Preliminary Programme

This paper examines female migration in the Spanish Empire in the 18th century Spain, focusing on the causes of women’s rural-urban movement and the roles they played in the destination cities, especially within migrant communities. Compared to men, women were much less geographically mobile, and the longer the distance the smaller the share of women in the migratory flow. Yet, despite patriarchal constraints and relative exclusion from the labor market, women did move to the big city, many of them in search of wage employment. The question is what made moving away from home possible – a move which supposedly lessened patriarchal control.
Women of all classes participated in three general flows: the most common short-range movement to nearby towns and cities; mid-range movement from rural villages, especially in the north of Spain, to the big cities of the center and south; and transatlantic crossing to urban destinations such as Mexico City or Buenos Aires, in which only a tiny fraction of women was involved. Employing a comparative perspective of both sending areas (in Spain) and receiving cities (in Spain and Spanish America), the paper revolves around two key questions: First, What pushed women out of their rural homes? And second, To what extent was their migration process – from departure to arrival and employment in the big city – constrained by patriarchal agents, such as father, brothers and fellow-countrymen?
To address these questions I examine multiple datasets of migrants, both men and women, residing in various cities in Spain and Spanish America. Information on migrants was culled from various types of quantifiable sources, key among them was marriage applications, which documented a common investigative procedure carried out by the Catholic Church to prevent illegitimate matrimony. As marrying couples brought witnesses, usually paisanos and paisanas (compatriots from their rural home), these records also contain information about migrants’ social networks. Using specific birthplace stated in these documents, I employ a GIS analysis of male and female migrants’ geographical origins to discuss endogamy (among paisanos-paisanas), single vs family migration, and women’s chain migration. Furthermore, to address the origins of female migrants – the types of places and families they came from – I focus on Galicia and the Basque Provinces, two key sending areas in the north with contrasting social features in terms of family structure, landholding patterns and relative poverty. By these comparisons of multiple sending and receiving zones, we may better understand the conditions that made female migration possible, in the face of strict social constraints. (Show less)

The circulation of revolutionary actors and ideas across the Caribbean during the Age of Revolution has been the subject of a vibrant historiographical field, vastly renewed over the last two decades. In turn, to the exception of Maya Jasanoff’s study of the Loyalist diaspora across the British Empire in the Americas, migrations – forced or otherwise – of loyalist subjects in the wake of revolution remain comparatively less studied. This paper proposes to explore Havana and its hinterland as transnational hub of Atlantic revolution and site of refuge for exiled people between roughly 1790 and 1810. It studies Havana as confluence two interrelated migratory streams from the island of Hispaniola to Cuba. First, it will focus on the exile to Havana of French settlers from Saint-Domingue in the context of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). Second, it delves into the relocation to Havana of Spanish-speaking settlers from Santo Domingo following the Treaty of Basel (1795) which officially ceded Santo Domingo to the French Republic.

Cast directly or indirectly in exile by the Haitian Revolution, both populations shared the same micro-geography of exile despite differences in subjecthood, but – curiously enough – have been scarcely studied in tandem so far. Likewise, scholarship on the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean as site of refuge for loyalist Spanish “emigrados” and foreign refugees from revolution remains very much in its infancy. While new studies by Sarah C. Chambers and Nicolas A. González-Quintero (among others) focus on exiled Spanish subjects during the wars for independence across Spanish America (from the early 1810s onwards), exile within – and to – the Spanish Empire during the period of deep imperial reconfiguration and revolutionary turmoil at the turn of the century (c.1790-1810) has received comparatively less scrutiny.

This paper zeroes in on the governance of relief to exiled people who settled in Havana and its hinterland. It emphasizes, more particularly, the politicization of concepts of ‘loyalty’ and ‘subjecthood’, and their use in claims of eligibility and special deservingness to material and financial assistance from Spanish colonial authorities. Colonial officials in Cuba strived to project an imperial self-image of benevolence and generosity towards displaced Spanish subjects and exiled foreigners deemed loyal to the Spanish crown, while hoping to mitigate the threats of revolutionary contagion and race war. By focusing on this predicament and the complex governance of (differential) relief, this paper proposes to study both migration streams as deeply entangled and mutually constitutive chains of exile. In so doing, it delves into the institutional and political governance of exile in Havana as emerging submetropolis of the Spanish Empire, focusing on claims of loyal vassalage, ambiguities in subjecthood, as well as on the relation between exiled populations and imperial politics. (Show less)