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A comparative analysis of the arming of slaves may shed light on the problems regarding the dynamics of power within slave societies, the nature of domination and resistance, and the paradoxes of mastery and enslavement. This book has provided case studies on the arming of slaves throughout thousands of years of history, focusing on the use of slave soldiers in regions from classical Greece to western Africa and the Middle East. It has examined how the arming of slaves expressed itself in either military slavery or the less sophisticated schemes commonly used in the Americas. It has also discussed slave recruitment and deployment and the reasons behind the arming of slaves, including blacks. In addition, the book has explored the consequences of the arming of slaves both for the enslaved and the institution of slavery itself.

Scholars of military slavery have offered various theories to explain why owners outside the American South armed their slaves. Max Weber, for example, argued that slaves were ideal clients of patrimonial rulers. However, this explanation does not take into account the lived experiences and political imaginations of slaves themselves. This chapter examines how military slaves on prazos—Portuguese-run estates along the Zambesi River—came to define themselves as sharers of a new social identity known as Chikunda (“the conquerors”). It first looks at the relation between military slavery and economic production on the prazos before discussing how slave soldiers valorized courage and military skill as they performed dangerous tasks. Slave soldiers defined themselves as Chikunda and celebrated their physical prowess through language, songs, ceremonies, initiation rituals, clothing, and facial tattoos.

The chapter focuses on the history of the professional slave soldier. The professional slave soldiers were slaves who fought in the army of the Prophet. Some Roman dignitaries had armed slave bodyguards while some owned gladiators. The slave in authority dates back to remote antiquity. Kings appointed slaves to positions of prestige and power during the Sumerian times. Different words were used to denote privileged slaves. The system of court slavery reached its final and fullest development in the Ottoman Empire where all the servants of the state were slaves of the sultan. The only exceptions were the members of religious establishments. The Ottoman kul was not a slave in terms of Islamic law but a slave in matters of marriage, property, and legal responsibility. He was subject to the power of the sultan.

In the 1850s, the wars of independence and the recruitment of slaves as combatants almost culminated in the end of slavery in what had been Spanish South America. Throughout the continent slaves were involved in the military process, helping to gain freedom for their nations and weakening the very institution that kept them in chains. Slave recruitment suggested the gravity of the situation, reversing a longstanding policy that prohibited the arming of this sector of the population. This chapter examines the role of slave soldiers in the fight for independence in Spanish South America and in the eventual abolition of slavery.

Male slaves had often been stereotyped as cowards who could not be relied upon in combat. This ideology, combined with fear, explains why the Confederate government did not seriously consider the arming of slaves until the last months of the U.S. Civil War. Yet in his prize-winning book Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin describes how slaves were drafted in time of war by English officials in colonial South Carolina, like their Spanish counterparts in Florida. This book explores why some slaves would choose to fight for their masters and why arming them did not undermine slavery itself. It considers examples of the use of slave soldiers in history that extend over thousands of years and encompass the ancient Mediterranean and early Islamic states as well as Africa, South America, the Caribbean, the U.S. Civil War, and even the anticolonial insurgency in late nineteenth-century Cuba.

Of all the nations in Europe, it was Spain which was most dependent on the military employment of slaves throughout its history. Armed military service in defense of the Spanish Crown provided a way for slaves to gain freedom. As one of the best in the world, the early modern Spanish army was significantly heterogeneous, incorporating volunteers and mercenaries of different nationalities as well as free and enslaved Africans to accomplish its early conquests. This chapter examines the arming of slaves, who were transformed from bondsmen into free vassals, to fortify colonial Spanish America's military campaigns against indigenous populations. It looks at the use of enslaved blacks to explore and expand Spanish frontiers throughout the Americas, to help Spain defend the Caribbean, and to fight against escaped slaves. It also discusses Cuba's creation of militias of free men of color, the rise to power of the French Bourbons, the use of slave soldiers in eighteenth-century Cuba, Spain's deployment of black militias to fight in various revolutions, and the black auxiliaries of Spanish King Carlos IV.

This middle section of the book, on the invasion and occupation, treats the two phases of the central events in Cuba as separate but parallel processes, with their own protagonists and outcomes. Chapter 3 focuses on the critical role of people of African descent during the siege. British war commanders had counted on a formidable defense of Havana from the Spanish soldiers stationed there, but what surprised them was the vigorous part played by free and enslaved people of color on the front lines of the defense. Not all people of African descent present at the siege acted in support of either the British or the Spanish war effort. But in general blacks in Havana made the siege so protracted that the British almost failed; its armies ended up losing more men to a virulent yellow fever outbreak than they had in the entire Seven Years’ War in North America. The defense of Havana was so fierce that it took down a massive British army and severely limited plans for the occupation.

The final section of the book moves across the fifty years after the occupation, exploring Spain’s efforts to reconstitute its authority in Havana and the many reverberations of the occupation throughout broader Atlantic and global systems. The actions of individuals in Cuba during this crucial episode of fighting and occupying revised understandings in the metropole that would go on to shape new policies with global ramifications. The exemplary service of black soldiers in defending Cuba from attack helped to convince the Spanish state of the “utility” of Africans for achieving its imperial ambitions and the wisdom of procuring, on its own, more populations of African descent for its overseas colonies. In addition, disloyalty among elites during the occupation convinced Spain that the way to tie the island better to its sovereign was to make more enslaved Africans available to these eager buyers.