Enslaved New World - Slavery, Freedom, and the Making of Race in Santo Domingo

Enslaved New World illuminates sixteenth-century Santo Domingo as the site of the Americas' earliest plantation and slave society and the first place where slavery became limited to people of African descent. Yet Santo Domingo was also home, Turits shows, to widespread continual flight from bondage and an ecology providing escapees with relatively easy refuge. This transformed the colony into a land in which predominantly self-emancipated Black people became the largest population group by the late seventeenth century, 150 years before slavery's abolition. Afterwards, slavery and legal racial hierarchy persisted, but the White elite often remained too poor and weak to overcome resistance and competing constructs of status and color emerged. By focusing on Santo Domingo's understudied African-descended majority population within novel frameworks, Turits opens up new understandings of Dominican history, slavery's racialization, race and racism's historical contingency, and an extraordinarily successful Afro-American trajectory of resistance.

List of contents

Introduction; 1. Slavery's transformation begins: Santo Domingo in the sixteenth century; 2. Becoming a world of Black and White: the Americas' first plantation society; 3. The enslaved strike back: Santo Domingo's long counter-plantation war; 4. Foiling Spanish supremacy: the pursuit of freedom in the century before abolition; 5. 'As if there were no more classes than free or slave': the problem of race in the eighteenth century; Epilogue: Freedom; Index.

About the author

Richard Lee Turits is a professor of History, Africana Studies, and Latin American Studies at William & Mary. He is the author of Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History; Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean (with Laurent Dubois), and Terreurs de frontière: Le massacre des Haïtiens en République Dominicaine en 1937 (with Lauren Derby).

Product details

• Authors: Richard Lee Turits
• Publisher: Cambridge Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 30.04.2026
• EAN: 9781009721455
• ISBN: 978-1-009-72145-5
• Weight: 250 g
• Illustrations: Worked examples or Exercises
• Series: Afro-Latin America
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; HISTORY / Latin America / General, Colonialism & imperialism, Santo Domingo, 17th century, c 1600 to c 1699, Colonialism and imperialism, Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700, History of the Americas, Dominican Republic, Slavery & abolition of slavery, 16th century, c 1500 to c 1599, c 1500 to c 1600, C 1600 To C 1700, Relating to people of the African diasporas / heritage, Slavery, enslaved persons and abolition of slavery