No God But Gain

June 29, 2015
Chambers (Jane and the Raven King) employs his narrative gifts in a historical study that centers on the ways in which the presence of slavery in Spain’s Caribbean and South American colonies affected the early development of the newly independent U.S. Even after the Constitution outlawed the transatlantic slave trade, the profits generated by trading slaves and slave-produced goods within the Americas created immense wealth for American capitalists and underwrote their nation’s economic and geographical expansion in the first half of the 19th century. Chambers focuses on the relationship between the U.S. and Cuba in this period, as the Spanish colony was “a uniquely central driver of U.S. economic development and foreign policy.” Analyzing the activities of a colorful cast of speculators, smugglers, lawyers, diplomats, and politicians, Chambers’s extensively researched monograph details the ways in which the early American republic’s foreign policies were manipulated by its canny and unscrupulous mercantile elite, who reaped immense wealth from U.S. involvement with the burgeoning sugar colony of Cuba. Though his writing suffers from some infelicities of style, Chambers helpfully places the familiar story of American slavery in a wider geographic context, illuminating how slavery underpinned all aspects of early American social, political, and economic development.