Wir freuen uns auf Ihren Besuch!
Alexander von Humboldt im Netz
Forschung
A Working Conference for Humboldt Studies:
Alexander von Humboldt and the Hemisphere
Michael Zeuske, Institute for Latin American and Iberian Studies, University of Cologne, Germany: Alexander von Humboldt and Slavery
My paper focuses on examples from the “Diario Habana 1804,” Humboldt’s last unpublished diary which covers his final visit to Spanish America before traveling to the United States. Humboldt wrote this diary under the direct impact of the Saint-Domingue or Haitian revolution (Haiti proclaimed its independence from France in 1804). In this diary, Humboldt begins his observations with a comparative history of slavery that using all the modern methods of social scientific inquiry, which were to become the core of his famous Political Essay about the Island of Cuba and its sections about slavery.
In this paper, I present Humboldt in “real time” during his travels in the Americas (1799-1804), focusing on his observations about slavery and his preferred strategies for abolishing slavery. Humboldt arrived in the Americas as an enemy of slavery and of revolution, which, to him, meant radical revolution, as in the case of the French Jacobins. In his diaries about the voyage to Mexico (all of which are published), Humboldt mentioned different aspects of slavery in a rhizomatic way. This is very different from how he refers to slavery in his notes on countries with large numbers of slaves, such as Cuba. For example, he says nothing about slavery in the diary he kept during his visit to Cuba’s most developed sugar production zone in “Cuba grande” (between Havana and Matanzas). Yet, only weeks later, he compares Cuba’s large sugar factories (ingenios) and massive slavery with the sugar fields in the Guaduas valley near Bogotá, which employ free peasants.
All of Humboldt’s diaristic observations confirm that he was an enemy of slavery. If we analyze Humboldt’s relationship with the local slave-holding elite, however, another account comes to light. While being a lifelong friend of members of the reformist elite in Havana (the group around Francisco Arango y Parreño, among whom were the largest slaveholders in all of the Americas at that time), Humboldt had a far more conflicted relationship with the Venezuelan elites who worked toward a revolution and the establishment of a “white republic.” He had especially strained relationships with those men who became military leaders during the revolution for independence: the Bolívars, the Ibarras, and the Penalvers, among others. An enemy of violent revolutions, Humboldt himself preferred slave emancipation that was controlled by the slave holders to the slaves’ self-emancipation.
