Imagining communities in black and white: Social stratification in colonial Virginia and Cuba and its impact on nineteenth century conceptions of race and nation

This dissertation reassesses Tannenbaum's thesis on the differences between North American and Latin American race relations by looking to the colonial period for the origins of modern racial categories and by placing the development of free labor and ideologies of whiteness at the center of analysis. Focusing on Virginia and Cuba, the study synthesizes a large secondary literature to illustrate how colonial legal and social regulations, particularly those surrounding labor and sexual relations, generated distinctive systems of social stratification and novel conceptions of race in the two colonies. These disparate approaches to labor and racial classification in the colonial period shaped nineteenth century transformations in the labor regime and nation-building in Cuba and the US more broadly, as the dismantling of slavery, the rise of wage labor, and increased immigration altered discourses of race and nation. The dissertation argues that the way in which colonial Virginia and Cuba solved their labor problems fundamentally shaped their constructions of racial categories. It concludes that the absence of a cross-class racial contract comparable to the one scholars like Edmund Morgan and Charles Mills have identified with the US is key to the disparate racial economies of Anglo and Iberian America.