Representing the slave trader:: Haley and the slave ship;: or, Spain's 'Uncle Tom's cabin'

Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of the foremost texts of the American abolitionist movement, but its impact on politics was international. This article traces the reception of Stowe's novel in Spain, the last European empire with a slave economy, during the mid-nineteenth century. As an imperial power, Spain was the political and economic force behind the transatlantic slave trade; but as a nation of readers, it imported a narrative back across the Atlantic in order to fictionalize and contemplate the effects of its slave policies in the Caribbean. One such adaptation converted the novel into a play about a slave trader and recast Stowe's story of slavery in the Atlantic world in terms of Spain's role in the slave trade and in the imperial control of Cuba.