The Butcher's Wife, Race Relations and Death by Hanging in Cuba and the Spanish Atlantic, 1830s-1930s.

This talk gives an overview of a micro-historical study currently in its research phase. It concerns a judicial trial over spousal murder in northeastern Cuba during the early 19th century. The incident, tried at the high court of Puerto Principe, Camaguey, was meaningful not only as it represented a reflection of day-to-day gender tensions among an ordinary segment of Cuban society affording as well a valuable window into the tense nature of race relations in the Spanish Empire's most significant slave society, but also as it unleashed legal transformations of an Atlantic magnitude. It is one of those rare cases that makes it possible for us historians of law to link local developments and larger changes impacting state development. It speaks, in particular, to the way the death penalty was implemented over the next century all over the remains of the Spanish Empire. The expectation is that the work shall make significant contributions to both social and legal history. It shall also have rich comparative implications.