The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere

The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in American Hemisphere. By Robert J. Cottrol. Studies in Legal History of South. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Pp. [xiv], 370. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4431-7; cloth, $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4405-8.) In this ambitious work Robert J. Cottrol has produced a sweeping synthesis of comparative legal history of race and slavery in Latin America and United States. Drawing on questions raised in legal scholar Frank Tannenbaum's provocative work, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in Americas (New York, 1946), Cottrol investigates how and why history of race and slavery differed in United States and Latin America. Cottrol uses secondary scholarship alongside statutes and appellate case law to sketch out his argument that what distinguished United States' history of race was cognitive dissonance between an ideology of democracy and equality--an ideology that was largely absent from Latin American societies--and a tradition of racial slavery (p. 10). Despite its deep commitment to a legal regime of white supremacy, Cottrol argues, United States after World War II became a model for Afro-American activists seeking to challenge discrimination in Latin America precisely because Jim Crow--the body of law supporting racial segregation in U.S. South--provided a clear target for combating racial restrictions (p. 210). Cottrol views law as a powerful force in shaping social relations, even if it has failed to destroy society's racial prejudices by beginning of twenty-first century. Cottrol's work pulls together decades of scholarship and covers centuries of history in an impressively concise and clearly written book that will become a starting point for future studies on law of race relations in Americas. Cottrol organizes this study into three loosely chronological sections--slavery and emancipation; postemancipation racial relations and restrictions; and struggle to roll back those restrictions in mid-to-late twentieth century--that include chapters on Brazil, Spanish America, and area that became United States. Cottrol chose seven Latin American countries (Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Dominican Republic) that he considers to represent the range of issues that have confronted peoples of African descent in Spanish America (p. 16). Although scope of work prevents Cottrol from providing in-depth histories of these nations, book offers an overview of particular conditions in each of these locations, emphasizing enduring presence of racial discrimination in Latin America, despite these nations' nominally egalitarian laws (p. 19). In first section Cottrol traces legal heritage of Roman slave law and Las siete partidas in Spain's American colonies. …