New Perspectives on the American Revolution: The View from George Washington, Cuba

This is an Archive of a Past Event

The island of Cuba supplied economic and military aid to the rebel cause during the American Revolution. This surprises those more familiar with the narrative of French, rather than Spanish, involvement in that war. What was the nature of this involvement and what does it reveal about eighteenth-century imperial rivalry and inter-American relations? Offering a Cuban optic on the American Revolution, this talk questions historians’ assumptions about “entangled empires” and the Age of Revolutions.

Speaker: Elena Schneider is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a historian of colonial Latin America and the Atlantic World. Her research explores the ways that war, trade, and slavery integrated the eighteenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic World. Her current book project, The Occupation of Havana, looks at the British invasion and occupation of Havana in 1762 as an episode in a long history of imperial rivalry over Cuba.