Paul Barba's Country of the Cursed and the Driven narrates the intertwined development of two systems of bondage—one of Indigenous peoples, the other of people of African descent—in the Texas borderlands from the sixteenth century to the outbreak of the American Civil War. Based on sources in Texas, this longue durée study raises important questions about what defines slavery and how two coercive labor systems shaped one another in a region marked by nearly four centuries of violent contestation.
By enslaving Native peoples in war and ransoming captives during peacetime, Spaniards sought to control—and in the process transform—the Texas borderlands. But by the mid-eighteenth century, the Comanche began to threaten Spanish rule in Texas. Incentivized to participate in the slave trade by the Spanish demand for labor, the Comanche kidnapped Apache women and children, selling them into an ever-expanding commercial market in the Southwest. The lucrative trade in stolen horses,...
