Cambio institucional y sociedad esclavista: la intensificación del mercado de trabajo esclavo en Matanzas (Cuba), 1755-1810

The long term institutional approach has created a static view of Cuba as a slave society throughout the entire Colonial per iod. This ossification of institutional change in Cuba has been criticized by the historiog raphy on slavery, which has still to define the characteristics and timing of changes in slave ownership. The aim of this article is to understand the rise of a slave society in Cuba, to analyse temporal aspects of the transformation towards a plantation economy in the last decades of the eighteenth centur y, and to describe its main features. For this purpose, the institutional changes and resulting economic g rowth are analysed using the social orders framework proposed by Nor th, Wallis and Weingast (2009). The slave market is studied with empirical data from the church records of the San Carlos cathedral in Matanzas, Cuba, and span the 1755-1810 timeframe. The data indicate that the 1780s were a time of increasing black workforce availability and growing numbers of slave owners; while the 1790s involved the establishment of the plantation system, along with a massive influx of male labourers and the expanding size of plantations. This lends support to the use of the slave labour market for institutional change analysis and the genesis of a slave society.