04.03.2018: Slave trader statue removed
On 4 March 2018, a statue of former industrialist and enslaver #Antonio_López was removed from the Barcelona square named after him, an initiative backed by members of the city council.
Inaugurated in 1884, a year after his death, López’s statue was pulled down in the summer of 1936 and its metal used for the war industries, during the fight against the fascists in the civil war. However, it was replaced in the 1940s during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship.
López was born in 1817 to a poor family in the fishing village of Comillas on the Asturian coast. At the age fourteen he emigrated to Cuba where he set out to make his way in the world in the ruthless fashion of the self-made. Marrying well, he used his wife’s capital to expand into slave trade and sugar plantations. In 1853 he left Cuba for Spain, now an extremely rich man and thus an archetypal indiano – the term used to describe the usually poor emigrants who enriched themselves in the “Indies”, often Cuba.
In Barcelona, López played a leading role in Catalonia’s incipient industrial revolution and founded three major companies – Tabaco de Filipinas, Banco Hispano-Colonial and Transatlántica Española – all of which were key in the exploitation of Spain’s colonies. Later, the Banco Hispano-Colonial allowed him to lend money to a broke Alfonso XII for which the monarch named him Marqués de Comillas in 1878 – though Barcelona’s popular classes had their own name for him: el Negrero (the Slaver). And, lastly in the trio there is Transatlántica Española, whose ships were used in colonial wars in Cuba and Morocco, and later to transport the recruits which sparked the Tragic Week uprising of 1909.
López became the richest man in Spain and in 1871 consented for his daughter to marry the son of another slave-enriched indiano, Joan Güell. With the two fortunes welded, their son Eusebi Güell thus became the wealthiest man in Spain and allegedly the tenth richest man in the world.
▻https://stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/8023/slave-trader-statue-removed
#statue #toponymie_politique #toponymie #Barcelone #esclavage #histoire #histoire_coloniale #Espagne #Espagne_coloniale
ping @cede @reka