The Instrucción on the education, treatment and occupations of slaves (1789)

A royal code for the Spanish Indies that fined owners for underfeeding or abandoning the people they held, ordered every death or absence reported to a judge within three days, prosecuted anyone but the owner who wounded a slave under the penalties for wounding a free person — and in the same document authorised the stocks, the chain and twenty-five lashes. The planters of Havana petitioned against it in 1790; twenty years later the Cuban authorities could not say when it had ever been in force.