Paths of Enslavement, Routes to Freedom: Slavery and Mobility in the Iberian Atlantic World

A 1.5-day workshop sponsored by the Global History and Culture Centre and the Humanities Research Fund, University of Warwick, 29-30 April 2024

 

This workshop aimed to connect some of the rich historiography of slavery in the Iberian Atlantic world to the fields of spatial and mobilities histories. Drawing on approaches from Black geographies, mobilities studies, and environmental history, papers explored how the movement of enslaved people both constructed and contested the spaces of slavery and freedom. Paths of Enslavement positioned Latin America’s built and natural landscapes, waterways, and archives at the heart of these discussions about slavery, space, and human movement. From different temporal and spatial vantage-points, the papers emphasised enslaved people’s ability to harness mobility in resistive ways and to fashion “place” on their own terms. A concluding roundtable explored how Latin American archive sources can be translated and curated for use in schools and universities in the UK and Latin America. Organised by the Paths of Enslavement research network, the workshop comprised a one-day research event (29 April 2024) and a half-day of grant writing and planning for future activities (30 April 2024).

Pedro Reinel and Lopo Homem, "Terra Brasilis" Miller Atlas, 1519 French National Library, Paris (Wikimedia Commons)

 

The first panel, chaired by Guido van Meersbergen, focused on spaces and mobilities in the early modern and eighteenth century Iberian world. The first speaker, José Lingna Nafafé, is a senior lecturer in Portuguese and Lusophone Studies at the University of Bristol. Building on his recent book, Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the Seventeenth Century (CUP 2022) as well as new evidence, José’s paper placed African journeys and agency at the centre of abolitionist struggles, which began much earlier than the European-centred story of abolitionism with which most historians are more familiar. He explored a highly organised, international legal case for ending slavery headed by Angolan nobleman Lourenço da Silva Mendonça in the seventeenth century. Mendonça’s 1684 case to the Vatican argued for the abolition of the enslavement of people of African descent in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, but also for that of New Christians and Native Americans. Mendonça’s relationship with New Christians, Native Brazilians and other Africans was central to the case he made for universal human rights, liberty, and humanity, yet this international initiative calling for abolition of slavery in the Atlantic - led by Africans themselves - has received little scholarly attention.

 

The second speaker, Selina Patel Nascimento, is a lecturer in the History of the Global South, Department of History, Lancaster University. Building on her article “Space Invaders? Slavery, Gender and the Remapping of Eighteenth-Century Portuguese Imperial Geographies,” just out in Immigrants and Minorities (Spring 2024), Selina’s paper explored the Rossio square in eighteenth-century Lisbon as a contested urban space between the dispossessed and the Portuguese imperial authorities. Focusing on the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake, Selina explored how enslaved and freed women of African and Afro-Brazilian heritage from the Portuguese colonies used and reconfigured the Rossio through direct confrontations with the imperial authorities. She showed how, by reading against the grain of traditional manuscript sources, it is possible to glimpse how contestations over this space underscored the dependence of the metropolis on such women’s labour, and also allowed Afro-Diasporic women to create alternate geographies of empire and power that pushed back against imperial spatial constructions.

Antonio de Ulloa, “Mount Capiro with tamandua and battle between mulatto and tiger,” Madrid, Antonio Marín 1748, John Carter Brown Library, Box 1894, Brown University, Providence, R.I. 02912

 

The third speaker, Bethan Fisk, is a lecturer in Colonial Latin American history in the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. Bethan’s paper showed how place played a constitutive role in Black religious practice in eighteenth-century Colombia. Turning away from the frequent focus on cities or plantations, Bethan instead highlighted the many sites, from mines and haciendas to palenques (maroon communities), which shaped, and were shaped by, Black mobilities. In the interstices – liminal places and spaces – religious practice and knowledge created openings in the midst of a society shaped by slavery and forged new connections and commonalities across these different spaces.

 

The second panel, chaired by David Lambert, brought together two book projects on the particular mobilities and immobilities that supported Cuba’s rapidly-expanding nineteenth-century slave society. The Atlantic trade in humans was illegal in Cuba from 1820, yet it expanded exponentially until emancipation itself in 1886. The first speaker, Oscar de la Torre, is associate professor of Africana Studies and Latin American Studies at UNC Charlotte. His paper explored the surviving historical material about the imposing urban barracoons that housed recently-trafficked Africans in Matanzas, exploring the role of these imposing wharf-side structures within the city’s larger racial geographies and asking what they can tell us about the expression and contestation of planter power in Cuban urban spaces at the height of the sugar boom. His paper examined how the long, roofed barracones were strongly reminiscent of the better-known plantation barracones, jail-like structures that housed enslaved sugar workers. Indeed, the warehouses sought to replicate the rationale of containment of the rural barracoons, providing a tightly regimented carceral facility that controlled the social interactions of the enslaved – yet they did so in the industrial heart of Matanzas. Oscar’s paper suggested that the Black workers of Matanzas’ Pueblo Nuevo neighbourhood (the location of the barracones) engaged in processes of intra- and inter-racial sociability, gradually eroding planter power in the city.

 

Ácana plantation, Matanzas, Cuba, 1857. Justo Cantero & Eduardo LaPlante, Los ingenios. Colección de vistas de los principales ingenios de azúcar

(Havana: Litografía de Luis Marquier, 1857).

 

The last speaker, Camillia Cowling, is associate professor of Latin American History, Department of History, University of Warwick. Her paper explored the practice of captura as it operated in Cuba by the mid-nineteenth-century. The term denoted the physical catching of alleged fugitive slaves, but it also referred to the lengthy administrative process of paying the catcher and returning the alleged fugitive, often via tortuous, forced journeys around the island. In the meantime, those captured were “stored” in one of a growing network of carceral spaces, where their labour was exploited for the perennially-underfunded public works - particularly in building the transport infrastructure that supported the “second slavery” in Cuba. While historians are familiar with the existence of captura, the paper argued that delving more deeply into the lengthy proceedings and contestations produced by captura sheds important new light on the daily operations of a fundamental power: to place, move, and incarcerate people of African descent. This power helped alter the administrative structures of the second slavery, carved out but also placed limits on individual enslavers’ power, and framed many of the gendered ways in which men and women of African descent laid claim to place and movement, as part of their struggles with the institution of slavery itself.

 

Day 1 of the workshop concluded with a generative discussion about how the collection of primary sources that the network collaborators plan to produce might be used for teaching in universities and schools in the UK and the Americas. We hope to use this collection to bring professional historians into closer dialogue with students and their teachers, offer students wider access to documents that reveal person-centred stories of agency and ingenuity as well as the trauma and horror of enslavement and coerced movement, and bridge the linguistic and historiographic divides make it difficult to explore the pain and power of this wider Atlantic story.

 

To explore the best ways to collate and deliver these materials, the panel discussion drew on the wide experience of school and university teaching of a number of colleagues. David Rawlings (Senior Lecturer, School of Education, Bristol) and Bethan Fisk discussed their plan to produce a GCSE syllabus on Caribbean History, working with local organisations such as Cargo that aim to widen the scope of Black history teaching at key stage 3. Selina Patel Nascimento explored how she has discussed the implications of her work at girls’ schools in Birmingham. José Lingna Nafafé (Bristol) has taught widely in schools as well as university settings. Rosie Doyle (Associate Professor, Latin American History, University of Warwick) acts as Widening Participation lead for the History Department at Warwick and runs the Hidden Histories project through which undergraduate students from the History Department receive training in lesson planning and go on to design and deliver lessons on a range of historical topics in local primary and secondary schools. Simon Peplow (Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Warwick) is a historian of modern British race, ethnicity, and migration, with particular interests in Black British political participation, who has worked with various organisations on projects to encourage collaboration between historians working at universities and in secondary schools. He has also produced resources for use in schools. Warwick final-year History student Cerys Hughes joined the panel to discuss her experience of studying slavery at school and her more recent experience at Warwick with in-depth analysis of primary sources on slavery in Latin America during her final-year module “Space, Place, and Movement in Atlantic Slave Societies: Brazil, Cuba, and West Africa.”

Taken together, the papers and roundtable helped explore the many ways in which new spatial and social histories of the Iberian Americas can make vital contributions to the emerging fields of Black geographies and spatial and mobilities histories. The discussions highlighted how, more than simply redressing the balance, the incorporation of the Iberian world allows us to ask new questions and explore new methods and frameworks. For example, it widens the chronological scope, to explore movements of enslaved Africans that began in the sixteenth-century Iberian world and ended only on the eve of the twentieth. It shifts the geographic focus from the North to the South Atlantic - fundamental to Atlantic slaving systems, yet still marginalised in Anglophone literature. Scholars working with Latin American archives also draw on distinctive kinds of materials - legal, religious, and notarial records, for example – that offer different vantage-points on enslaved people’s diverse ability to practise mobility or make “place” in their own ways, such as by travelling to sacred sites, rebuilding shattered family ties, or using Iberian legal mechanisms to forge precarious rights to stay put.

After the workshop, Day 2 of the event allowed network members to plan for future grant applications (the National Endowment for the Humanities and the AHRC Curiosity Award) that will allow us to organise larger conferences and events and co-edited publications. We also intend to incorporate a significant impact element, focused on the primary source collection and teaching activities discussed in the roundtable.