Historian Yesenia Barragan has produced a profound and cutting-edge interpretation of American freedom and unfreedom. In Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific, Barragan weaves a case study of Colombia into the larger fabric of Black Atlantic history. One of her major interventions is to rethink the significance of the early republican period in general and gradual slave emancipation in particular. These are well-known but rarely studied conjunctures, and the latter receives short shrift from scholars. Yet as Barragan asserts, Colombia's 1821 gradual emancipation law was a “relatively successful biopolitical experiment in social control” that generated a new racial order, new labor regimes, and new (if rarely fulfilled) antislavery sensibilities (22). This gradual emancipation rule, as Barragan calls it, took three main forms: self-purchase, public manumissions, and the so-called Free Womb provision. The book analyzes each from both the legal-political perspective and the perspective of the affected African-descended people. Together they shaped the possibilities of bondage and liberation for a generation.Freedom's Captives zeroes in on the Chocó, a relatively remote, rainforest-covered, and gold-rich province of northwest Colombia. Historically and to this day, the Chocó's population has been overwhelmingly of African descent, a legacy of Spanish colonialism, Atlantic slavery, and coerced gold extraction from the region's mineral-rich waterways. Yet as Barragan argues, the region's remoteness and mineral wealth opened possibilities for autonomy and even legal freedom for Afro-Colombians.Early chapters trace the rural and town-based worlds of both enslavers and unfree peoples of the Chocó, with a focus on the men who rowed boats and women who prospected gold along the infinite waterways of this jungle region. The story then zooms out to a national perspective of early republican legal and political cultures, with a focus on the 1821 gradual emancipation law at the Congress of Cucutá. At stake was the legal creation of the much-contested Free Womb provision, whereby a child born to an enslaved woman would at adulthood gain legal freedom but remained a “captive” until then (134). Barragan then returns to the Chocó to examine how these national legal changes informed the social calculus of Pacific lowlanders. The Free Womb captives endured an active market in the buying and selling of their unfree labor while self-purchase, the main route to legal freedom, fueled the extractive economy of gold mining. Public manumission ceremonies, despite their political and emotional charge, nonetheless reinforced the subordination of enslaved people. The book's narrative ends around final abolition in the early 1850s, when a new subsistence-based society took hold in the Chocó, much to the chagrin of Colombia's ruling classes.Scholars will find that the book has many strengths. For one, its constant comparisons to other country contexts add up to a thorough accounting of hemispheric changes in gradual emancipation. The comparative analysis is capacious and deeply integrated into every chapter. Barragan has read widely in the scholarship. I have not seen a monograph that so systematically introduces relevant interpretations of other countries. As Barragan points out, Colombians at the time were in conversation with other Americans about emancipation, hence our need to understand how Free Womb provisions and other abolitionist ideas circulated beyond Colombia. Students of comparative slavery and emancipation in the Americas will appreciate such thorough cross-country connections that are rarely made by historians, as well as the most up-to-date bibliography and synopses of the state of the field. But it is much more than that. The effect of reading this constant comparative framework is substantial. For the first time, the Colombian example feels properly integrated into the wider story of slave emancipation in the Americas. Barragan has placed the country at the forefront of the scholarship on the subject.On top of the important comparative analysis, the book is deeply researched. Barragan carried out work in six archives in four Colombian cities plus archives in Britain and the United States. (Investigating notarial records—notoriously byzantine—in the Chocó could not have been easy!) In addition to these manuscript collections, Barragan uses an array of historical newspapers and published primary sources. The result of such comprehensive research is a narrative that portrays the world of the Colombian Pacific in vivid detail. The everyday lives of free and enslaved rural lowlanders rise from the page. While warning us about the lapses and silences in the written record, Barragan has nonetheless reconstructed to a remarkable extent the stories of individuals struggling for freedom.A final strength is the writing. Barragan is a wordsmith. The care she has taken in crafting sentences shines throughout, making the book a pleasure to read. The grace of the prose only adds to the intellectual bounty of this important book.
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Open Access
Sep 17, 2024
A R Gilmullin 
