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5 - Routes to Freedom, Gradients of Unfreedom

Testamentary Manumission, Self-Purchase, and Public Manumissions

from Part II - The Time of Gradual Emancipation Rule

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2021

Yesenia Barragan
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
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Summary

Chapter 5 studies the two principal avenues of acquiring freedom available during gradual emancipation rule in the northern Pacific lowlands: self-purchase for enslaved and Free Womb captives, and public manumissions administered by the new manumission juntas. As Claudia Leal argues, “the Pacific coast of Colombia stands out for being—in all likelihood—the place in the Americas where self-purchase accounts for the largest percentage of manumissions.” This popular practice continued during gradual emancipation, giving rise to a debt-ridden moral economy of familial self-purchase embedded in the northern Pacific lowland gold industry. In the rest of the chapter, I argue that the public manumissions performed by the juntas, while they transformed the political culture and meaning of manumission as a public good in Colombia, fundamentally retained the disciplining logic of the slaveholding order. In fact, a close analysis of the juntas’ finances reveals how they repackaged self-purchase as manumission, thereby erasing the lowland’s long legacy of black self-purchase.

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Chapter
Information
Freedom's Captives
Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific
, pp. 199 - 230
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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