Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific

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...