In the late 1840s Magdalena, a young woman of African descent, was held overnight in the stocks, “accompanied only by the steady rain, constellations of stars, and animals that roamed the village of Noanamá,” an Indigenous settlement in Chocó, Colombia (p. 1). Magdalena was “a child of the Free Womb,” born after the introduction of gradual abolition legislation in 1821 and into a world of limited and violent freedoms (p. 2). She emerged from the stocks with one of her hands disabled and scarred. Yesenia Barragan's Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific begins with this vignette, immediately immersing the reader in the physical world of nineteenth-century Chocó during “gradual emancipation rule.” Freedom's Captives retells the story of gradual emancipation, abolition, and liberalism by centering free womb children like Magdalena and their families.
The book is organized into three parts. The first, “The Social Universe of...
