Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 November 2024
The chapter examines the distinctiveness of this composite freedom suit; the unorthodox Afro descendant community that took it to the highest imperial tribunal in Madrid; and the larger historical context that triggered the legal action in the early 1780s. It lays out the significance of the notions of “collective freedom” and “natives of a pueblo” deriving from colonial customary practices and from political, social, and juridical discourses rooted in the Spanish Atlantic world here reworked into novel proposals that challenged the approaching tsunami of slavery expansion in Cuba and the Atlantic world amid the Age of Revolutions, and it even presented a colonial alternative to slave-based plantation and extractive regimes. Linkages are made between the local, colonial, and imperial levels in which legal and political mobilizations unfolded. The chapter also surveys the various historiographies of slavery, race, Afro descendants, Indians, and law, politics and society that intersect in this study and discusses the sources and archives on which the study is based.
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