This chapter investigates the connection between officeholding and serfdom in light of new interpretations which have suggested that serfdom, rather than being a significant liability that the unfree fought hard to remove, was instead characterised by routine obligations and disappeared quickly after the Black Death. Through comparing lists of officers with records of landholding and personal status, it finds that both free and customary landholders served in office. It also demonstrates that serving in office was rarely resisted as an obligation and that while officials did help enforce some aspects of serfdom, they were no longer doing this by the mid-sixteenth century, and even before this only enforced limited aspects of personal unfreedom which likely did not disadvantage tenants in a meaningful way. These findings highlight that the division between unfree and free landholding was breaking down in the late Middle Ages, but also, more significantly, show that officials were not put-upon unfree servants. Communities of tenants were not forced to serve in office but recognised the utility of manorial structures for meeting their own objectives.

The formulas describe unfree men and women with terms that are fluid and overlapping, and that encompass everything from what we would call chattel slavery to loose patronage. The unfree most often appear as the passive objects of the power and interests of their betters. They are not a closed group, however. Free people submitted themselves to servitude either voluntarily or by force of circumstance, in exchange for money or to make amends for some wrong. Unfree were freed or bought their own freedom. The unfree also display a significant amount of agency. They ran away. They sought help against their own lords from other powerful people. Sometimes they stole things, including marriage partners. They contested their status, often with success. Some even owned other unfree. In short, the formulas tell us that status at the interface between free and unfree was fluid, and that while they spent much of their lives as the passive objects of power, the unfree in this world had the capacity to act in their own interests, were fully aware of how power flowed, and could work the social and political system to their own advantage.

Chapter 2 begins thematically with survivors’ perceptions of freedom, exploring how survivors perceive slavery as a physical reality and freedom as a relative concept, drawing out themes of resistance, death, and education as freedom. It is argued that the simple binary conception of “free” and “not free” is an artificial one. Contrary to the belief that slavery is a constant, and that freedom is both an immediate and joyful escape from enslavement, micro freedoms occur and are assumed during slavery. Conversely, slavery continues in the mind of the free, leaving individuals in a permanent state of survival and undermining the realisation of meaningful, and what Frederick Douglass called “full,” freedom.

When most people think of early America, they imagine a geographical region that encompasses the present-day United States. Like previous chapters in this volume, the present chapter encourages a broader conception of the region by, in this case, illuminating the importance of the Caribbean as a physical space and as an idea in early American literature. The Caribbean was a battle ground for empire. Consequently, those texts written in and about the region can tell us a great deal about European exploration and settler colonialism, transatlantic slavery, capitalism and modernity, colonial resistance, and the diasporic, migratory patterns of people, which are themes that pervade early American literature in general. This chapter, then, offers an overview of that literature, highlighting the literary contours of a Caribbean America. The discussion homes in on the anglophone Caribbean and its place within the literary imagination of English-language texts of early America and addresses three questions: How do English-language texts of early America imagine the Caribbean? How do we read those texts within the wider field of early American literature? And why does it matter?

The introduction lays out the complex matrices of bondage, freedom, terror, and possibility that defined the period and place under investigation in this book: the gradual abolition of slavery (1821-1852) in the frontier, gold-rich lowland province of Chocó in the Colombian Black Pacific. Barragan calls the thirty-one years from the law’s enactment in 1821 to the final abolition of slavery in 1852 the time of “gradual emancipation rule” in the northern Andes in order to see this period as a distinct moment in the history of liberal racial governance rather than an inconsequential and benign prelude to the final abolition of slavery. While ostensibly designed to gradually destroy slavery, Barragan argues that speculating slaveholders in Colombia paradoxically came to have an even greater stake in slavery through gradual emancipation rule. After a historical and historiographical exploration of slavery and gradual emancipation rule in Colombia, Atlantic World, and Chocó, the introduction concludes with two sections on sources and methodology and chapter outlines.