Mastering the Law

Students of slavery in the Americas have long recognized that the law of the Spanish Empire provided more in the way of formal, judicially enforceable rights for enslaved people than did the legal regimes of the English, French, Dutch, and other New World empires. That distinction was at the heart of Frank Tannenbaum's 1946 pioneering comparative effort Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas. Tannenbaum's writings helped precipitate a debate that has lasted to the present day on how much we might be able to rely on the law as an indicator of the lives and circumstances of slaves, freed people, and others who lived out their lives in New World slave systems. Ricardo Raúl Salazar Rey's Mastering the Law: Slavery and Freedom in the Legal Ecology of the Spanish Empire provides a thoughtful look at the role of law in Spain's American colonies. The study provides both a theoretical framework and important microhistories gleaned from court cases that help us better understand how law was mobilized in the Spanish Empire and, at times, put to use by those at the bottom of the empire's social pyramid.Salazar Rey is concerned with what he terms “the legal ecology” of the Spanish Empire, by which he means the customs, laws, and legal institutions that provided the empire's subjects “with a common language and forum to resolve disputes” (p. xiii). This legal ecology, with a foundation resting on thirteenth-century Castile's reception of Roman law, Las siete partidas, and Spanish law's normative abhorrence of slavery, provided enslaved Africans, Afro-Iberians, and Afro-Americans legal mechanisms to challenge not the institution of slavery but the conditions under which particular slaves lived. This access to the courts often became of paramount importance for some enslaved individuals, who found that their ability to appeal to the law could aid in the enforcement of manumission contracts or provide relief from draconian punishments.Mastering the Law focuses on cases from Cartagena during a long seventeenth century that Salazar Rey sees as extending from 1580 to 1714. He shows us a legal world where the overlords of the Spanish Empire, well aware that actual Spaniards made up only a minority of the peoples governed by Spanish law, sought a recognition of the legal system's legitimacy from the empire's subjugated peoples, those of African and Indigenous descent. That legitimacy required a belief that the courts would administer justice fairly, as justice was seen within the parameters of Spanish law.That those who administered Spanish law sought a recognition of their legitimacy even from those whom they often harshly ruled provided one avenue for the development of a degree of agency on the part of some of the slaves of the Spanish Empire. An understanding of the law and an internalization of the rules of proper behavior for free, partially free, and enslaved people in the empire could be effectively used to mitigate punishment and press an individual's claim for freedom. Salazar Rey is at his best when he uses cases to show how the various categories of enslaved peoples of African descent came to understand not only the importance of their substantive rights under Spanish law governing slavery but also often the procedural details necessary to vindicate those rights.Mastering the Law is one of a number of recent studies, including Adriana Chira's Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba's Plantations (2022) and Michelle McKinley's Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 (2016), that take us beyond the manumission-friendly codes of the Spanish Empire to show us actual enslaved people and how they were able to use the law and the officials of the empire to gain a measure of freedom in a slave society. Their work invites us to consider again the importance of law in the lives of enslaved peoples in the Spanish Empire and in the Americas more broadly. The picture that emerges from this literature is one of perseverance and agency even in a system of often-striking cruelty. Salazar Rey's study is a valuable addition to this body of work

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