Freedom's Captives

Colombia’s Pacific coast, especially the present-day Chocó Department, is often deemed a peripheral region. It is, to use Oslender’s phrase, an aquatic space, defined by mangroves, small rivers flowing through tropical forests to the Pacific, the Atrato river draining into the Gulf of Urabá on the Caribbean Coast, and extraordinary levels of rain.1 By centering the lives of the Black people of this region in the first half of the nineteenth century, Barragan inverts this working assumption of marginality. In this narrative, abolition, the debate about the meaning of freedom, the understanding of technologies of oppression, and the definition of Atlantic history all run through the Colombian Pacific.The work follows two lines. One charts the process of abolition from the passage of the Free Womb Law in 1821 to the end of slavery in 1852. Barragan, a digital historian who created the The Free Womb Project (https://thefreewombproject.com/), relates this history to that of the Haitian Revolution, abolition in the British Caribbean, gradual abolition in the northeastern United States, and Brazil’s passage of a free womb law in 1871. Colombia’s 1821 law declared that no one would be born a slave, but “Free Womb children” were bound to their mother’s master until the age of majority. The law set the stage for a trade in “Free Womb children,” a shadow market in which purportedly free people were bought and sold. In presenting this development, and related ones, Barragan challenges assumptions about liberal progress during the age of Atlantic Revolution. The most jarring example is the case of Clemencia Valencia, whose master agreed to her self-purchase in 1812 with the stipulation that the payment received did not cover “the child that she [had] in her womb” (116). This claim, drawn from a seemingly obscure notarial record, is a powerful summation of gendered Atlantic capitalism.The book’s other line of inquiry is a meticulous reconstruction of life in the Colombian Pacific lowlands. The region was, and remains, mineral-rich. Its conquest by the Spaniards and subsequent white attempts to control it—whether by absentee mine owners, foreigners from the other Caribbean empires, or local Colombians—were driven by the quest for gold. But the Africans and their descendants who found this gold supplied the labor for its extraction and performed the many related tasks in support of their purported masters. Barragan, who authored a book about cash-for-gold shops after the 2008 financial crises, brings an ethnographer’s eye to this story.2 Working deftly with archival sources and the extant literature, she reconstructs how Black people in Chocó—whether enslaved, free, or some combination thereof—fished, managed riverine transportation, and developed the skills to find and extract wealth from gold-washed rivers. Barragan renders vivid descriptions of labor regimes, mine development, and other aspects of daily life. Like any study of the Pacific lowlands, this one also is based on environmental studies and geography.The book also draws from history, literary analysis, and political theory to rework how we understand the larger Atlantic past and our collective past. Thus, it joins the dazzling array of contemporary studies about slavery in the Black Atlantic of the last decade, making an exciting and important contribution to this dynamic, morally compelling, literature. It will redefine many people’s understanding of the Atlantic and the meaning of Atlantic history by mapping another region into our collective historical imagination

Emancipation · Ethnology · Geography · Middle Passage · Narrative · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Settlement (finance) · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Law