Michelle A. McKinley. Fractional Freedoms

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700, by Michelle McKinley, is a must-read book. Focusing on the seventeenth-century urban environment of Lima, one of two viceregal capitals of the Spanish Empire with a large enslaved and free African and African-descent population, McKinley meticulously, incisively, and insightfully considers the historical context within which the legal mobilization of slaves occurred. Women are at the center of her deeply researched sociolegal portrayal of the gendered and intimate nature of experiences of enslavement: what it meant to be treated as both person and property, how distinct forms of labor conditioned experiences of bondage, and how women pursued legal options in secular and ecclesiastical courts to protect themselves from ill-intentioned masters and to save children and future generations from continued bondage. Experiences of freedom, as the book’s title suggests, were fractional: encompassing neither absolute nor complete autonomy from masters, yet enabling relationships with kith and kin to develop and be sustained. Questioning historian Frank Tannenbaum’s thesis that moving from a slave to a citizen in colonial Spanish America was a frequent and positive experience, McKinley shows that manumission in Lima was often incomplete and contingent on the continual and long-term extraction of labor from indebted parties. Through an analysis of freedom suits, parish records, wills, census data, and slave-trade records, the author enters into dialogue with medieval European, colonial Latin American, and U.S. studies on slavery, agency, and the law. She argues convincingly that slaves who questioned their conditional freedom could become enmeshed in protracted legal battles that only deepened relations of paternalistic dependency. For many of those freed in early infancy, re-enslavement was a lived reality.

Agency (philosophy) · Archaeology · Autonomy · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Empire · Political science · Population · Social science · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Demography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies