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Objective/context: The boom-and-bust of New World slavery in the nineteenth century has always been a major topic of scholarship. In this essay, I suggest that the literature devoted to this theme, the so-called “capitalism and slavery debate,” has made capital invisible as a category of analysis due to its over-reliance on classical and neoclassical economics. As a result, slavery itself has been poorly historicized. My purpose is to put forth an alternative framework to restore the historicity of capital and slavery. Methodology: The article explores critical value theory to conceptualize capital and capitalism in historically meaningful terms. It argues that value creation is never confined to one country. It requires a historically transnational social formation that turns concrete labor into abstract labor and use-values into commodities through the multi-scale operatives of world money and world markets. The history of slavery should be narrated within this broader globalizing setting. Originality: The article’s claim is that the global value relations of industrial capital redetermined spatial relations between town and country, capital and labor, and production and consumption, engendering overlapping layers of a world geography of accumulation that both stimulated and challenged slavery. Conclusions: While most scholars present the relation between slavery and capitalism as constant for the period 1780-1880, I conclude that New World slavery went through two moments of boom-and-bust (c.1780-c.1820 and c.1830-1880), which were formed through, respectively, the global value relations of cotton production and coal-and-iron industrialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/Context: Historians have long acknowledged the importance of merchant diasporas and trade networks in Indian Ocean history but paid little attention to merchant capital’s role in transoceanic labor migration in and beyond this part of the globe. Research on slave trading in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries highlights the need to pay closer attention to the complexities of economic life in this oceanic world. Methodology. This article surveys relevant historiography and draws on archival research in the India Office Records in London and the Mauritius National Archives in Coromandel. Originality. This article illustrates some of the ways in which Asian and European merchant capital shaped colonial social and economic life. Conclusions. A deeper understanding of the social, economic, and political complexities inherent in Indian Ocean history is contingent upon situating the specialized case studies that characterize this field of study in more fully developed local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/context: This article shows the internal dynamics of a distinct frontier region along the eastern plains of the New Kingdom of Granada during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The foundation of cities, the creation of governorships, their constant shifts and jurisdictional disputes, the exploitation of indigenous labor, security, and the imperial expansion were highly complex issues that today allow analyzing the territorialization of the Spanish Empire on a local scale in which multiple negotiations took place between the central power of the Audiencia at the Reign's capital and the rulers and settlers in the frontier. Methodology: By comparing and contrasting rarely explored sources, such as the capitulations of governorships and the reports of royal officials and Jesuit missionaries on indigenous slavery and settlement, the article shows how the plain's provinces were politically and administratively constructed over this period. Originality: the research delves into the complexities of provincial formation in a frontier area, expanding in detail the procedures for the settlement of the Llanos' governorships, a topic little studied in the literature dedicated to the imperial past in the New Kingdom of Granada. Conclusions: The dynamism and mobility that occurred in the plains piedmont, influenced by phenomena such as indigenous slavery, jurisdictional instability and fear of possible invasions by foreign powers, reveal the local construction of the Empire and the relationships between different managing levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/Context: The incorporation of the former governorship of Popayán into Colombia was challenging and was only achieved by sacrificing an essential part of the revolutionary program. The cost for the Republic was very high, since a model of society that the other New Granada provinces rejected survived, aggravated, in a region of capital importance. A political vortex came about where party disputes in the country would swirl about until the end of the century. Methodology: To understand this momentous gestation, this article, built from pamphlets of the time and military and judicial sources, follows the footsteps of Colonel José Concha, who was entrusted by the pro-independence authorities with the expansion of the Colombian project in the newly created department of Cauca. Originality: As will be seen, the insurmountable difficulties he faced in recruiting and marshaling resources are a clear indication of the fierce opposition of society as a whole to revolutionary innovations. The approach adopted, by insisting on the intensely passionate and emotional adherence that the royalist and revolutionary cause aroused during the last stage of the War of Independence in the southwest of New Granada, proposes a way to overcome the collapse of that historical reality in the face of the unchecked importance given to ethnic and corporate factors. Conclusions: Despite his activity and his arrests, Concha failed in his mission, and the Republic, in a certain way, gave in as well for this reason, leading to pacification ending up strengthening poisonous aristocratic ambitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/Context: Revisiting disease as a category of analysis characterized by its plasticity, while at the same time highlighting how it can help understand particularities of black slavery in latecolonial Chile. In particular, it seeks to appreciate how some ailments, or certain contexts in which they were revealed, expose conflicts between slaves and their owners, or between different masters, as well as certain limits of slavery, such as the difficulty in performing domestic chores. Originality: It highlights the analytical possibilities of disease as a category for understanding slavery resulting from the transatlantic trade in Chile, and underlines that it played a role in challenges to slavery, in some cases brought forward by enslaved people themselves. Methodology: This article is in dialogue with historiographies that place disease as a category, along with those that work on the history of Afro-descendant slavery. Various aspects of slavery are seen through the lens of thirty legal proceedings in which slaves appear with illnesses, injuries and ailments in the courts of justice of Santiago, at the time part of the General Captaincy of Chile, between 1740 and 1823. Conclusions: I argue that disease has a double plasticity, or two ways in which this particularity is revealed: one is the result of its elusive character, and the other is the product of how it was used in a particular judicial context by enslaved people, slave owners, and participants in related litigation. Furthermore, the plasticity of disease as a category exposes aspects of slavery as a system that implies the coercion of the enslaved body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the genesis and consolidation of devotion to the holy Ecce Homo in the city of Popayán -- located in the New Kingdom of Granada-- during the second half of the 17th century. It explores the influence of this mystical experience in crystalizing the city's religious feasts and the cultural nuances that permeated this particular invocation. It also describes the relationship of interdependence between the liberty of the free black man Juan Antonio de Velasco and other merchants, slaves, artisans, and the devout public in stabilizing this particular form of worship of the holy one. At the same time that it specifically traces the "life world" of the founder and confrere of the tradition, it calls attention to the imprint he made on this religious ritual in Popayán, "the white city." In addition to these social factors, it also shows the influence that the generalized natural crisis of the 17th century had on the emergence of new brotherhoods, rogation days and forms of devotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tracing the history of a family across three generations, from enslavement in eighteenth-century West Africa through emancipation during the Haitian Revolution and subsequent resettlement in New Orleans, then France, then Belgium, can shed light on phenomena that are Atlantic in scope. Together, the experiences of the Vincent/ Tinchant family illuminate an Atlantic and Caribbean rights-consciousness that crossed the usual boundaries of language and citizenship. Uncovering these experiences suggests the value of combining the close focus displayed in Sidney Mintz's Worker in the Cane with the Atlantic approach of his later Sweetness and Power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the demographic responses of the large slaver land holders of Rio de Janeiro, to the British pressure to end slavery in the Atlantic Ocean. It places special emphasis on the decades of 1810 and 1820, although it covers a longer period in lesser detail. The article questions the idea, widely disseminated in Brazilian historiography, that the internal slave trade in Brazil was enough to respond to the demands of growing slaver plantations and, therefore, that the natural positive growth of the slave population and of slavery were incompatible variables in colonial and imperial Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article covers the topics of body, health, and illness in the slaves of the New Kingdom of Granada during the 18th century. It analyzes the main diseases which affected this part of the population as a result of their work in the mines, estates, and as domestic workers. The objective is to show that health and disease were linked to the social and cultural conditions of the urban and rural areas inhabited by slave population, as well as to the way the Spanish Empire handled them politically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the process of co-constructing the systems of maritime navigation, naval design, and the Atlantic slave trade during the nineteenth century. To do so, it reconstructs the complex relations between actors, artifacts, states, institutions, scientific and technological knowledge, ideologies, and the techno-productive systems involved in this process. From the end of the eighteenth century, the legitimacy of the transatlantic slave trade was increasingly questioned. In 1807, the British government -- representing the county with the greatest participation in the trade at the time -- unilaterally abolished it. Simultaneously, it started actively persecuting slave traders and promoted the abolition of the trade among the countries still involved. In this new scenario, transformations occurred among the heterogeneous elements tied to the slave trade, as well as the kinds and ways of interaction between them. To overcome mono-causal and deterministic explanations of technological development, the theoretical and methodological approach we use is constructivist. This allows us to identify new relations, reconstruct new processes, and generate new explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how popular classes, especially Afro-Colombians, created an alliance with the Liberal Party in the Cauca region of Colombia during the mid-nineteenth century. Afro-Caucanos negotiated with elite leaders of the party, trading their votes and service as soldiers in the civil wars of the era for a variety of social, economic and political gains, including the abolition of slavery, access to commons, the reduction of aguardiente monopolies, and obtaining the status of citizens. Afro-Caucanos also redefined citizenship, imagining a popular liberalism different from the conceptions of Liberal elites, investing it with more powerful notions of liberty and equality. In the 1870s, the alliance began to fracture as elite Liberals refused to break the hacienda system and grant land rights to their popular supporters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contraband was an important component of the system of economic monopolies that Spain maintained with the Indies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this illegal trade, the traffic of human beings followed the same pattern as that of merchandise. The illegal slave trade in the Caribbean region of New Granada had two main characteristics. First, the illegal trade of captives carried out by pirates, corsairs and foreigners. Second, the fiscal fraud conducted by Portuguese merchants who brought more slaves than permitted by their contracts. This type of illegal trade benefited from the complacency of provincial authorities and royal officials who profited enormously from the bribes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the rituals that accompanied acts of manumission in the province of Cartagena during the nineteenth century and the way in which liberals took advantage of these events to create propaganda for their own utopian liberalism. They thus tried to present themselves both as modernists and lovers of liberty. The acts of manumission, which were almost anonymous until 1821, contrast with the majesty and splendor that characterized such acts after the triumph of liberalism in 1849. Notwithstanding the fact that many elements of liberal symbolism were propagated through said acts, they were extremely precarious with respect to the question of granting freedom to the descendents of African slaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents in a abbreviated manner the results of field research on the names proprietors gave to their slaves and the identities of slaves in the process of abolition of slavery in Cuba. In giving slaves only the first surname of one of their last owners and denying them the second surname in legal documents, a process of race-race-marking and race-making began after emancipation, in the period of post-emancipation. The article also presents models of the relations between former slaves, both male and female, and the territories defined by the elites (region, state, etc.) and how former slaves and their children in Cuba participated in politics (war of independence 1895-1898) to define new territories, such as the independent republic of 1902. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paula de Eguiluz, like many other women of African ancestry born in the Caribbean, was obliged by the Inquisition to narrate her body, her emotions, her affections and her sexuality. Her testimonies manifest an untiring search for affection and reiterate the use of love magic so that others would be well loved. In the eyes of the inquisitors, women like Paula were "witches" and "sorcerers". The declarations transcribed during the hearings that the Inquisition carried out against her shed light on two moments of her life. The first occurred in 1624 when she first appeared before the Tribunal of the Holy Office in the city of Cartagena de Indias. Paula was 33 years old and had recently been deported from Cuba. Accused of witchcraft, she was sentenced to wear a reconciliation habit, to 200 lashes, and to work in the city hospital. The second period developed 8 years later, in 1632, when the second process against her began. Paula was then 41 years old. During her eight years in Cartagena, she sold her knowledge of how to trap lovers and how to be well loved. Her clients were white women and free mulattas of the city who paid up to 50 pesos for her work. I wish to invite the reader to listen to Paula de Eguiluz say words that, although fragmented by the interpretation of the scribe, speak more of the condition of female slaves in the Caribbean in the 17th century than any of the stories of Sabbaths of witches that flew on broomsticks and devoured children that predominated in the minds of the judges. The fragments of her discourse will be interpreted from the perspective of the fugitive slaves, which means that knowledge of love and desire as well as the art of sensuality will become territories of freedom and autonomy for enslaved women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historic tension between freedom and slavery in the Nuevo Reino de Granada constitutes a challenge for current historiography that attempts to trace the study of systems of slavery. This article, as an initial reflection, proposes discarding unilateral visions that project freedom and slavery as two historically separate entities. It proposes instead the concept of the "discursiveness of slavery" as the transversal variable that would relate the everyday phenomena of slavery, the "parasitic" dependence of slaveowners, and the resistence mechanisms of the enslaved and the indentured, among other things. Within this scenario, two central dynamics are proposed: freedom in slavery and slavery in freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on ethnographic and ethnohistorical research about the "Culimochos", the name given to a most unusual people of Spanish ancestry. Unlike other groups of similar origin, the Culimochos did not leave the southern Pacific coast of Colombia after slavery was abolished in 1851. Instead, they continued living on the beaches of Mulatos and Almarales on the northern coast of Nariño. They claim to have descended from Basque navigators whose ships were supposedly shipwrecked upon those shores one hundred years before Columbus reached America, and from whom they learned the art of shipbuilding they still practice. They also allege to forbid marriage with black people and to despise black customs in general. Nonetheless, they are highly knowledgeable regarding the Afro-Colombian culture of Nariño, more so than they are about the culture of the "whites" (the Hispanic-American mores) of the region. Furthermore, they give "black" names to important landmarks within their territory (e.g. "Mulattos") and, in Bogota, Culimochos displaced by economic modernization or by the ongoing war identify themselves as "Afrocolombians". Increasing Africanization of local and urban identities is of interest to those who study the formation and changes of ethnicity, as well as to those concerned with the effects of armed conflict on Afrocolombians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large number of Portuguese "New Christians" (Jewish converts to Catholicism) constituted one of the most important components of the white population of the Indies during the 16th and 17th centuries. They settled in various cities within the jurisdiction of the High Court of Justice of the New Kingdom of Granada, especially in Cartagena, where they occupied themselves in the slave trade and commerce in general. They extended their trade networks to and from the Viceroyalty of Peru and other provinces to the south of the New Kingdom. The Inquisition used its power to persecute them and to confiscate their property as a way to protect the purity of the faith and to sustain the institution economically. The New Christians were accused of secretly practicing the Jewish religion and of not being true Christians. Many of them were crypto-Jews who observed the Sabbath and Queen Esther's feast day, observed Jewish fasting and dietary practices, and attended synagogue meetings. The most respected men among them acted as rabbis and orally transmitted their prayers and the few traditions remaining extant among them. As a result of both persecution by the Inquisition and the independence of Portugal in 1640, some of them returned to that country, while others scattered throughout the Caribbean and still others blended into the traditional Christian population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Se presenta una introducción en que el autor discurre sobre los artículos en este número, incluyendo uno sobre la esclavitud en Brasil, uno sobre el congreso de estudiantes latinoamericanos en la década de 1930 en Chile y uno sobre el crecimiento urbano.