Join author Chloe L. Ireton for the launch of her book ‘Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic.
In this intellectual history, author Chloe L. Ireton, British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2023-2026), is weaving together thousands of archival fragments, exploring a shared Black Atlantic world where the meanings of slavery and freedom were fiercely contested and claimed. It recreates the worlds of extraordinary individuals and communities in the long sixteenth century, whilst mapping the development of early modern Black thought about slavery and freedom. From a free Black mother’s embarkation license to cross the Atlantic Ocean, to an enslaved Sevillian woman’s epistles to her freed husband in New Spain, to an enslaved man’s negotiations with prospective buyers on the auction block in Mexico City, to a Black man’s petition to reclaim his liberty after his illegitimate enslavement, Chloe L. Ireton explores how Africans and their descendants reckoned with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions. Their intellectual labor reimagined the epistemic worlds of slavery and freedom in the early modern Atlantic.
Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic will be published by Cambridge University Press in December 2024 and will be available in paperback, hardback, and as ebook.
ABOUT THE EVENT
Join us for a roundtable discussion with author Chloe L. Ireton and
– Matthew J. Smith (Chair), Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at UCL, and author of Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica After Emancipation (2014), and Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict and Political Change, 1934-1957 (2009).
– Julie Hardwick (University of Texas-Austin), author of Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789 (2020), The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France (1998) and Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economy of Daily Life in Early Modern France (2009).
– Miles Ogborn (Queen Mary University London), author of Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680-1780 (1998), Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (2007), Global Lives; Britain and the World, 1550-1800 (2008), and The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World (2019).
– Danielle Terrazas Williams (University of Leeds), author of The Capital of Free Women; Race, Legitimacy, and Liberty in Colonial Mexico (2022).
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