The First Page: Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought

THE FIRST PAGE

Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought
in the Early Spanish Atlantic

by Chloe L. Ireton

28 April 2025

The First Page presents the first page of books that are launched as part of the IAS Book Launch Programme. On 8 May 2025, Chloe L. Ireton will launch her first book, Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic, an intellectual history that explores a shared Black Atlantic world where the meanings of slavery and freedom were fiercely contested and claimed.

Introduction

In the early modern era, millions of people were enslaved, dispossessed, and forcibly displaced from sites in West Africa and West-Central Africa to European imperial realms where the meanings of slavery and freedom were codified into distinct rules of law. These laws and traditions often differed from legal cultures about slavery in enslaved peoples’ places of origin or the sites where they or their ancestors were first enslaved. Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought traces how West Africans and West-Central Africans and their descendants reckoned with the violent world of Atlantic slavery that they were forced to inhabit, and traces how they conceptualized two strands of political and legal thought – freedom and slavery – in the early Spanish empire. In their daily lives, Black Africans and their descendants grappled with laws and theological discourses that legitimized the enslavement of Black people in the early modern Atlantic world and the varied meanings of freedom across legal jurisdictions. They discussed ideas about slavery and freedom with Black kin, friends, and associates in the sites where they lived and across vast distances, generating thick spheres of communication in the early modern Atlantic world. Discussions about freedom and its varied meanings moved from place to place through diverse exchanges of information, fractured memories, and knowledge between Black communities and kin across the Atlantic Ocean.

Slavery and freedom were two concepts and legal categories that regulated the lives of every person of African descent in continental Europe and in the Americas in the early modern era. European empire-building projects in the Americas from the sixteenth century onwards and ambitious plans to extract and exploit the region’s natural resources led to insatiable demand for unfree labor to sustain these projects. In response, …

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CHLOE L. IRETON is a Lecturer in the History of Iberia and the Iberian World 1500-1800 in the UCL History Department and a British Academy Wolfson Fellow (2023-2026), whose research and teaching interests span the histories of slavery, freedom, empire, and subaltern public spheres in the early southern Atlantic world.

On 8 May 2025 Chloe L. Ireton will launch her book with a panel discussion at the Institute of Advanced Studies. More information.

Lead Image by Giorgio Trovato via Unsplash.