‘This book is an astounding, sweeping, and beautifully written intellectual exploration of the rich, complicated, and worldly lives of people of African descent as they negotiated experiences of enslavement and emancipation in the early modern Iberian Atlantic. It charts an extraordinary intellectual cartography of early modern Black living that upends how scholars think of Black movement and agency at the dawn of and decades into the Atlantic slave trade.’
Yesenia Barragan - Rutgers University
‘Ireton guides the reader through the early-modern archive pointing to sources that bring into focus themes long held to be unimaginable. The narrative before us is a testament to archival presence engendered by the thoughts and actions of enslaved Africans and their early-modern descendants. She charts new ground in this brilliant study of slavery and freedom.’
Herman Bennett - author of African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic
‘If there was ever a body of early modern Hispanic Black Atlantic thought, as the archive of ideas on freedom, rights, and livelihood, Ireton provides its fullest account through the examination of the lives and thoughts of myriads of Black people born in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Behind the letters, trials, and petitions examined in this book, readers can piece together the lives of these Black men and women both in metropolitan Spain and the colonies, in tandem, as never before.’
Alex Borucki - University of California, Irvine
‘In her masterful exploration of a ‘lettered Black public sphere’ in the Spanish Atlantic, Ireton traces how Black subjects mobilized a transatlantic web of information to enact freedom. Her subjects gossip, litigate, acquire wealth, and theorize freedom as they circulate, spreading knowledge in surprising ways. Beautifully written, deeply researched, and centered in life stories, Ireton provocatively expands upon our knowledge of freedom and unfreedom.’
Karen Graubart - author of Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in the Spanish Atlantic World
‘This book is a marvel of methodological inventiveness and scholarly rigor. Drawing on expansive archival material, Ireton grounds readers in the ‘thick spheres of communication’ that enslaved and free people of African descent engaged in to shape ideas and debates about slavery and freedom across the Spanish empire.’
Tamara Walker - author of Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing and Status in Colonial Lima
‘Extensively researched and creatively argued, this groundbreaking study is replete with richly detailed vignettes featuring the voices of Africans and people of African descent in sixteenth-century Seville and Spanish America. Ireton reminds us of Black individuals’ agency and dynamism within the early modern Iberian world, mustering a wealth of new evidence to document their multiform efforts to safeguard their liberties and loved ones.’
David Wheat - author of Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640
‘In 2023, the Nigerian-based artist El Anatsui premiered a three-part installation, Behind the Red Moon, at the Tate Modern in London. In its materiality, form, and scale, Behind the Red Moon visualizes the entanglements of commodification, imperialism, and the transatlantic slave trade as well as the creativity and resilience of the African diaspora. A detail of El Anatsui’s artwork from this show graces the cover of Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic by Chloe L. Ireton, offering an apt parallel to Ireton’s work. Much as El Anatsui weaves together thousands of liquor bottle caps and plastic scraps to transforms detritus into monumental art, so Ireton assembles archival fragments from across the Iberian world into a strikingly radical new whole. Coaxed by Ireton’s close and careful scholarship, incomplete paper trails resolve into textured possibilities that generate a fuller image of black intellectual life.’
Nathalie Miraval
Source: Ler História
‘Throughout the book, Ireton provides a compelling, nuanced, detailed, and complex panorama of the lives of enslaved, formerly enslaved, and freeborn Black men and women, including individuals born in West Africa and West Central Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Spanish Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … [the book] masterfully addresses the interplay of oral and written communication … An important contribution to the historiography of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, [it] is also essential reading for scholars and students of Black intellectual history and African diaspora history.’
Ana Lucia Araujo
Source: Hispanic American Historical Review
‘Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought is a significant and magisterial work that greatly contributes to our understanding of Black intellectual history and associated freedom projects … [The book] marshals a wealth of archival evidence and moves the field of early modern Afro-Iberian studies into new terrains … Ireton establishes an intellectual world in which Black people’s struggles for freedom defined the contours of political belonging and religious and racial inclusion in the early modern Iberian empire …’
Michelle A. McKinley
Source: The Americas
‘Chloe L. Ireton’s compelling assertion… that we can - indeed, we must - uncover what enslaved and free Black men and women were thinking about freedom and the varying degrees of unfreedom that they faced … Like all the best book ideas, this seems obvious once it is painstakingly researched, carefully articulated, and presented to us on the page … her second and even more impressive contribution is that her extensive and immersive reconstructions of their lives and personalities are so powerful that we start to root for them - they become the often flawed but heroic central characters in stories that Ireton imbues with remarkable narrative tension … one could argue that she brings those subjects to life so successfully that her book is not, in the end, about Black thought but about Black thinkers.’
Matthew Restall
Source: The William and Mary Quarterly
‘The book reveals a vast amount of testimonial material on the daily lives and self-fashioning of slaves about whom we knew little … by weaving together countless ego-documents, fragmentary testimonies, and case studies … Ireton’s findings are significant and, at times, extremely detailed. We learn about the active Black participation in the legal culture surrounding freedom papers within the complex administrative system of the Spanish Empire. Furthermore, strategies for obtaining liberation from slavery are presented … Ireton’s archival work is outstanding. All the testimonies are highly compelling and provide rich information about the social and entangled history of African slaves in the early modern era. She has chosen a highly relevant topic by presenting ideas of freedom from the perspectives of the slaves themselves. It is also a valuable contribution to intellectual history within the space of the 'Black Atlantic.' This is an important book.’
Nikolaus Böttcher
Source: American Historical Review
‘Chloe L. Ireton’s impressive debut monograph offers a meticulous archival reconstruction of Black experiences of slavery and freedom in the early Spanish Atlantic … Ireton substantially advances our understanding of Black agency, legal consciousness, and transatlantic communication … the book offers a valuable history from below, showcasing the intellectual labour of enslaved and free Black people who embedded their ideas in notarial records, petitions, and lawsuits … By deftly connecting micro-level individual claims with broader Atlantic arguments on Black legal consciousness, the author makes this study indispensable for scholars of race, slavery, and early modern legal cultures … the book is a major contribution to the scholarship on Atlantic slavery, illuminating the sophisticated ways enslaved and free Black individuals navigated legal frameworks to assert their autonomy. Methodologically innovative and historically insightful, the book will be essential reading for historians of race, law, slavery, and the early modern Atlantic.’
Thiago Krause
Source: Slavery & Abolition
‘All the testimonies are highly compelling and provide rich information about the social and entangled history of African slaves in the early modern era. Ireton has chosen a highly relevant topic by presenting ideas of freedom from the perspectives of the slaves themselves. It is also a valuable contribution to intellectual history within the space of the “Black Atlantic.” This is an important book.’
Nikolaus Böttcher
Source: American Historical Review
‘Chloe Ireton's remarkable work employs a true color palette to define previously sketched drawings that are now enhanced in a completely new way... this is a truly remarkable work, a book that is essential for many reasons: for its integrative vision of the Atlantic world, for the diverse methodology it employs, for the case studies it presents, for the intelligent way in which the problems it solves are presented, and for its profoundly human character.’
José Belmonte Postigo
Source: PerspectivasAfro
