The Prologue introduces the fundamental concepts of the book (antislavery, abolition, judicial forum), and Colombia’s ambiguous manumission law of 1821. Colombian leaders embraced a politics of antislavery by criticizing the Atlantic slave system and Spanish colonialism as a form of political slavery, but their efforts to speed the coming of a world with no slavery were lukewarm. They took the gradual emancipation approach, leaving most slaves in captivity, upholding the property rights of masters, and offering no citizenship to slaves and most former slaves. By contrast, some slaves and a few magistrates developed radical antislavery positions, calling for the unconditional end of slavery. However, antislavery and anti-Spanish politics had overlapping legal origins and tensions that emerged in the political exchanges and debates that transpired during litigation. In this judicial forum – a space of antislavery and abolition in a society with no freedom of the press or association – many slaves articulated their vision of a peaceful and complete end of slavery. They hoped to become law-abiding, God-fearing vassals of the king and, later on, citizens of the early republics.

Chapter 6 further documents and analyzes slaves’ criticism of early republican principles and antislavery policies. Antioquia slave leaders emerged as vanguard abolitionists in 1812, folding critical antislavery conventions from the judicial forum into emerging anti-Spanish, egalitarian, and republican doctrines. They proposed that the liberation of slaves should be an immediate purpose of the new republic, and suggested that slaves fully belonged in their homeland of Antioquia – a critique of limited republican citizenship. But republican leaders paid no attention to this exegesis of liberty, claiming that the slaves’ immediate liberation would bring about chaos. This tension would be inherited by the Republic of Colombia’s manumission law of 1821, which closed the possibility of immediate abolition. Still, powerful Popayán masters, denounced by the former slave Pedro Antonio Ibargüen as “aristocrats,” continued to defend inequality and bondage. They undermined even limited antislavery legislation on the groundless notion that setting slaves free from their masters would unleash a war of black against white and paralyze gold mining.

This chapter considers the upheavals of 1781 (The Comunero Revolution), and the decade of 1790, when authorities believed the New Kingdom of Granada was under threat by the French and Haitian Revolutions. High officials became increasingly convinced that foreign literature, foreign agents, and disloyal local vassals would seek to overthrow the Spanish monarchy to establish a republic and a system of equality. This would allegedly include the liberation of slaves, the destruction of the slave-based gold economy, and the undoing of the hierarchical, sacred order of society. However, political tensions hinged on local and regional dynamics, with many slaves seeking to advance their own interests and express their opinions in the judicial forum rather than to turn the world upside down. The chapter critically analyzes stereotypes about French influence (epitomized by the works of the Abbé Raynal) and rebellious slaves.

With “the failure of the Irish people in recent times” on his mind, Douglas Hyde, an Irish translator and later the first president of the fledgling Gaelic League, took the stage at the Leinster Lecture Hall in Dublin late in the autumn of 1892.1 Having been well publicized weeks before in The Freeman’s Journal and in United Ireland, Hyde entitled the address he planned to make before the newly formed National Literary Society, “The Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland.” In anticipation, Hyde had spent days revising the lecture, believing he could illustrate Ireland’s present cultural crisis, namely why it was that a “nation which was once, as every one admits, one of the most classically learned and cultured nations in Europe, is now one of the least so.”2 As Hyde saw it, Irish civilization had declined to such an extent that “one of the most reading and literary peoples has become one of the least studious and most un-literary,” and on that account, the aesthetic sensibilities of the country at large had been degraded, “the present art products of one of the quickest, most sensitive, and most artistic races on earth” having become “only distinguished for their hideousness.

This chapter looks at the tensions between slavery and freedom in the three slave societies of Cartagena, Antioquia, and Popayán, probing the ways in which specific officials and slaveholders interpreted and used the specter of slave insurrection in light of their own interests and local conflicts. In contrast to the stereotypes of insubordinate slaves, the chapter maps out slaves’ culture of expectation. Underpinned by a dynamic grapevine transmitting rumors and tales, this culture of expectation included notions about the end of slavery and discussions on tactics to improve working conditions or accelerate the coming of freedom. Many enslaved communities told hopeful fables of peaceful liberation and legally recognized emancipation. The rumor that a merciful monarch had decreed collective freedom reappeared periodically. For some, the hope was based on manumission promises by masters. Others thought that God would end slavery and punish the masters. Many slaves hoped that they could become law-abiding members of the body politic (paying taxes, obeying magistrates and priests, and living in their own towns) after emancipation.

This chapter explores the judicial forum as a political space relatively free from censorship in which some lawyers and litigants scrutinized aspects of the social order under Spanish rule. Some expressed their dislike of slavery and their aspirations for change. The chapter looks at litigation and intellectual culture in Popayán, where the lawyer Félix José de Restrepo asserted that slaves were people with dignity who deserved judicial compassion. The government, he argued, should facilitate slave emancipation, a trademark of prudent legislation. The former slave Pedro Antonio Ibargüen even argued that all vassals of the king, rich and poor alike, deserved equal protection from the magistrates. With a political crisis shattering the viceroyalty in 1810, political revolution had new implications for these positions. Some patricians who sympathized with independence now criticized the viceroyalty’s “pact” with Spain as "slavery." Pushing the boundaries of this metaphor, some slaves in Popayán saw their own freedom as a necessary extension of the freedom from Spain demanded by their masters. A few patricians now began to discuss a formal plan to reform slavery through legislation.

“For the last few days I have been longing for the quiet of the boat,” declared W. B. Yeats.1 As Yeats boarded the RMS Lusitania, bound for New York on January 31, 1914, he welcomed the journey. The previous month had seen him ridiculed in the English press. George Moore (1852–1933), the novelist and his sometime adversary, had published an excerpt from his memoir, Hail and Farewell, where he skewered Yeats, recalling a tantrum the poet had thrown in 1904. Speaking for Hugh Lane (1875–1915) and his exhibition of Impressionist paintings, Yeats had appeared “with a paunch, a huge stride, and an immense fur overcoat.”

“On the morning when I heard of his death a heavy storm was blowing and I doubt not when he died that it had well begun.”1 So wrote W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) in March 1909, four days after the death of his friend and protégé, the 37-year-old playwright John Millington Synge (1871–1909). For Yeats, the death of Synge marked an important turning point in his life and, broadly, in the development of modernist expression across the literatures of Ireland and Britain. A heavy storm was indeed blowing; and in the weeks that followed Synge’s death, Yeats, though awash in grief, slowly began to envision his reinvention as a poet, elaborating a new theory of artistic genius anchored in reflection over Synge’s art and life. A “drifting, silent man, full of hidden passion,” he wrote, Synge had long been marked by “physical weakness,” but that weakness had done little to diminish his imagination.2 On the contrary, as his body grew weak in the last months of life, Synge’s imagination became “fiery and brooding,” undimmed by disease and decay.

Literary modernism developed on the ‘Celtic fringe’ in the early twentieth century at the same time as revivals of self-declared Celtic civilizations were underway and as the character of British and Irish classical education was also evolving in drastic fashion.1 As such, classical reception was transformed in this period, in conjunction with – and in reaction to – nationalist narratives of rebirth. As classical learning slowly became dislodged from a central role in marking a sense of civic entitlement for the British Empire’s elite, formal knowledge of Greek and Roman antiquity saw its wider cultural prestige diminish, leaving receptions of antiquity open to new forms of social, political and aesthetic reconfiguration.

Standing before a judge in the Welsh town of Caernarfon, Saunders Lewis, a playwright and the president of Plaid Cymru, defended the right of conscience. The offence for which he and his associates Lewis Valentine and D. J. Williams then stood accused