The concept of rights as the bedrock of legal systems arose in modernity. This fact derives from a variety of contingent circumstances, some historical, others epistemological. Yet the building blocks from which the edifice of rights discourse is constructed were assembled and shaped in premodernity. The oldest strata in the quarry from which legal rights derive is surely classical, insights and postulates explored first by the Greeks beginning in the fifth century bce and incorporated into legal praxis through Roman law, particularly in the high imperial centuries. They were then kept alive and further developed in the late Middle Ages when the twelfth- and thirteenth-century glossators and in turn the fourteenth-century nominalist William of Ockham first articulated most of the principles out of which the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastics, seventeenth-century humanists, and eighteenth-century social contract theorists would develop full-fledged elaborations of rights-based law.

Historians have long debated the impact of the American Revolution on the institution of slavery. Did the war create a nation devoted to liberty or one mired in slaveholding? Beginning in the 1780s, Black and white abolitionists won hard-fought battles for gradual emancipation and manumission in some states even as slaveholding expanded across much of the South. At the national level, the choices that federal leaders made to secure a strong union of states gave enslavers unprecedented access to the land and labor that would make the United States a significant slaveholding power. As the United States grasped territory over the next forty years, slavery spread with the nation. These changes were devastating for enslaved people, who lost their families, communities, labor, bodily autonomy, and lives to the world that slavery created. Within just a few decades after the American Revolution, the landscape of slavery was entirely transformed.

This contribution brings racial affect theory to bear on the literary representation of Roman manumission, in the process developing new critical tools for the history of Roman slavery as a mechanism for racialization. Through a close reading of the freed man Hermeros’ diatribe in the Cena Trimalchionis, I argue for the centrality of racial melancholy to the discursive and social forms by which manumission came to be experienced and figured. The operation of this racial melancholy in Petronius’ text is decomposable into two distinct, but complementary, sentimental performances: paranoia on the one hand, and compulsion into (evasive) autobiographical confession on the other. The interlinking of these performances within Hermeros’ speech generates a melancholic affect, which I conceptualize as a disposition for managing and negotiating the grief of enslavement and manumission. In formulating and grounding this claim, I hope to clear a space for mutually enriching exchange among historians of Roman slavery, historians of premodern race, and those literary critics and cultural theorists who have been influential in setting the terms for the “affective turn.”

On a well-known epitaph from first-century CE Rome, one man commemorates another as his “fellow freedman and, at the same time, dearest companion” (conlibertus idem consors carissimus) (CIL 6, 22355a). The phrase reveals that the men are connected in two ways: by their involuntary legal subjection to the same patron and by their mutual camaraderie. It is the relationship between these two ties, expressed by the Latin idem, that I investigate in this chapter. Over 100 epitaphs employ a form of idem to communicate two distinct but simultaneous bonds, the majority of which were formed through the processes of enslavement and liberation. Employing this corpus of inscriptions, I explore the entanglement of interpersonal ties experienced by freed persons in Roman households. I show that the word libertus/a (freed person), which we often read as a marker of status, is employed on these epitaphs as a relational term, interchangeable and sometimes overlapping with interpersonal ties generated by very different social and legal phenomena, including affection, birth, marriage, and testation.

The Principate of Nero is a well-documented period for a study about the literary evidence on Roman enslaved and freed people. In Neronian literature – as exemplified by Seneca, Persius, and Petronius – manumission is recurrently mentioned as a metaphor for describing forms of aristocratic behavior in imperial times, so that freed people became an important issue in discussions about the moral meanings of freedom and slavery under the Principate and its inherent elite competition for social dominance. Neronian authors criticized certain aristocrats by depicting them as morally acting like enslaved or freed persons, thus becoming examples of an indecorous behavior. The chapter argues that the representations of freed people in this context were related to the legal changes in slavery since Augustus, which involved a kind of surveillance of the practice of manumission and the creation of a new category of freed people, the Junian Latins, that did not automatically entail Roman citizenship. Both aspects had an impact not only on the more immediate relations between enslavers and enslaved persons, and on the social life of enslaved and freed people, but also reconfigured the ideas of slavery shared by the Roman elite.

This introductory chapter places the volume within its wider academic context through discussion of its method, background, and content. First, the chapter frames the debates that gave rise to the collection and sets out the central research questions that the chapters address. Second, it summarizes the current state of the literature, including a discussion of how similar lines of inquiry have developed in different disciplines (archaeology, legal history, epigraphy, and ancient history). Third, it discusses the contents and significant conclusions of the volume by summarizing the chapters and then by highlighting the major commonalities between them. Fourth, it outlines the volume’s unique contributions to the debate and sketches avenues for future research.

In Roman Egypt, Greek remained the language of rule but the introduction of the Roman legal system and practices resulted in changes within the bureaucracy and an increase in documentation. Declarations were now required for birth, death, taxes, and much else. There were minor changes in the vocabulary of slavery, but in terms of acquisition and use much remained unchanged. There was an active market in slaves who were primarily employed in the home. There is further evidence for slaves in labouring jobs, artisanal roles, in entertainment and sex work. Imperial slaves held some important administrative roles, and slaves might act as business agents in urban settings. Slave labour was little used in agriculture, though the balance between free and unfree changed over time. As earlier, the boundaries between these categories were sometimes blurred. There is evidence, too, for the manumission of slaves. Documents translated in this chapter illustrate the situation.

Having addressed exploitation and violence towards elders, the book moves to consider how some enslavers chose the less physical – but no less cruel – route of abandoning, selling, or simply neglecting enslaved people once they had become “old and broken.” Chapter 2 covers manumission laws and the efforts of enslavers to work around these; the significance of age to the dynamics of, and experiences in, the internal slave trade; and the tragic consequences of neglect for elders deemed unproductive by those whom enslaved them. Proslavery claims of “retirement” or of care from cradle-to-grave were no match for the economic self-interest of enslavers, small and large, and the driving force of slavery revolved around taking the “best years and the best strength” from enslaved people. This chapter shows how enslaved people understood this exploitative dynamic, and the horrifying consequences of it for Black elders, all too well

Intergenerational disputes shaped by white southerners’ hopes to profit from slavery did not end with the death of an enslaver. These contests became particularly virulent when the matter revolved around posthumous manumissions, and this chapter shows how elderly enslavers who sought to emancipate enslaved people in wills had their actions challenged by rivals who utilized the discourse that conflated old age with weakness, both of body and mind, to diminish their reputation and deny their mastery. The aging process had public and political ramifications in a slave society built on dominance and mastery, and a focus on emancipation and age serves as a fitting end to this study which underlines the wider importance of age as a vector of power in the antebellum south. Contests over emancipations underscore how far understandings of aging as a period of declining force led to conflict between white southerners looking to rise at another’s expense. White enslavers looked to their aged peers who sought to free their slaves as reduced in authority and status, and as figures whose claims to mastery must be usurped for the good of both private and public interests associated with slavery.

The formulas describe unfree men and women with terms that are fluid and overlapping, and that encompass everything from what we would call chattel slavery to loose patronage. The unfree most often appear as the passive objects of the power and interests of their betters. They are not a closed group, however. Free people submitted themselves to servitude either voluntarily or by force of circumstance, in exchange for money or to make amends for some wrong. Unfree were freed or bought their own freedom. The unfree also display a significant amount of agency. They ran away. They sought help against their own lords from other powerful people. Sometimes they stole things, including marriage partners. They contested their status, often with success. Some even owned other unfree. In short, the formulas tell us that status at the interface between free and unfree was fluid, and that while they spent much of their lives as the passive objects of power, the unfree in this world had the capacity to act in their own interests, were fully aware of how power flowed, and could work the social and political system to their own advantage.

This chapter recovers the performances of Saint Domingue’s refugees who fled the slave uprisings and acted out their relationship to Haiti on professional American stages. The Haitian Revolution’s refugees also appeared as stage characters in original plays such as John Murdock’s 1795 The Triumphs of Love, which reimagined refugees as refined but unfortunate figures, integrating them into American culture by differentiating them from comic but rebellious slaves.

As long as people could be used as economic pawns, freedom was an ambiguous status. While legal recognition of property rights over land and goods expanded in the nineteenth century, the morality regarding ownership of human beings was challenged in courts, parliaments, and newspapers for centuries. Chapter 5 explores the experiences of freed people in a context of change related to property recognition and rights along with freed people’s access to property in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although semantics suggest otherwise, there was very little distinction between the experiences of enslaved or freed people in Angola. Accumulation of free and enslaved bodied, known as wealth in people, has been a fundamental framework for understanding West Central African societies’ understandings about wealth and accumulation. But ownership rights over people were contested within a context of juridical changes in all kinds of property rights in Angola. Coerced, unfree labor persisted, even as Portugal introduced gradual means to emancipate slaves in its possessions. Any efforts to regulate and end ownership rights over individuals had a public and a private sphere of debates, where slavers resisted the end of commodification while enslaved individuals rejected amelioration and gradual abolition projects.

It rained on the first day of December in 1838. This was a day to remember. Across the Cape Colony the yoke of forced labour had been lifted from the almost 40,000 inhabitants who had formerly been classified as slaves. They were now free.

It had been a long road to freedom. When the Dutch first settled the Cape in the mid-seventeenth century the Atlantic slave trade was expanding. As we discussed in Chapter 11, hundreds of thousands of Africans were being shipped across the Atlantic by Portuguese, British, French and Dutch traders and sold to settlers in the New World. Because of the profitability of the trade, the rivalry between these slave-trading nations was intense. It would be this rivalry that would bring the first shipment of Angolan slaves to the Cape.

American Revolutionaries cast themselves as metaphorical orphans, voluntarily severing ties with an overbearing empire-parent. In rendering the trauma of orphanhood as a virtue, this particular metaphor required a harsh rite of passage for protagonists to move from minor status to self-sufficiency. Only by casting off natal relations and their burdensome histories could one move into freedom, as defined by an idealized white male citizen, unencumbered by the trappings of the past. The slave trade’s project of inflicting literal orphanhood on a massive scale sets off this early republican celebration of voluntary alienation in garish relief. The author explores how the tension surrounding orphanhood structured the American Colonization Society, one of the most widely supported and well-financed failures of the time. The ACS was nonetheless the collective author of the first narrative crafted to persuade African Americans of anything: here, to convince them that severing ties to the United States was the only path to true freedom. Attending to orphanhood as imagined in the writings of slavers, the enslaved, and early antislavery legislators, the author traces how theories of early republican childhood were shaped by a shadow narrative in which slavery’s history had to be severed from the nation’s progress.

In Santiago, in Cuba’s far east, a region known to be the cradle of radicalism on the island, peasant communities of African descent laid a distinctive path to emancipation during the nineteenth century. Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies of universal freedom as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, as they occupied land and pulled themselves out of slavery through manumission, fugitiveness, and unrest, they negotiated their rights through a colonial legal framework that allowed room for local custom. As they chipped away at the institution of slavery gradually yet consistently, they also reimagined colonial racial systems before any of Cuba’s prominent nineteenth-century liberal intellectuals. This introduction provides an outline of the book's main argument and the six chapters that follow.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, no written law numerated the rights of conditionally and partially free individuals, the vast majority of those who would eventually obtain manumission. How much of their time could such individuals control? Could they be punished? Could they live independently? Were the children born of mothers who held this ambiguous status free or enslaved? In courts of first instance, in the absence of illuminating legislation, judges turned to witnesses for arbitration, as enslavers and enslaved vied over the terms of their oral contracts and public reputations. The freedom that emerged from such vernacular legalism was not liberal autonomy. Rather, it was situational dependence on others, usually free and enslaved Afro-descendants who had participated in the coartación in some capacity, and who arbitrated casuistically. Freedom’s legal meanings emerged through such negotiations that belonged to local custom. Historically, these negotiations went back to the cobreros’ customary access to land and coartación as subsistence-based rights. By the 1830s, some enslaved people had redefined such need-based rights as merit-based entitlements.

Between 1808 and 1830, as new coffee plantations developed in Santiago, private actors and local state authorities realized that they did not have the means to coercively control the unprecedented number of enslaved people working in the jurisdiction. Instead, they prudently turned to cooptation. They encouraged the formation of dense familial networks between enslaved people working on coffee estates and between enslaved and free people of color, as well as the distribution of local militia responsibilities to the free Afro-descendant peasant class, who in El Cobre were even given government roles. Although Santiago’s enslaved and free people of African descent would draw inspiration from liberalism and seek to exploit the local elites’ fears of it, they were far more successful at eliciting prerogatives through long-established colonial frameworks: prudential policies that allowed for some redistribution of rights and resources against birth status hierarchies.