Part I. The balance of order and disorder -- 1. Ambitious bandits: disorder equals progress -- 2. The aura of the king -- 3. The spoils of independence -- 4. Bent on being modern -- 5. Bandits into police, and vice versa -- Part II. Toward the Western model -- 6. Order, disorder, and development -- 7. The limits to dictatorship -- 8. A kind of peace -- Part III. A political police performance -- 9. Constabulary of campesinos and artisans -- 10. The president's police -- 11. It's the image that counts -- Part IV. Demons of revolution unleashed -- 12. The rollercoaster called capitalism-- 13. Unraveling the old regime -- 14. Disorder in search of order.

In Search of Liberty explores how African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggles for freedom as part of the larger Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture the pursuits of equality and justice by African Americans across the Atlantic World through the end of the nineteenth century, as their fights for emancipation and enfranchisement in the United States continued. This book illuminates stories of individual Black people striving to escape slavery in places like Nova Scotia, Louisiana, and Mexico and connects their eff orts to emigration movements from the United States to Africa and the Caribbean, as well as to Black abolitionist campaigns in Europe. By placing these diverse stories in conversation, editors Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene have curated a larger story that is only beginning to be told. By focusing on Black internationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, In Search of Liberty reveals that Black freedom struggles in the United States were rooted in transnational networks much earlier than the better-known movements of the twentieth century.

While the literature on slave flight in nineteenth-century North America has commonly focused on fugitive slaves escaping to the U.S. North and Canada, Conditional Freedom provides new insights on the social and political geography of freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century North America by exploring the development of southern routes of escape from slavery in the U.S. South and the experiences of self-emancipated slaves in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. In Conditional Freedom, Thomas Mareite offers a social history of U.S. refugees from slavery, and provides a political history of the clash between Mexican free soil and the spread of slavery west of the Mississippi valley during the nineteenth-century.