In this pioneering study of slavery in colonial Ecuador and southern Colombia--Spain's Kingdom of Quito--Sherwin Bryant argues that the most fundamental dimension of slavery was governance and the extension of imperial power. Bryant shows that enslaved black captives were foundational to sixteenth-century royal claims on the Americas and elemental to the process of Spanish colonization. Following enslaved Africans from their arrival at the Caribbean port of Cartagena through their journey to Quito, Bryant explores how they lived during their captivity, formed kinships and communal affinities, and pressed for justice within a slave-based Catholic sovereign community. In Cartagena, officials branded African captives with the royal insignia and gave them a Catholic baptism, marking slaves as projections of royal authority and majesty. By licensing and governing Quito's slave trade, the crown claimed sovereignty over slavery, new territories, natural resources, and markets. By adjudicating slavery, royal authorities claimed to govern not only slaves but other colonial subjects as well. Expanding the diaspora paradigm beyond the Atlantic, Bryant's history of the Afro-Andes in the early modern world suggests new answers to the question, what is a slave?

This groundbreaking volume addresses the enslavement and experiences of Black Africans in Spain and the Spanish Caribbean, particularly La Española (or Hispaniola) and Puerto Rico, two of the earliest colonies. Spanning nearly four hundred years and rooted in extensive archival research, Transatlantic Bondage sheds light on a number of relatively underexamined topics in these locales, including the development and application of slavery laws, disobedience and its consequences, migration, gender, family, lifestyle, and community building among the free Black population and white allies. In bringing together new and recent work by leading scholars, including two essays translated into English here for the first time, the book is also a call for further study of slavery in the Spanish Caribbean and its impact on the region.

Beyond 1619 brings an Atlantic and hemispheric perspective to the year 1619 as a marker of American slavery's origins and the beginnings of the Black experience in what would become the United States by situating the roots of racial slavery in a broader, comparative context. In recent years, an extensive public dialogue regarding the long shadow of racism in the United States has pushed Americans to confront the insidious history of race-based slavery and its aftermath, with 1619--the year that the first recorded enslaved persons of African descent arrived in British North America--taking center stage as its starting point. Yet this dialogue has inadvertently narrowed our understanding of slavery, race, and their repercussions to the U.S. context. Beyond 1619 showcases the fruitful results when scholars examine and put into conversation multiple empires, regions, peoples, and cultures to get a more complete view of the rise of racial slavery in the Americas. Painting racial slavery's emergence on a hemispheric canvass, and in one compact volume, provides historical context beyond the 1619 moment for discussions of slavery, racism, antiracism, freedom, and lasting inequalities. In the process, this volume shines new light on these critical topics andillustrates the centrality of racial slavery, and contests over its rise, in nearly every corner of the early modern Atlantic World. Contributors: John N. Blanton, Jesse Cromwell, Erika Denise Edwards, Rebecca Anne Goetz, Rana Hogarth, Chloe L. Ireton, Marc H. Lerner, Paul J. Polgar, Brett Rushforth, Casey Schmitt, Jenny Shaw, James Sidbury.

Introducing readers to the contemporary field of sacramental theology, this volume covers the biblical and historical foundations, a survey of the state of the discipline, and a collection of constructive essays representing major themes, practices and approaches to sacraments and sacramentality in the contemporary world. The volume starts with a set of foundational essays that offer broad introduction to the field of sacramental theology from contemporary scholars, analysing a number of historical figures in order to illumine and inform contemporary sacramental theology. The second part of the volume is dedicated to a series of essays on sacramentality, and includes attention to elements of space, time, ritual action, music, and word, all as aspects of what Christians have termed “sacramental” reality. The third set of essays includes attention to each of the seven practices that have most commonly been termed “sacraments” in Christian traditions: baptism; eucharist/Lord's Supper; confirmation; confession, forgiveness and reconciliation; marriage; ordination; and anointing. The final part of this volume features scholars who are working on sacraments in conversation with contemporary academic disciplines: critical race theory, queer theory, comparative theology, and disability studies.

Explores the legal relationships of enslaved people and their descendants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spanish America Atlantic slavery can be overwhelming in its immensity and brutality, as it involved more than 15 million souls forcibly displaced by European imperialism and consumed in building the global economy. Mastering the Law: Slavery and Freedom in the Legal Ecology of the Spanish Empire lays out the deep history of Iberian slavery, explores its role in the Spanish Indies, and shows how Africans and their descendants used and shaped the legal system as they established their place in Iberoamerican society during the seventeenth century. Ricardo Raúl Salazar Rey places the institution of slavery and the people involved with it at the center of the creation story of Latin America. Iberoamerican customs and laws and the institutions that enforced them provided a common language and a forum to resolve disputes for Spanish subjects, including enslaved and freedpeople. The rules through which Iberian conquerors, settlers, and administrators incorporated Africans into the expanding Empire were developed out of the need of a distant crown to find an enforceable consensus. Africans and their mestizo descendants, in turn, used and therefore molded Spanish institutions to serve their interests.Salazar Rey mined extensively the archives of secular and religious courts, which are full of complex disputes, unexpected subversions, and tactical alliances among enslaved people, freedpeople, and the crown. The narrative unfolds around vignettes that show Afroiberians building their lives while facing exploitation and inequality enforced through violence. Salazar Rey deals mostly with cases originating from Cartagena de Indias, a major Atlantic port city that supported the conquest and rule of the Indies. His work recovers the voices and indomitable ingenuity that enslaved people and their descendants displayed when engaging with the Spanish legal ecology. The social relationships animating the case studies represent the broader African experience in the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.

This book tells the compelling story of postemancipation Colombia, from the liberation of the slaves in the 1850s through the country's first general labor strikes in the 1910s. As Jason McGraw demonstrates, ending slavery fostered a new sense of citizenship, one shaped both by a model of universal rights and by the particular freedom struggles of African-descended people. Colombia's Caribbean coast was at the center of these transformations, in which women and men of color, the region's majority population, increasingly asserted the freedom to control their working conditions, fight in civil wars, and express their religious beliefs. The history of Afro-Colombians as principal social actors after emancipation, McGraw argues, opens up a new view on the practice and meaning of citizenship. Crucial to this conception of citizenship was the right of recognition. Indeed, attempts to deny the role of people of color in the republic occurred at key turning points exactly because they demanded public recognition as citizens. In connecting Afro-Colombians to national development, The Work of Recognition also places the story within the broader contexts of Latin American popular politics, culture, and the African diaspora.

For readers of such crusading works of nonfiction as Katherine Boo’s Beyond the Beautiful Forevers and Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains comes a powerful and captivating examination of two entwined global crises: environmental destruction and human trafficking—and an inspiring, bold plan for how we can solve them. A leading expert on modern-day slavery, Kevin Bales has traveled to some of the world’s most dangerous places documenting and battling human trafficking. In the course of his reporting, Bales began to notice a pattern emerging: Where slavery existed, so did massive, unchecked environmental destruction. But why? Bales set off to find the answer in a fascinating and moving journey that took him into the lives of modern-day slaves and along a supply chain that leads directly to the cellphones in our pockets. What he discovered is that even as it destroys individuals, families, and communities, new forms of slavery that proliferate in the world’s lawless zones also pose a grave threat to the environment. Simply put, modern-day slavery is destroying the planet. The product of seven years of travel and research, Blood and Earth brings us dramatic stories from the world’s most beautiful and tragic places, the environmental and human-rights hotspots where this crisis is concentrated. But it also tells the stories of some of the most common products we all consume—from computers to shrimp to jewelry—whose origins are found in these same places. Blood and Earth calls on us to recognize the grievous harm we have done to one another, put an end to it, and recommit to repairing the world. This is a clear-eyed and inspiring book that suggests how we can begin the work of healing humanity and the planet we share. Praise for Blood and Earth “A heart-wrenching narrative . . . Weaving together interviews, history, and statistics, the author shines a light on how the poverty, chaos, wars, and government corruption create the perfect storm where slavery flourishes and environmental destruction follows. . . . A clear-eyed account of man’s inhumanity to man and Earth. Read it to get informed, and then take action.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “[An] exposé of the global economy’s ‘deadly dance’ between slavery and environmental disaster . . . Based on extensive travels through eastern Congo’s mineral mines, Bangladeshi fisheries, Ghanian gold mines, and Brazilian forests, Bales reveals the appalling truth in graphic detail. . . . Readers will be deeply disturbed to learn how the links connecting slavery, environmental issues, and modern convenience are forged.”—Publishers Weekly “This well-researched and vivid book studies the connection between slavery and environmental destruction, and what it will take to end both.”—Shelf Awareness (starred review) “This is a remarkable book, demonstrating once more the deep links between the ongoing degradation of the planet and the ongoing degradation of its most vulnerable people. It’s a bracing reminder that a mentality that allows throwaway people also allows a throwaway earth.”—Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet